The Atlantic is announcing the hires of three new staff writers: Ariel Sabar, who has contributed to The Atlantic as a freelancer since 2015, and Joshua Partlow and Sebastian Smee, both joining from The Washington Post. Joshua will cover extreme weather and natural disasters. Ariel will focus on in-depth narrative reporting. Sebastian will write widely about visual art and its influence on modern life and culture. More details from our editors about all three journalists follow:
Ariel Sabar is joining as a staff writer. Ariel has been contributing to The Atlantic as a freelancer since 2015, and is responsible for such classics as “A Biblical Mystery at Oxford,” “The Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme that Hooked Warren Buffett and the U.S. Treasury,” and the truly amazing “The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife.” (If you’ve read that one, you’ve likely never forgotten it.) That last piece turned into his 2020 book, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, which was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe award for best true-crime book of the year and the runner-up for the Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award. His first book, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Family’s Past, in which Ariel reported from the ancient village in Iraqi Kurdistan where his father grew up, won the National Books Critics Circle Award in 2009. Ariel is a truly inexhaustible reporter with a gift for writing narratives that you can’t put down. Joshua Partlow is joining as a staff writer, and will focus on extreme weather and natural disasters. Josh comes to us from The Washington Post, where he wrote most recently about environmental issues in the American West. He is a powerhouse reporter who has also been a foreign correspondent in Latin America and the Middle East. He served with distinction as the Post’s bureau chief in Mexico City, Kabul, and Rio de Janeiro, and was a stalwart in the paper’s Baghdad bureau, where he made a name for himself as a particularly brave and resourceful reporter. He has already made his mark at The Atlantic with his striking story on the fatal Lake Tahoe avalanche earlier this year. Sebastian Smee is joining as a staff writer. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, Sebastian is the former art critic for both The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. He has written eloquently about visual art for many years, and is one of the most respected arts commentators and critics in the English-speaking world. Sebastian is a brilliant observer of the arts who approaches artists as well as individual works with deep humanity and sustained attention. He has dissected the rise of megadealers and reported the fascinating story of a Jackson Pollock theft. He is the go-to critic in times of controversy, weighing in in timely and acute ways on matters ranging from the deaccession effort at the Baltimore Museum of Art to the postponement of a Philip Guston show. Sebastian will write widely on visual art and its influence on modern life and culture more broadly.
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