Atlantic Monthly

Subterms

    Latest story

    163 Shares135 Views

    After the Signal Leak, How Well Do You Know Your Own Group Chats?

    by

    A journalist’s inclusion in a national security discussion served as a reminder that you might not know every number in the chat — and that could be a big problem.Hey, are you sure you want to send that to your group chat? Like, one thousand percent sure?Just checking. Because it’s been a strange week in the history of the group chat, those seemingly intimate text conversations that ping back and forth among friends and family members and, apparently, national security personnel.On Monday, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote that he had accidentally been added to a group chat on the encrypted messaging app Signal. He followed along as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth laid out attack plans against Houthi strongholds in Yemen and watched other national security officials post celebratory emoji after the strikes had taken place.As lawmakers on both sides of the aisle condemned the security breach, Americans with their own unruly group chats watched with recognition and disbelief: How had some of the country’s most powerful officials managed to so badly bungle using technology that millions of people rely on every day?“Obviously it’s a very relatable screw-up,” Mr. Goldberg said during an interview with Tim Miller of The Bulwark on Tuesday. “We’ve all sent texts to the wrong people,” he added.Those inadvertent texts, however, don’t typically contain high-stakes national security information that is being shared outside secure government channels.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares107 Views

      in Elections

      Trump’s Team Calls Europe ‘Pathetic’ in Leaked Signal Group Chat Messages

      by

      Trump administration officials haven’t kept their disdain for Europe quiet. But the contempt seems to be even louder behind closed doors.Europeans reacted with a mix of exasperation and anger to the publication of parts of a discussion between top-ranking Trump administration officials, carried out on the messaging app Signal. The discussion, about a planned strike on Yemen, was replete with comments that painted Europeans as geopolitical parasites, and was revealed on Monday in The Atlantic, whose editor was inadvertently included in the conversation.“I just hate bailing out the Europeans again,” wrote Vice President JD Vance, asserting that the strikes would benefit Europe far more than the United States.“I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, later replied. “It’s PATHETIC.”The exchange seemed to show real feelings and judgments — that the Europeans are mooching and that any American military action, no matter how clearly in American interests as well, should be somehow paid for by other beneficiaries.A member of the chat identified as “SM,” and believed to be Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, suggested that both Egypt and “Europe” should compensate the United States for the operation. “If Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return,” SM wrote.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      William Whitworth, Revered Writer and Editor, Is Dead at 87

      by

      After writing memorable character sketches and fine-tuning others’ copy at The New Yorker, he spent two decades as editor in chief of The Atlantic Monthly.William Whitworth, who wrote revealing profiles in The New Yorker giving voice to his idiomatic subjects and polished the prose of some of the nation’s celebrated writers as its associate editor before transplanting that magazine’s painstaking standards to The Atlantic, where he was editor in chief for 20 years, died on Friday in Conway, Ark., near Little Rock. He was 87.His daughter, Katherine Whitworth Stewart, announced the death. She said he was being treated after several falls and operations in a hospital.As a young college graduate, Mr. Whitworth forsook a promising career as a jazz trumpeter to do a different kind of improvisation as a journalist.He covered breaking news for The Arkansas Gazette and later for The New York Herald Tribune, where his colleagues eventually included some of the most exhilarating voices in American journalism, among them Dick Schaap, Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe.In 1966, William Shawn, The New Yorker’s decorous but dictatorial editor, wooed Mr. Whitworth to the venerated weekly. He took the job although he had already accepted one at The New York Times.At The New Yorker, he injected wit into pensive “Talk of the Town” vignettes. He also profiled the famous and the not so famous, including the jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus (accompanied by photos from his former Herald Tribune colleague Jill Krementz) and the foreign policy adviser Eugene V. Rostow. He expanded his profile of Mr. Rostow into a 1970 book, “Naïve Questions About War and Peace.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More