Pricey everybody,
I’m writing as we speak with excellent news about 5 journalists who shall be coming aboard this fall: Paul Beckett as a senior editor, and Lily Meyer, Alex Reisner, Simon Shuster, and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez as employees writers. Three of those journalists are fully new to us; two are already valued contributors to the trigger.
First, Paul: Paul Beckett is one among journalism’s nice editors, and he’s extensively admired for guiding his writers to ambition and excellence, in addition to for championing press freedom. As a senior editor chargeable for nationwide safety and international coverage protection, he shall be essential to our speedy enlargement in these massively vital areas.
For seven years, Paul led the Wall Avenue Journal’s Washington bureau, and, amongst different issues, deftly and tirelessly directed the Journal’s marketing campaign to free Evan Gershkovich from Russian captivity. Paul can also be a stellar reporter in his personal proper, having coated the monetary trade in New York, and having completed stints as a correspondent in London and Mexico Metropolis. He additionally served because the Journal’s South Asia bureau chief, primarily based in New Delhi, the place he and his staff received an Abroad Press Membership award for his or her reporting. After that he turned the Journal’s Asia Editor, primarily based in Hong Kong, the place he led protection of China, Japan, India, and Southeast Asia in addition to the Journal’s local-language providers. And he ran protection of the 1MDB fund scandal in Malaysia that was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Worldwide Reporting.
Subsequent, Lily: Lots of you already know Lily Meyer’s sensible and incisive writing on books and tradition. She has written repeatedly for The Atlantic since 2018, and have become a contributing author in 2023. Lily brings nice curiosity to her essays, regardless of the topic: the evolution of early-pandemic literaturethe significance of displaying Philip Guston’s Workor how to not be ashamed of materialismto call a couple of. She has additionally mirrored on dead-end jobs, divorce memoirsthe good-enough lifeand the girl who made America take cookbooks significantly. Her literary criticism has engaged deeply with books by Rachel Kushner, Susan Choi, Lee Chang-dong, and Lauren Elkin, amongst others. Along with her work as a ebook critic, Lily has a Ph.D. in inventive writing and is each a novelist and a translator. She was the Translator in Residence at Princeton College final fall, and her translations embrace tales by the Peruvian author Claudia Ulloa Donoso. Lily’s second novel can even be revealed subsequent yr.
Alex Reisner: We’re all acquainted with Alex’s many abilities: He’s the mastermind behind our AI Watchdog missionwhich launched earlier this month, and his work because the foremost investigator of the hidden knowledge that goes into coaching AI fashions has distinguished him as one of the crucial inventive chroniclers of the ChatGPT period. These of us who’ve already labored carefully with Alex have come to know him as dogged, scrupulous, and ingenious. His background contains intensive work in programming, baseball podcasting, and, for good measure, drumming in Francis and the Lights. Alex’s first work for The Atlantic, in 2023, turned a serious scoop in regards to the greater than 190,000 pirated books used to coach outstanding generative AI programs. (Margaret Atwood and Stephen King each responded to that story in our pages.) Alex joined us as a contributing author earlier this yr. His transfer to employees author will enable him to broaden his groundbreaking work even additional.
About Simon: Simon Shuster has written about armed conflicts and authoritarian regimes for practically 20 years, most of that point as a correspondent for Time Journal. He has produced authoritative work on Islamist terrorism, European fascism, Brexit, Covid, Syria, the debt disaster in Greece, and has interviewed dozens of world leaders and army commanders. Famously, no correspondent has coated President Zelensky extra completely and with extra acuity than Simon. He was the primary international journalist to reach in Crimea as Russian troops seized the peninsula in 2014, and when Russia’s full-scale invasion started eight years later, Simon spent months embedded with Zelensky’s staff. That reporting turned the premise for Simon’s ebook The Showmanfor which he acquired the 2025 Colby Award for army writers. Simon got here to the U.S. as a refugee from the Soviet Union when he was 6 years previous, and grew up in San Francisco, although he returned to Russia to start his reporting profession. In 2020, after 14 years as a international correspondent primarily based in Moscow, Kyiv and Berlin, he returned to the U.S.
Lastly, Yvonne. Yvonne Wingett Sanchez is a relentless reporter and a scoop machine, with deep experience on voting and elections nationwide. She involves us from The Washington Submitthe place for the previous three years she has coated threats to democracy. She instructed the tales of individuals and communities who’ve misplaced religion of their authorities’s potential to carry free and truthful electionsexplored the surge of violent political threats in opposition to elected officersas episodes of horrible political violence. Alongside the way in which, she additionally helped expose how a Saudi-owned firm was utilizing large quantities of groundwater in Arizona, the place she lives. Earlier than the SubmitYvonne spent greater than 20 years at The Arizona Republicmost just lately as a nationwide political reporter.
I’m very excited to see us herald all this new expertise. Please be part of me in welcoming our new colleagues to the staff.
