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Read The Atlantic’s continuing coverage of Russia’s war on Ukraine here.


JEFFREY GOLDBERG

 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 

Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic and a recipient of the
National Magazine Award for Reporting. He is the author of Prisoners: A Story of
Friendship and Terror. More +

Before joining The Atlantic in 2007, Goldberg was a Middle East correspondent
and the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. He was previously a
correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and New York magazine. He has also
written for the Jewish Daily Forward and was a columnist for The Jerusalem Post.

Goldberg's book, Prisoners, was hailed as one of the best books of 2006 by the
Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, The
Progressive, Washingtonian magazine, and Playboy. He received the 2003 National
Magazine Award for Reporting for his coverage of Islamic terrorism and the 2005
Anti-Defamation League Daniel Pearl Prize. He is also the winner of the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists prize for best
international investigative journalist; the Overseas Press Club award for best
human-rights reporting; and the Abraham Cahan Prize in Journalism.

In 2001, Goldberg was appointed the Syrkin Fellow in Letters of the Jerusalem
Foundation, and in 2002 he became a public-policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

 * Stock Montage / Getty
   
   
   A PARTY, AND NATION, IN CRISIS
   
   The GOP’s leaders are attempting to destroy the foundations of American
   democracy.
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * January/February 2022 Issue


 * INTRODUCING NINE NEW NEWSLETTERS
   
   Written by nine great writers
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * November 2, 2021
 * Andrew Harnik-Pool / Getty
   
   
   ADAM KINZINGER: REPUBLICANS ARE ‘FRIGGING CRAZY’
   
   The Illinois representative thought the GOP was filled with democracy-loving
   internationalists. Now he sees the party as a corrupt shell of itself.
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * September 23, 2021
 * Jon Cherry / Getty
   
   
   THE CAPITOL RIOT WAS PROLOGUE
   
   In this month’s newsletter: a crisis for American democracy. Plus: a Q&A with
   George Packer, and a selection of must-read stories from the past several
   weeks.
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * June 14, 2021
 * Artur Widak / NurPhoto / Getty
   
   
   ‘NETANYAHU IS PLAYING WITH FIRE WITH THE DEMOCRATS’
   
   As Israel goes to the polls, the country’s opposition leader sets out the
   risks Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection would pose to ties with the U.S.
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * March 23, 2021


 * FOR SUBSCRIBERS: A NOTE FROM OUR EDITOR IN CHIEF
   
   Jeffrey Goldberg reflects on our pandemic year. This is The Atlantic’s weekly
   email to subscribers.
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * March 15, 2021
 * Interim Archives / Getty
   
   
   ILLUMINATING THE WHOLE AMERICAN IDEA
   
   Introducing “Inheritance”
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * March 2021 Issue
 * Jon Cherry / Getty
   
   
   MASS DELUSION IN AMERICA
   
   What I heard from insurrectionists on their march to the Capitol
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * January 6, 2021
 * Jabin Botsford / The New York Times / …
   
   
   THE ATLANTIC DAILY: RON KLAIN SAW IT COMING
   
   Last January, the incoming White House chief of staff warned that Donald
   Trump wasn’t ready to handle the looming coronavirus outbreak.
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * December 16, 2020
 * © Jordan Casteel. Photo of painting: David Schulze
   
   
   WHY OBAMA FEARS FOR OUR DEMOCRACY
   
   In an exclusive interview, the former president identifies the greatest
   threats to the American experiment, explains why he’s still hopeful, and
   opens up about his new book.
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * November 16, 2020
 * Chip Somodevilla / Getty
   
   
   MR. TRUMP, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL
   
   The president showed nearly as much disrespect for the White House as he did
   for the presidency itself.
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * November 8, 2020
 * Caitlin O’Hara / Bloomberg / Getty; The Atlantic
   
   
   THE CHALLENGE OF DOCUMENTING WHITE NATIONALISM
   
   A Q&A with the filmmakers behind White Noise, The Atlantic’s first feature
   documentary
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * October 21, 2020
 * Yoav Horesh
   
   
   THE MIDNIGHT MESSAGE
   
   Preserving American democracy in a moment of peril
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * November 2020 Issue
 * Tia Dufour / White House / Anadolu Agency …
   
   
   IRAN AND THE PALESTINIANS LOSE OUT IN THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS
   
   From authoritarian leaders to White House aides to the Palestinians, tallying
   the winners and losers
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * September 16, 2020
 * Sasha Arutyunova
   
   
   ALEXANDER VINDMAN: TRUMP IS PUTIN’S ‘USEFUL IDIOT’
   
   In his first interview, a key witness in the impeachment trial says Trump
   goes out of his way to try to please the Russian president.
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * September 14, 2020
 * Chip Somodevilla / Getty
   
   
   TRUMP: AMERICANS WHO DIED IN WAR ARE ‘LOSERS’ AND ‘SUCKERS’
   
   The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members,
   and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple
   sources tell The Atlantic.
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * September 3, 2020
 * Christie Hemm Klok
   
   
   JAMES MATTIS DENOUNCES PRESIDENT TRUMP, DESCRIBES HIM AS A THREAT TO THE
   CONSTITUTION
   
   In an extraordinary condemnation, the former defense secretary backs
   protesters and says the president is trying to turn Americans against one
   another.
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * June 3, 2020
 * Erik Carter
   
   
   THE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS ARE WINNING
   
   America is losing its grip on Enlightenment values and reality itself.
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * May 13, 2020


 * FOR SUBSCRIBERS: OUR BEST JOURNALISM ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC
   
   A note from our editor in chief: We are working harder than ever to provide
   you with the best possible information and analysis about the coronavirus
   pandemic.
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * March 15, 2020
 * Erik Winkowski
   
   
   INTRODUCING FLOODLINES
   
   A new narrative podcast from The Atlantic
   
   * Jeffrey Goldberg
   * March 12, 2020

 * More Stories


BOOKS

 * Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror


MOST POPULAR

 * Sergey Bobok / AFP / Getty
   
   
   THE WESTERN WORLD IS IN DENIAL
   
   Veronika Melkozerova
   
   I understand why democratic countries are reluctant to fight, but I worry
   they don’t understand what will happen next.
   
   KYIV, Ukraine—It’s been 19 days since Russia started the unprovoked war in
   Ukraine. I have changed my location three times, but I am staying in Kyiv to
   take care of my elderly parents. Every day I see Russians getting closer to
   my city from the northwest. I have been sleeping on the floor since February
   24, when Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade my country. I am lucky.
   Others have lost their homes, or have no water, food, or heating. Russian
   troops have already killed several thousands of Ukrainians, including more
   than 80 children.
   
   Every night I close my eyes thinking I might be next on Putin’s death-toll
   list. Nowadays you never know where the Russians will drop their bombs—onto a
   residential building, a kindergarten classroom, a monastery, or a maternity
   hospital.
   
   Continue Reading
 * Takuro Yabe / Pool / AFP; Getty
   
   
   PUTIN NEEDS AN OFF-RAMP
   
   Tom McTague
   
   The question for world leaders is how to ensure the Russian president is
   defeated while nevertheless providing him with a route out of the crisis.
   
   Across the West there is a sense that Vladimir Putin not only must be stopped
   from colonizing Ukraine but should be punished for his barbarism as well. It
   is a question of natural justice. But Western leaders also face a second
   imperative. The frightening reality is that we are closer to nuclear war than
   at any time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. And in some ways, the risk
   of the current crisis spiraling out of control is even greater than that
   faced by John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. Unlike in 1962, a hot war is
   already raging over territory that one side considers important to its
   national interest, and the other knows is necessary to its national survival.
   The war, in other words, has become a zero-sum conflict, even though on no
   reasonable basis can Putin’s belief in Ukraine as a threat to Russia’s
   security be seen as valid.
   
   Continue Reading
 * Reuters
   
   
   AMERICA’S HESITATION IS HEARTBREAKING
   
   Eliot A. Cohen
   
   As the leader of NATO and of the free world, the United States needs to think
   much bigger than it has thus far.
   
   “When you’re at war, you’re at war,” the saying goes, and if so, you have to
   accept the implications. So too in the present circumstance. The United
   States and its NATO allies are engaged in a proxy war with Russia. They are
   supplying thousands of munitions and hopefully doing much else—sharing
   intelligence, for example—with the intent of killing Russian soldiers. And
   because fighting is, as the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said, “a
   trial of moral and physical forces through the medium of the latter,” we must
   face a fact: To break the will of Russia and free Ukraine from conquest and
   subjugation, many Russian soldiers have to flee, surrender, or die, and the
   more and faster the better.
   
   Continue Reading
 * Rosalind O'Connor / NBC
   
   
   THE SIMPLE BRILLIANCE OF THAT AMAZON GO SNL SKETCH
   
   Amanda Wicks
   
   The show delivered incisive commentary by hewing close to shoppers’
   realities—and adding a small dose of horror.
   
   Amazon Go stores are touted as a futuristic shopping experience promising
   unfettered ease and speed. The stores are equipped with the company’s
   proprietary Just Walk Out technology, which combines a nebulous mix of
   “computer vision, deep learning algorithms, and sensor fusion”; shoppers scan
   their Amazon app to enter, grab what they want to purchase, and … leave. If
   that sounds like shoplifting, it apparently feels like it too. Saturday Night
   Live picked up on that problem during last night’s episode, delivering
   incisive commentary reminiscent of its excellent “Mid-Day News” and “Black
   Jeopardy” sketches.
   
   The show’s fake commercial for Amazon Go illustrated the disparity that white
   and Black consumers might experience in a store promoting freedom but mired
   by surveillance. “You want me to just take something and walk out?” asked a
   Black businessman (played by Kenan Thompson). The commercial’s voice-over
   artist (Cecily Strong) reassured him that he could. But unlike his fellow
   white shoppers, Thompson remained dubious. “Nice try,” he said before walking
   away from the item he’d been considering.
   
   Continue Reading
 * H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock / Getty; Gabriela Pesqueira / The
   Atlantic
   
   
   THE THINGS I’M AFRAID TO WRITE ABOUT
   
   Sarah Hepola
   
   Fear of professional exile has kept me from taking on certain topics. What
   gets lost when a writer mutes herself?
   
   One evening, I sat on the brown-leather couch of a younger man who admired me
   for my writing, and maybe other things, if the salty text messages were true.
   He came from a different generation, but I was pleased to discover that he
   shared many of my unconventional opinions and favorite authors, that taste
   and perspective weren’t necessarily a matter of the year you were born. Joan
   Didion, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, though I had more reservations
   about that last one. Books were a common pleasure point, and I was eager to
   tell him about a literary party I’d recently attended in New York City, where
   I’d once lived and often visited in the Before Times.
   
   This was 2018, and the party was an informal gathering at the sumptuous
   Brooklyn brownstone of a writer deemed problematic, even before that word
   went mainstream. Her place was filled with hardback books and writers who had
   been invited because they danced on the precarious edge of what was
   considered appropriate. A New York Times columnist who would eventually be
   publicly excommunicated. A journalist whose delightfully combative Twitter
   account I read regularly, like an episodic novel.
   
   Continue Reading
 * Jaime Culebras / Photo Wildlife Tours
   
   
   THE FREELOADING BOYFRIENDS THAT JUST WON’T LET GO
   
   Katherine J. Wu
   
   Male Santa Marta harlequin toads piggyback on their mate for months before
   egg meets sperm.
   
   For male Santa Marta harlequin toads, sex is an exercise in patience.
   
   The ping-pong-ball-size frogs, which are native to a mountainous strip in
   northern Colombia, spend most of their days milling about the region’s
   burbling brooks, hoping to chance upon a mate. They don’t often get lucky:
   Only rarely, for a few days a year around the start of the rainy season, will
   the species’ much-larger females venture down from the trees to flit through
   these loose froggy frats. That means the window of amorous opportunity is
   painfully tight, and “the probability of meeting is very low,” says Luis
   Alberto Rueda Solano, a biologist studying the toads at the University of
   Magdalena, in Colombia. The first unattached female a male sees that year
   might be the only unattached female he sees that year—his one shot at
   shattering his celibacy until the rains come again.
   
   Continue Reading
 * Peter Hirth / laif / Redux
   
   
   RUSSIA’S ECONOMIC BLACKOUT WILL CHANGE THE WORLD
   
   Derek Thompson
   
   Like all novel experiments, the group punishment of Russia is a leap into the
   unknown.
   
   Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.
   
   In a matter of days, the United States, Europe, and others have
   excommunicated Russia from the world stage, isolating the 11th-largest
   economy financially, commercially, and culturally. The U.S. and Europe have
   frozen foreign assets held by Russia’s central bank, hurting its ability to
   stabilize its currency. Private companies, including Apple, Netflix, Adidas,
   and BP, have cut off the Russian market, and the U.S. has moved to ban
   Russian oil imports. Sports leagues, film festivals, and other cultural
   institutions have banished Russian competitors. McDonald’s is closing its
   Russian franchises. Many of these measures are unprecedented for a country of
   Russia’s stature. Collectively, they amount to a radical worldwide experiment
   in moral retribution. If Vladimir Putin sought to expand the Russian empire
   by hard power, he has achieved the very opposite: the diminishment of Russia
   through an unprecedented display of global soft power.
   
   Continue Reading
 * Getty; The Atlantic
   
   
   THE CORONAVIRUS’S NEXT MOVE
   
   Katherine J. Wu
   
   Here are four shapes that the next variant might take—which will also dictate
   the shape of our response.
   
   If the coronavirus has one singular goal—repeatedly infecting us—it’s only
   gotten better at realizing it, from Alpha to Delta to Omicron. And it is
   nowhere near done. “Omicron is not the worst thing we could have imagined,”
   says Jemma Geoghegan, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Otago,
   in New Zealand. Somewhere out there, a Rho, a Tau, or maybe even an Omega is
   already in the works.
   
   
   
   Not all variants, though, are built the same. The next one to trouble us
   could be like Delta, speedy and a shade more severe yet still trounceable
   with existing vaccines. It could riff on Omicron’s motif, eluding the
   defenses raised by infections and shots to an extent we’ve not yet seen. It
   could merge the worst aspects of both of those predecessors, or find its own
   successful combo of traits. Each iteration of the virus will require a
   slightly different set of strategies to wrangle it—the ideal approach will
   depend on “how sick are people getting, and which people are getting sick,”
   Angela Shen, a vaccine-policy expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia,
   told me.
   
   Continue Reading
 * Dmitry Aleshkovskiy / Wikimedia; The Atlantic
   
   
   WE HAVE REACHED A HINGE OF HISTORY
   
   Ben Rhodes
   
   Out of the righteous rage of this moment, perhaps a new world can be born.
   
   Europe’s largest invasion since World War II is a logical outcome of Vladimir
   Putin’s dominance of Russian politics in the 21st century, a reminder that
   grievance-based ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism lead inexorably to
   conflict. Putin’s efforts to reconstitute empire and “protect” Russian
   speakers beyond national borders tap into currents of history running deep
   underneath our collective experience. And in many ways, the tolls of the
   war—cities reduced to rubble, civilians caught amid armies, refugees moving
   en masse across European borders, threats of nuclear annihilation—recall the
   circumstances that shocked world powers into creating an international system
   to prevent another world war. Perhaps it is no coincidence that at precisely
   the time when living memory of World War II is fading away, humanity has
   failed to heed the lessons of our worst history.
   
   Continue Reading
 * Andy Kropa / Redux
   
   
   THE U.S. SUBSIDY THAT EMPOWERS PUTIN
   
   David Frum
   
   Ending America’s foolish subsidies for ethanol could aid Ukraine.
   
   The United States is supporting Ukraine with aid and weapons and punishing
   Russian aggression with financial and economic sanctions. But the United
   States can do more to resolve the global crisis caused by the Russian
   invasion of Ukraine: It can end the ethanol program.
   
   For decades, the U.S. government has, at great expense, encouraged farmers to
   grow more corn so that it can be turned into ethanol, a gasoline additive.
   Ethanol makers receive all kinds of grants and subsidies. Federal regulations
   require ethanol to be blended into gasoline, creating a giant industry that
   would not exist without large subsidies and imperious mandates. America’s
   largest ethanol company earned annual revenues of $8 billion pre-pandemic.
   Demand from the ethanol industry, in turn, bids up the price of corn, and the
   income of those who farm it.
   
   Continue Reading


 * THE WORLD’S TALLEST WATERSLIDE WAS A TERRIBLE, TRAGIC IDEA
   
   Emily Buder
   
   A fatal accident at a waterslide park was the result of gross negligence, lax
   state regulations, and a whole lot of hubris.
   
   Watch Video


 * THE UNEXPLAINED NOISE 2 PERCENT OF PEOPLE CAN HEAR
   
   Emily Buder
   
   A man is tormented by a low-frequency humming sound emanating from his house,
   which he believes is caused by a nearby gas pipeline.
   
   Watch Video

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