The Atlantic Hires Tim Alberta and Jennifer Senior as Staff Writers

The Atlantic is continuing to grow its editorial team at the start of the year with the addition of two staff writers: Tim Alberta, who comes to The Atlantic from Politico, where he has been the chief political correspondent; and Jennifer Senior, joining from The New York Times, where she is a columnist. Both Alberta and Senior will begin with The Atlantic shortly.

“We are trying––and succeeding, I think––to make The Atlantic the premier home in America for brilliant magazine writing, and Tim and Jen represent crucial additions to our roster of outstanding talent,” said editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg.

At The Atlantic, Alberta will expand beyond politics writing to report features and profiles on a range of subjects. This is a bit of a homecoming for Alberta, who reported for several years for The Hotline and National Journal, where he was a House-leadership reporter and covered campaigns as a senior political correspondent. At Politico, Alberta has covered Donald Trump, Capitol Hill, the Republican Party, and demographic change in America. He has also reported for The Wall Street Journal and National Review. Alberta co-moderated the last of the Democratic presidential-primary debates in 2019. His book that year, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list.

Senior will report long-form features across a wide array of subjects and will also write about books for The Atlantic. For the past two years she has been a columnist for the New York Times op-ed page, where in recent months she’s bid farewell to Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, profiled Joe Biden through a rereading of the 1988 presidential-primary book What It Takes, and analyzed the suicide of a happiness researcher in the memorable piece “Happiness Won’t Save You.” Before joining Opinion, Senior was one the Times’ three daily book critics. She spent almost 20 years as a staff writer for New York magazine, writing profiles and cover stories about politics, social science, and mental health. Senior is also the author of the hugely popular book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.

Other staff members to join The Atlantic’s editorial team this year include senior editors Daniel Engber from Wired, Honor Jones from The New York Times, and Chris Ip from Engadget; staff writers Katherine Wu and Caitlin Dickerson, both formerly of The New York Times; and Aithne Feay, who joined The Atlantic’s experimental-storytelling team.

Last week The Atlantic launched the weekly podcast The Experiment: Stories From an Unfinished Country in partnership with WNYC Studios. In each episode, released every Thursday, host Julia Longoria is joined by The Atlantic’s writers and editors to explore America’s promise through riveting, surprising, and even surreal stories that uncover powerful and sometimes invisible forces of history. The March issue of The Atlantic will be released this week, and features in this week’s episode of The Experiment.