Dear everyone,
I’m writing today with good news about five journalists who will be coming aboard this fall: Paul Beckett as a senior editor, and Lily Meyer, Alex Reisner, Simon Shuster, and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez as staff writers. Three of these journalists are entirely new to us; two are already valued contributors to the cause.
First, Paul: Paul Beckett is one of journalism’s great editors, and he is widely admired for guiding his writers to ambition and excellence, as well as for championing press freedom. As a senior editor responsible for national security and foreign policy coverage, he will be crucial to our rapid expansion in these hugely important areas.
For seven years, Paul led the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau, and, among other things, deftly and tirelessly directed the Journal’s campaign to free Evan Gershkovich from Russian captivity. Paul is also a stellar reporter in his own right, having covered the financial industry in New York, and having done stints as a correspondent in London and Mexico City. He also served as the Journal’s South Asia bureau chief, based in New Delhi, where he and his team won an Overseas Press Club award for their reporting. After that he became the Journal’s Asia Editor, based in Hong Kong, where he led coverage of China, Japan, India, and Southeast Asia as well as the Journal’s local-language services. And he ran coverage of the 1MDB fund scandal in Malaysia that was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
Next, Lily: Many of you already know Lily Meyer’s smart and incisive writing on books and culture. She has written regularly for The Atlantic since 2018, and became a contributing writer in 2023. Lily brings great curiosity to her essays, whatever the subject: the evolution of early-pandemic literature, the importance of displaying Philip Guston’s paintings, or how not to be ashamed of materialism, to name a few. She has also reflected on dead-end jobs, divorce memoirs, the good-enough life, and the woman who made America take cookbooks seriously. Her literary criticism has engaged deeply with books by Rachel Kushner, Susan Choi, Lee Chang-dong, and Lauren Elkin, among others. In addition to her work as a book critic, Lily has a Ph.D. in creative writing and is both a novelist and a translator. She was the Translator in Residence at Princeton University last fall, and her translations include stories by the Peruvian writer Claudia Ulloa Donoso. Lily’s second novel will also be published next year.
Alex Reisner: We’re all familiar with Alex’s many talents: He is the mastermind behind our AI Watchdog project, which launched earlier this month, and his work as the foremost investigator of the hidden data that goes into training AI models has distinguished him as one of the most creative chroniclers of the ChatGPT era. Those of us who have already worked closely with Alex have come to know him as dogged, scrupulous, and inventive. His background includes extensive work in programming, baseball podcasting, and, for good measure, drumming in Francis and the Lights. Alex’s first work for The Atlantic, in 2023, became a major scoop about the more than 190,000 pirated books used to train prominent generative AI systems. (Margaret Atwood and Stephen King both responded to that story in our pages.) Alex joined us as a contributing writer earlier this year. His move to staff writer will allow him to expand his groundbreaking work even further.
About Simon: Simon Shuster has written about armed conflicts and authoritarian regimes for nearly two decades, most of that time as a correspondent for Time Magazine. He has produced authoritative work on Islamist terrorism, European fascism, Brexit, Covid, Syria, the debt crisis in Greece, and has interviewed dozens of world leaders and military commanders. Famously, no correspondent has covered President Zelensky more thoroughly and with more acuity than Simon. He was the first foreign journalist to arrive in Crimea as Russian troops seized the peninsula in 2014, and when Russia’s full-scale invasion began eight years later, Simon spent months embedded with Zelensky’s team. That reporting became the basis for Simon’s book The Showman, for which he received the 2025 Colby Award for military writers. Simon came to the U.S. as a refugee from the Soviet Union when he was 6 years old, and grew up in San Francisco, though he returned to Russia to begin his reporting career. In 2020, after 14 years as a foreign correspondent based in Moscow, Kyiv and Berlin, he returned to the U.S.
Finally, Yvonne. Yvonne Wingett Sanchez is a relentless reporter and a scoop machine, with deep expertise on voting and elections nationwide. She comes to us from The Washington Post, where for the past three years she has covered threats to democracy. She told the stories of people and communities who have lost faith in their government’s ability to hold free and fair elections, explored the surge of violent political threats against elected officials, as episodes of terrible political violence. Along the way, she also helped expose how a Saudi-owned company was using massive amounts of groundwater in Arizona, where she lives. Before the Post, Yvonne spent more than two decades at The Arizona Republic, most recently as a national political reporter.
I’m very excited to see us bring in all this new talent. Please join me in welcoming our new colleagues to the team.
