Today The Atlantic is announcing four new members of the editorial staff: Gabby Deutch and Ian Bogost as staff writers, and Nick Summers and Talya Zax as senior editors.

Ian is a familiar name to Atlantic readers, having been a contributing writer for the past 15 years; Gabby was an Atlantic editorial fellow in 2018 and 2019, and for the past five years has been a senior correspondent at Jewish Insider; Nick is a senior features editor who has worked at New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The New York Times, where he is currently the acting Sunday Business editor; Talya will be a senior editor on the Books desk, and has most recently been the opinion editor at The Forward.

Below is the staff announcement from editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance:

We’re writing to share excellent news: After nearly 15 years as a contributing writer, Ian Bogost is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer; an alumna of the Atlantic fellowship, Gabby Deutch, is returning to us as a staff writer; and Nick Summers and Talya Zax are coming on board as senior editors.

First, Ian. As all of you know by now, Ian is an original—and he has contributed so much to our magazine over the years, with uncommon creativity and range. Ian has produced serious reporting on the cultural and social power of Big Tech, and helped our readers understand the knock-on effects of DOGE under Trump, the chaotic rise of AI in higher education, and the decline of American populist-industrial ambition. He has also analyzed the ontology of slushies, the merits of cow therapy, the delight of toasters, the glory of the 747, the design of carry-on bins, and the strangeness of the McRib sandwich. And he has played with all kinds of formats. (Remember that time he built an old-timey slang generator?) In addition to his reported features and essays, Ian writes the new Ordinary Extraordinary newsletter, which is growing rapidly. When he isn’t writing for us, Ian also serves as the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. And he is the author of 11 books—most recently The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life, which was published last month—and is a founding partner of a game and design studio.

Next, Gabby. A member of the 2018–19 fellowship class (along with the previously announced, happily returning Maddy Carlisle), Gabby went on to NewsGuard, where she covered the 2020 election and the proliferation of conspiracies and falsehoods during the coronavirus pandemic as Washington correspondent. Gabby has spent the past five years as a senior correspondent at Jewish Insider, focusing this election cycle on how disputes over anti-Semitism and Israel are affecting both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Her reporting has appeared in The Washington Post, Politico Magazine, Tablet, and Wired. We can’t wait to welcome her back.

In more good news, Nick Summers will be joining us as a features editor. Nick is a talented and experienced editor who comes to us from, among other publications, New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The New York Times, where he is currently the acting Sunday Business editor. He is a skilled director of business and finance coverage—including investigations and deeply reported profiles of industry leaders—and he’s also assigned and edited stories on topics as varied as the scourge of LED lighting (clearly Nick will have much to discuss with Gilad) and a highly unusual copyright fight.

And finally, Talya Zax is joining us as a senior editor on the Books desk. A sharp, stylish, and omnivorous writer and editor, Talya comes to us from The Forward, where she spent more than a decade at the intersection of news and the arts—including as the publication’s deputy culture editor and, most recently, as its opinion editor. Talya has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and, of course, The Atlantic, where she has contributed reviews and reported stories about fiction and theater. We are very happy she’s agreed to join us and can’t wait for her to start.

Press Contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | press@theatlantic.com

The Atlantic Festival, back for the second year in New York City from September 17 to 19, is announcing new speakers including the legendary quarterback, philanthropist, and entrepreneur Colin Kaepernick, who will be interviewed by contributing writer Jemele Hill about his forthcoming memoir, The Perilous Fight. The festival will also feature an exclusive first look of Netflix’s limited series East of Eden, a fresh interpretation of John Steinbeck's novel that has been adapted and executive produced by Zoe Kazan, who also serves as co-showrunner. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Kazan, the series’ executive producer and star Florence Pugh, and Bela Bajaria, the chief content officer of Netflix, moderated by staff writer Shirley Li.

These events are part of many new programming announcements today, including: Padma Lakshmi, on the future of creative work and the entertainment industry; Senator Mark Kelly, in conversation with staff writer Mark Leibovich, who recently profiled the senator for the magazine; a discussion about press freedom with Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times, together with Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, and Amna Nawaz, a PBS News Hour co-anchor; former Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, interviewed by the MS NOW anchor Stephanie Ruhle; a conversation with the author, actor, and filmmaker Ben McKenzie; a conversation with the journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell; and a conversation with the filmmaker Richard Linklater.

Also at The Atlantic Festival:

• Pete Buttigieg; Andrew Card and Karl Rove; Rahm Emanuel; Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd; Representative Chip Roy; Olympian Ibtihaj Muhammad; San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker, and Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval; University of California President James B. Milliken, Mount Holyoke College President Danielle R. Holley, and Columbia University President Jennifer L. Mnookin; State Attorneys General Rob Bonta of California, John Formella of New Hampshire, and David Sunday of Pennsylvania; The Anxious Generation author and Atlantic contributing writer Jonathan Haidt; author and famed Odyssey translator Emily Wilson; The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan; and live events with Atlantic podcast hosts David Brooks, David Frum, Adam Harris, Hanna Rosin, and Charlie Warzel. The festival involves dozens of The Atlantic’s writers and editors, and today we’ve added Tyler Austin Harper, Honor Jones, Helen Lewis, and Caity Weaver.

Special programming, screenings, and Out and Abouts:

‘A Soundtrack of a Nation’ at Zuccotti Theater (PAC NYC)
Thursday, September 17, 7:30 to 9 p.m. ET
The festival’s opening-night program, “A Soundtrack of a Nation,” a special collaboration with Juilliard, including the composer and pianist Nicholas Britell, the tap dancer and choreographer Michelle Dorrance, the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, and Juilliard President Damian Woetzel; additional performers are to be announced.

Crime and Punishment at Roxy Cinema
Saturday, September 19, 11 to 12 p.m. ET
An exclusive screening of the forthcoming PBS documentary series, which explores the 250-year history of the United States’ criminal legal system, directed by Lynn Novick and executive produced by Ken Burns and Sam Pollard, followed by a discussion with Novick and the poet Reginald Dwayne Betts.

Playing POTUS at Roxy Cinema
Saturday, September 19, 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. ET
A new documentary on presidential parody featuring Saturday Night Live alumni and comedy legends, with director Josh Greenbaum and more speakers to be announced.

Tickets: Single-Day Passes and Out and About tickets are now on sale, along with 2-Day Premier and 2-Day General Admission Passes. Atlantic subscribers receive an exclusive 30 percent discount on festival passes and select Out and About programming.

The 2026 Atlantic Festival is underwritten by Genentech at the Presenting Level; Boston Scientific, Contentful, Edward Jones, and TIAA at the Supporting Level; and Allstate, Calm Health, Ferrero, and Hauser & Wirth and Seabourn Cruise Line at the Contributing Level.

Media and creators interested in covering the festival should reach out to our comms team at press@theatlantic.com; in-person seating will be limited and will need to be reserved in advance.

The Atlantic Festival
September 17–19, 2026
Perelman Performing Arts Center and venues around the city, including the Tenement Museum, the Brooklyn Public Library, and Roxy Cinema.
For Passes: theatlantic.com/theatlanticfestival

History Is Running Backwards

In the May issue, David Brooks considered why reactionaries are taking over the world.

“History Is Running Backwards” is a provocative article. But I think David Brooks errs in framing traditionalism and modernity as an either/or, when in fact they exist in a both/and context. One can be both a traditionalist and a modernist simultaneously. The key, as Brooks notes, is that “a well-adjusted life consists of daring explorations from a secure base.” Would that we all were so blessed to have that!

Judy D. Cottrell
Eugene, Ore.

In dividing humanity into two neat psychological types—stability-seeking traditionalists and novelty-seeking progressives—Brooks misses an essential point: Psychology doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it constantly interacts with changing social factors. People who not long ago may have readily switched jobs and moved cities are now more likely to stay in place because of the scarcity of new positions and lack of affordable housing. Their psychology didn’t change—their circumstances did. Our ancestors who ventured out of Africa 1.9 million years ago were likely seeking their next meal, not the thrill of adventure. These days, people are liable to deny science and seek safety in traditional institutions because the grandest creation of modern technology—artificial intelligence—threatens everything about our way of life. Debates should focus not on psychological insecurity but on the technological, economic, and political decisions that are fostering material uncertainty and pushing people to cling to a much safer past.

Allen Frances, M.D.
Carmel, Calif.

The fact that the traditionalists whom Brooks discusses cannot even agree on when humanity’s “fall” occurred should raise doubts about their ideology. What they are constructing is less history than creation myth: As in the story of Adam and Eve, the fall occurs when people begin thinking for themselves. History and science teach us that there never was an Eden of perfect human harmony. Civilization was built painfully, and by most measurable standards, life today is far better than it was in the past.

The key to understanding the traditionalists is analyzing not the past they claim to describe but the present in which their appeals are gaining traction. Their movement has emerged as society has granted more rights to previously marginalized groups. Beneath the traditionalists’ arguments lies a recurring sentiment: My group once had the authority to define how society should function, and now it no longer does. If only people would stop questioning inherited traditions and defer once again to established authority, as defined by my group, then society could recover its lost harmony.

Brooks suggests that cultivating a sense of “rootedness” might help blunt the traditionalists’ appeal. But many Americans do not see themselves reflected in what passes for American tradition. Our society does not make it easy for them to feel “rooted”—they do not see people like themselves in the literature or history they study. We need to develop broader narratives that tell the country’s whole story. That in turn can cultivate a broader sense of belonging. The humanities do need revival, as Brooks argues. But they should not be organized around a myth of decline. They should be grounded instead in the founding principles that all people are created equal and possess inalienable rights. The continuing struggle to realize those ideals could provide the shared civic story in which all Americans might find roots.

Thomas M. Thurston
Rosarito, Mexico

Everything Is Free and Nothing Matters

In the May issue, Noah Hawley described what he saw at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” Ernest Hemingway, in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” issued a reply, writing, “Yes. They have more money.” I returned to their exchange while reading Noah Hawley’s essay about his time at Jeff Bezos’s retreat. Hawley demonstrates that Fitzgerald was indeed correct—and not merely in the way Hemingway considered. Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and their peers are so wealthy that they cannot spend all of their money in their lifetime. They really are free from consequences.

Neil Ravin
Hampton, N.H.

Billionaires are certainly having a moment—they’re more powerful than ever. But Noah Hawley’s assertion that they are living consequence-free lives is false. After Elon Musk criticized Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” the president was clearly displeased, and a rift emerged between the two titans. But it was short-lived: Trump had the power to damage Musk’s business interests by canceling his lucrative contracts with the federal government. Political leaders still have the power to rein in billionaires—if only they’re brave enough to try.

Ken Taub
Saint James, N.Y.

I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

In the May issue, Caity Weaver wrote a “fun article for people to read.”

When I received my print edition and saw that the cover story was about America’s “best free bread,” I was a little grumpy. The world is in chaos, democracy is withering, and this was the best The Atlantic could do? But because the story was on the cover, I sat down and read it. Turns out the answer was “Yes!” Caity Weaver’s article is an amazing novella. Her style is witty and brilliant, light and insightful. The article is a masterful piece of journalism and a true delight to read, even with its wrenching moments. Thank you for featuring something that pushed the chaos and gloom to the back of my mind for an hour.

Stacey Wells
Oakland, Calif.

In the midst of a particularly taxing, soul-sucking, and bleak week, “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America” made me smile and laugh and remember that there are still lovely things to discover about the world. I’m very sorry for Weaver’s loss. I’m sure her parents would be proud that her articles have brought much joy to the world, and made a random computer programmer in Las Vegas not want to have a tantrum in the conference room.

Evan Appel
Las Vegas, Nev.

Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “Confessions of a Token Black Professor,” Tyler Austin Harper recounts his decision to leave a tenure-track assistant professorship at Bates College, in Maine. One of the few Black faculty members, Harper came to find the college’s performative commitment to social justice suffocating, and ultimately hypocritical. On the cover, the outline of a lone figure walks away, set against the Bates seal.

— Paul Spella, Senior Art Director

Corrections

“Never Call Retreat” (July) misstated the name of the labor organization that repurposed “Battle Hymn of the Republic” into “Solidarity Forever.” It was the Industrial Workers of the World, not the International Workers of the World.

“How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi” (July) stated that the economic gaps between London and other British cities are comparable to that between cities in West and East Germany. In fact, the economic gap between southeastern England, where London sits, and the rest of Britain is comparable to that between West and East Germany.

“So You Want a Coat of Arms” (July) gave the incorrect impression that Kate Middleton directly received her own coat of arms. The arms were granted to her father ahead of her royal wedding.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

For The Atlantic’s September cover story, staff writer Tyler Austin Harper writes about how he came to lose faith in academia, chronicling his recent career as a professor and his decision to leave his tenure-track position after five years at Bates College in Maine. “I saw clearly now what should have been obvious all along. Bates was not a good place to work, nor a moral one. And the problem went beyond a single college: Bates was a node in a higher-education system that offered teenagers an uncertain future in exchange for often unpayable debt, and that asked scholars—enticed by the tweedy dream of a kind of faculty life that has long since been clubbed to death—to keep waiting for the real job that would surely come after the temporary job, and the next.”

Harper began as an enthusiastic assistant professor when he started at Bates: “I saw my academic success as the culmination of several generations of familial sacrifice, paid for by the deferred dreams of others. And I saw American colleges and universities as embodying what was best about this country: the belief that an education is liberating, civilizing, a democratic good for all rather than a luxury to be gatekept. I imagined myself teaching at Bates forever.”

But over time, Harper encountered hypocrisy at Bates and in liberal-elite academia more generally that gradually wore down his initial idealism. He focuses on Bates’s celebrations of DEI and anti-racism, which he felt functioned only as a Band-Aid over the deeper social injustices that he saw the college perpetuating. And he details how, in his view, this infected the courses offered, including a proposal that all students regardless of major take at least two courses “centering” race, white supremacy, and colonialism; influenced who got hired (he served on search committees that passed over more qualified candidates); and shaped the activities on campus.

After a few years at Bates, Harper writes, he “began to see the version of affirmative action that I had defended in my head as a fantasy.” He continues: “I had spent my entire adult life at college, in grad school, and now working as a professor, and I had never before been self-conscious about being a beneficiary of affirmative action. I had always assumed that if I simply worked harder than the people around me—if I read more, went to more conferences, published more and in better venues—then nobody would question whether I deserved to be there. My experience on that search committee, though, disabused me of the notion that any of this mattered at Bates. The school’s culture encouraged us to see professors of color as vehicles for achieving the college’s diversity goals. The inescapable conclusion I arrived at was that I had been hired to be visibly Black first and a scholar second, if at all.”

Harper continues, “Wokeness allowed elite higher ed to create a new model of inclusive exclusion: one in which tuition can continue to climb, acceptance rates can continue to plummet, endowments can continue to expand, and adjunct labor can continue to be exploited as long as the demographics of those paying the tuition and those being exploited continued to get browner, Blacker, more LGBTQAIP2+. It also helped nurture the delusion that elite college graduates were being prepared for lives of civic virtue, and that their highly priced education would be deployed in service of the public good. Never mind the fact that, during my time at Bates, roughly a quarter of the school’s graduates went on to jobs in tech, finance, or consulting—­a startling figure that nonetheless pales in comparison to the nearly half of Harvard and Yale students who end up in these same career tracks.”

Tyler Austin Harper’s “Confessions of a Token Black Professor” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests.

Press contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com

Today The Atlantic is announcing two new staff writers: Madeleine Carlisle and Danyel Smith. This marks a homecoming for Madeleine, who was an Atlantic editorial fellow in 2018 and 2019, and went on to Time magazine and most recently 60 Minutes. Danyel is a legend in journalism who spent the past three years as a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and was previously the editor of both Vibe and Billboard.

Below is the staff announcement from editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg:

Dear everyone,

I’m very happy to let you know that two extraordinary journalists are joining The Atlantic as staff writers: Madeleine Carlisle and Danyel Smith. Both names should be familiar to you; Danyel’s because she is a legend in journalism, having served as the editor in chief of both Vibe and Billboard; and Maddie’s because she is one of our profession’s rising stars (and in particular because she jump-started her journalism career in 2018 as an Atlantic fellow).

About Danyel, who is coming to us from The New York Times Magazine: I’ve been reading Danyel for years, starting, if memory serves, with her brilliant, definitive 1995 cover profile of Whitney Houston, and continuing on through her piercingly forthright 2024 feature in the Times, “I Knew Diddy for Years. What I Now Remember Haunts Me.”

Danyel is a brilliant observer of popular culture—and of the music world in particular—who will bring deep knowledge to our reporting and criticism. Danyel’s list of achievements is long. In addition to leading both Vibe and Billboard, she has been an editor and writer at ESPN and is the author of Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop. Danyel has profiled some of the biggest names in pop culture (Lionel Richie, Tina Turner, Barry Manilow, SZA), and she will do more of this for us.

About Maddie: A bunch of us sensed that, sooner or later, she would be coming back to us. Maddie was a very successful member of the 2018–19 fellowship class who went on to cover politics, law, and gender issues for Time magazine. She then joined the 60 Minutes team, where she worked with correspondents Scott Pelley, Anderson Cooper, and Cecilia Vega on their stories, including one about crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao that earned an Emmy nomination for outstanding investigative coverage.

As a fellow on the Politics team, she wrote about a Florida woman whose nephew was killed in the Parkland shooting, and about President Trump’s unfulfilled promises to GM workers in Ohio. We’ve been so happy to watch her become an outstanding journalist, and we’re thrilled that she’s rejoining The Atlantic.

Please join me in welcoming both Maddie and Danyel.

Best wishes,
Jeff

Press Contacts:
Anna Bross and Quinn O’Brien | press@theatlantic.com