Today The Atlantic is launching Being Human, a new section and newsletter at TheAtlantic.com as part of a major expansion of its writing and reporting on health. The name describes The Atlantic’s wide-ranging approach to health coverage, on what it means to live a life bound up in a body and conducted by a mysterious, fallible brain.

The Atlantic grew its health-reporting team significantly ahead of this launch, and Being Human will broaden the magazine’s existing coverage of the ideas and issues that readers encounter every day: wellness culture, human behavior, mortality and disease, and other mysteries of the body and the mind.

Editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg said of the expansion: “The Atlantic’s health team produces the smartest, most analytically acute, and best-written stories of any journalism outfit nationally, and with this new expansion, we’re going to be comprehensive in a way we haven’t been before. In an age of mass confusion––not just about health, of course––I think our team is perfectly positioned to bring clarity to this important coverage area.”

Being Human launches with new reporting on the BRCA gene needing a rebrand, by Kristen V. Brown; how the broad support for vaccines in America may be tested by the incoming Trump administration, by Daniel Engber; and the way people are thinking about deodorant all wrong, from Yasmin Tayag.

Find more stories at the Being Human section, and please reach out with questions or interest in interviewing our writers about their reporting.

Press Contact: Anna Bross | press@theatlantic.com

The Atlantic is announcing a new staff writer: Jonathan Chait, who will bring his prolific writing and analysis of national politics and policy to the magazine at a pivotal moment. Chait has been a political columnist at New York magazine since 2011. He begins at The Atlantic this week.

“Jon Chait is a journalist of immense gifts who writes in the tradition of Michael Kinsley. He is fearless, indefatigable, funny, acutely analytical, and smartly (which is to say, not axiomatically) contrarian. Our time requires truth tellers like Jon, and The Atlantic’s readers will benefit greatly from his writing,” said editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg.

Chait has been one of the most influential political columnists of the past three decades, first at The New Republic, where he was a staff writer for 15 years, and most recently with his daily columns for New York magazine. He is the author of Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail and The Big Con: Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America.

Last month, The Atlantic announced that it was adding more print issues in 2025 and expanding the newsroom––hiring a number of writers and editors to grow coverage of defense, national security, and technology, in addition to health, science, and other areas. For the first time in more than two decades, The Atlantic will once again publish monthly, beginning with the January 2025 issue, which will be released in December.

Other editorial hires who have joined The Atlantic recently include the staff writers Kristen V. Brown, Nicholas Florko, Shane Harris, and Shayla Love; Jen Balderama, Serena Dai, and Allegra Frank, all senior editors for Culture; and contributing writers Danielle Allen and Robert Kagan, both formerly of The Washington Post. Katie Gunn is a new director of creative operations overseeing art and design.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

Danielle Allen and Robert Kagan, two of the nation’s prominent scholars and commentators on matters of democracy, freedom, and the American idea, are joining The Atlantic as contributing writers, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg announced today. Both writers join The Atlantic from The Washington Post, where they served as opinion columnists.

“The Atlantic is deeply committed to covering the crisis of democracy in all its manifestations, and having Danielle Allen and Robert Kagan join our already excellent team represents a real boon for our readers,” Goldberg said.

Allen, who serves as the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, is a political philosopher and scholar of public policy. She is also director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and director of the Democratic Knowledge Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has published numerous books on justice and citizenship, including 2023’s Justice by Means of Democracy, as well as Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality and the acclaimed memoir Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. Allen has contributed several articles to The Atlantic, the most recent about the history of a forgotten Black Founding Father.

Kagan is a senior fellow in the foreign-policy program at the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution. He has written for The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal, and is the author of a number of critically acclaimed and best-selling books, most recently Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again. He is also the author of The Ghost at the Feast: America and Collapse of World Order, 1900–1941; The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World; and Of Paradise and Power. Kagan served in the State Department from 1984 to 1988 as a member of the policy-planning staff, as principal speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and as deputy for policy in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com