The following excerpt was sent out from The Atlantic:
The journalists Michael Powell and Zoë Schlanger will join The Atlantic as staff writers, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg announced today. Michael has been a reporter at The New York Times since 2007, and will begin with The Atlantic next month. Zoë will start this fall, covering issues of climate and writing the newsletter The Weekly Planet, which tells the story of life on a changing planet.
Michael Powell
At The New York Times, Michael covered presidential campaigns, reported on the economy, wrote the “Gotham” column for the Metro section, and for six years was the “Sports of the Times” columnist. Most recently, he was a national reporter covering issues around free speech and expression, and stories capturing intellectual and campus debate.
He and two colleagues won the George Polk Award for reporting on a corrupt police detective—stories that led to more than a dozen exonerations, including freeing a man who had served 22 years for a murder he did not commit—and he was part of a team that won the Pulitzer for breaking-news reporting on Eliot Spitzer. Before joining the Times, Michael worked for The Washington Post from 1996 to 2006, where he covered the 2000 presidential campaign and later served as New York bureau chief.
Zoë Schlanger
Zoë is a distinguished science reporter and the author of a forthcoming book, The Light Eaters, about plant intelligence. She has contributed to The Atlantic, The New York Times, New York Review of Books, and Audubon magazine, among other publications. She was previously a staff reporter at Newsweek and later Quartz, reporting on climate change, the environment, health, and science policy. She has received several awards for her reporting, including for her coverage of the global plastic trade and air pollution in Detroit.