About Margot Ainsworth-Rée

Margot Ainsworth-Rée founded Top Picks Report in September 2025 to publish a magazine that does the one thing the affiliate-driven roundup format cannot: tell the reader, with conviction, that there are five things in a category worth knowing about, and that the rest can be safely ignored. The conviction matters. A reader who has been told everything is a “top pick” has been told nothing.

She came to magazine editing through writing. The MFA at Iowa was nonfiction, not fiction, and the writing she did there was about objects, places, and the small choices people make to surround themselves with one thing rather than another. The teachers who shaped her thinking at Iowa — the ones who taught her that an essay about a kitchen knife could be an essay about restraint, family, or the particular vanity of the kind of person who buys a Japanese kitchen knife — set the editorial line she now runs at Top Picks Report.

Editorial focus

Margot writes the editor’s letter at the front of every issue. She edits each piece her senior editors file, with particular attention to the question of whether the writer has earned the right to rank one thing above another. The house rule, which she enforces personally, is that a “top pick” must be defended with at least one specific reason that the writer has tested, lived with, or otherwise verified — never with marketing copy, never with consensus from elsewhere on the internet.

She also assigns the cross-vertical pieces — the ones that don’t fit any single editor’s beat — and writes a small number of them herself, including the recurring podcasts column.

Conflicts of interest

Margot accepts no compensation, sponsored placement, or affiliate commission from any product, app, or service that appears on Top Picks Report. She maintains no affiliate accounts. She has no equity in any company whose product is reviewed here. Her income is derived from this publication and from occasional contributions to other magazines that share our no-affiliate stance.

Issues by Margot Ainsworth-Rée

Recent work

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Top 5 Podcasts for Engineers

Five podcasts worth subscribing to for working engineers, with Software Engineering Daily at the top. Edited audio, real expertise, no ad-monetized listicle content.

Feb 15, 2026