Megan Garber
@megangarber
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Atlantic writer. 2025 New America/Emerson Collective fellow.
Joined January 2009
An open letter to media outlets discussing Ghislaine Maxwell: There is no such thing as an “underage woman.” An underage woman is a girl.
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An open letter to media outlets discussing the Gaetz investigation: There’s no such thing as an “underage woman.” An underage woman is a girl.
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Hannah Arendt warned of a world where it would begin to feel like "everything was possible and nothing was true." That world gets closer, day by day.
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"Stumblingly drunk.” “Aggressively drunk.” "Belligerently drunk.” . One of the questions lurking in all the Kavanaugh chaos is who, in America, is afforded the luxury of lost control:.
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One of misogyny’s fondest fantasies is that women are naturally manipulative. But the country is in crisis right now because a man—too vain and too scared to admit the truth—did what he always does, instinctually, when reality proves inconvenient: He lied.
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“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.”.
The @nytimes has deleted this, saying it was “poorly phrased,” but this is not about the wrong choice of words - it’s the constant diminishment and laughing off of women’s pain.
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I wrote about Dwight Schrute, an icon for an age of incoherence .
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There was clear video of the interaction between Jim Acosta and a White House staffer during today's news conference. Sarah Sanders mischaracterized it—in cynically gendered terms—anyway. The expansion of the post-truth press shop continues apace:.
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Last night, Laura Ingraham described a basic democratic exchange—members of the American public questioning their elected leader—as an “ambush.” The absurdity of that, and the danger, is part of what I tried to think through here: .
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I find it helpful to think about Fox not just as a source of news or opinion or propaganda (though: yes), but also as a language. Fox has its own grammar. Fox has its own lexicon. And Fox has a totalizing influence on many of its deeply loyal viewers.
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We live at the mercy of Donald Trump’s mind. That fact is the result of so many failures.
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This will end, in some quarters, both with Megyn Kelly treated as a martyr and with NBC treated as an exemplar. She is not. It is not.
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This great @adamserwer essay, like every great @adamserwer essay, is a pitch-perfect fusion of clarity and complexity. Today as any other, it's really worth your time: .
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This is heartbreaking to read. Which is why it is necessary to read.
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I wrote about Lysoled lungs and our extremely nonfictional dystopia: .
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As a journalist, I am bursting with admiration for this brilliantly reported and beautifully crafted @edyong209 masterpiece. // As a human, I am filled with APPARENTLY ENTIRELY REASONABLE HORRORPANIC at this @edyong209 masterpiece.
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To be alive in the America of the present moment is to be under the influence of power brokers who will regress, literally and reliably, to the mean: .
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This is a crucial hour for American democracy. Fox failed it.
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This @edyong209 masterpiece is ultimately about the mysteries of mindfulness, the dignities of science, the wonders of the deep. It is also, however, about OCTOPUSES ON ECSTASY
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"Then it all came to me, and I wrote like it was a hurricane." This is a very fantastic moment(!!!!!) to read @davidlsims' conversation with Bong Joon-ho:.
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The sitting president of the United States was credibly accused of rape. The claim barely registered in the public mind. I really don’t know what else to say.
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Don’t judge a book by its cover, but then again … whew, look at that cover. I’m thrilled to be a part of @TheAtlantic’s latest issue, which is sobering in its theme but also, thanks to @mendelsund's redesign, striking in its look: .
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As we talk this weekend, let's be clear about what so many of the bad-faith defenses of Kavanaugh are really defending:
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This week, Tucker Carlson tried to rebrand disinformation as "freelance thinking.". It was a reminder that cynicism is not just wisdom gone awry. Cynicism is a way of looking at the world without seeing it. It is ignorance. It is mistrust. It is a threat.
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I can't stop thinking, as that leaked Louis CK set goes around, about how great he was at seeming to be better than he is. And about all the ways—sometimes for the best, and sometimes for the absolute worst—that comedy is complicity.
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Per the word "childless" has 4 synonyms: "infecund," "infertile," "sterile," and "unfruitful.". We need much better language—more precise, more permissive, less cruelly reductive—for talking about families as they exist in 2018.
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Health is not a DIY project. Health is not a funny joke. Health is not a faith-based initiative. Health is not a luxury good. I wrote about the deep cynicisms of 'The Goop Lab': .
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The misogyny of past presidential contests was often blunt and unashamed. The misogyny of 2020, though, has been different. It has lawyered up. It has emphasized plausible deniability. And it has been finding ever-cannier ways of hiding in plain sight:.
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“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” .
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Today is reminding me of how unfit our political language can be for our political reality. Partisan, hypocrisy, impunity, spin—the terms are true but not enough. How do you fully capture the depth of the cynicism, the weight of the lies?
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Before they dismissed Deborah Ramirez’s claims as inconvenient, they dismissed Christine Blasey Ford’s as inconsequential. America’s power-brokers are so good at listening to women and so bad at actually hearing them: .
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Vaccines don't happen in a vacuum; public health is a matter of culture, too. So this—in @sarahzhang's essential report on the potential paths of COVID-19—gutted me: 20% of Americans *already* say that, whenever a vaccine is available, they'll refuse it.
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Orwell talked about the connections between political chaos and the decay of language. But "chaos"—the word itself, which forecloses language's possibilities—is its own kind of political decay.
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Something I think about a lot: the way the seething, sneering testimony Brett Kavanaugh gave during his Senate hearings—on this day, around this time, last year—got described, preemptively, as . “incandescent” .
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Writing this, I looked at how people of the time made sense of Darwin's insights, Carson's, Galileo's. We're living in the midst, I think, of another world-shaking revolution. And are coming to terms with it all just as they did: Slowly. Warily. Awkwardly.
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Here is what Newt Gingrich said when asked to participate in the new "Hillary" doc: “I would rather stick a needle in my eye than talk to you about Hillary Clinton in a documentary." . This @shirklesxp piece is so rich and smart and full of insight: .
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"The next commission will issue informed and well-meaning recommendations. But they won’t be surprising. Because we’ve heard them all before." -@AdamHSays.
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"A good kiss creates its own small universe." @ethiopienne's appreciation of the modest magic of the kiss is gorgeous and also CORRECT
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This @dcopaken piece eloquently captures, on top of so much else, how often harassment manifests not as a single event, but as a pattern of behavior—one that destabilizes and disrupts lives both in the instant and over time
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"'People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day,' Winnie the Pooh muses to Christopher. He, like Paddington, should be regarded as a hero." . This @davidlsims review of "Christopher Robin" is such a thorough delight:.
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"The sight of Trump shoulder-swiveling to 'YMCA' while entombed in his typical boxy suit sent me searching for Susan Sontag’s definitive 1964 treatise, 'Notes on Camp.'" @skornhaber on . everything . is so, so good:
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There's so much to be struck by in this Warren press conference. One thing, though, is her revealing refusal to disguise her sadness at the outcome. The electric quality of emotions felt in public. This is from last year, but I think it holds up: .
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Reading this work of @fivefifths genius made me decide, finally, to destroy my phone and go off the grid and set up life-camp in a commune of woodland yurts. (I'm returning now just to recommend that you read it yourself and okay now back to the yurts bye)
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Someone whose work I wish got more attention: Neil Postman. I think about him literally every day, these days.
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I wrote about I Feel Pretty and The Beauty Myth and all the ways we’ve found to tell women they'll never be enough
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“The ultimate stressor—the ultimate trauma—is being removed from your loving caregiver. On top of that, the child is losing the person who is supposed to buffer that stress. Who are they to turn to, to give them that comfort?”
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Letter of recommendation: every last line of this @mckaycoppins dispatch from Sean Spicer's book party
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What is literature, at this point? Who is it for, anymore?
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Come for @jameshamblin's reference to hand-washing as "a tiny baptism of the fingertips." Stay for his timely reminder that hand-washing is, on top of everything else, an act of generosity.
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I wrote a little while ago about how tempting it can be to frame reunification stories as happy endings ( . this latest Times report—and so many other gut-wrenching stories like it—is a deeply awful reminder of how not-happy those "endings" can be.
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“People will be fine when you take what they give you. But, oh, don’t take more.”.
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As we talk about "hearings," it's worth remembering how little interest many in power seem to have in really listening to—truly hearing—the stated experiences of women:
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In which Jason Bateman utters the phrase "not to belittle"—in the course of belittling Jessica Walter's memories of how Jeffrey Tambor treated her on the set of Arrested Development—not once, not twice, but THRICE:
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I've been thinking about the recent news cycle and its series of extremely preventable tragedies—and about all the ways we've come up with to give ourselves permission to ignore and absolve and otherwise look away. Here, I think, is one of those ways:
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Grateful to @olgakhazan for this thorough and fascinating report on breastfeeding as a practice, as a business . and as a source of international contention:
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This @davidlsims/@rianjohnson discussion of Knives Out (and of Agatha Christie, and Clue, and Cats) is, on top of everything else, such a great distillation of the ways art can be serious and joyous at the same time:.
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"Right now it feels like I have the support of the entire world because I’ve spoken out against someone who most people agree is a villain. But I also feel like I could lose that support the moment I might speak out against someone who has their respect." .
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"The most famous address in America now feels like a coronavirus breeding ground." -@PeterAtlantic
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For @TheAtlantic’s December issue, I wrote about what happens when sorrynotsorry becomes a political style: .
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"It was not yet clear that the man known as Bill Cosby was as much of a fictional character as the good doctor." Read @AdamSerwer on Cosby's profoundly ironic moralism:
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On Jim Jordan and Sean Spicer and Americans' capacity to forget even the most recent of histories:
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I will avail myself of literally any excuse to talk about Shakespeare and his puns—including, this April 23, the fact that being born and dying on the same date is basically THE MOST COSMIC PUN IMAGINABLE
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The Superman cape, kid-sized. The 4-H ribbons. The pair of stuffed red lips—K-I-S-S stitched onto them—that his mom packed, every day, along with his lunch. The objects that speak to a life. This was a profoundly sad story to write.
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'The Good Place' was such a marvel of a show: wacky, compassionate, profound. One thing I keep thinking about, now that it's ended, is what a gift it was for a sitcom to take on some of the moment’s most sweeping anxieties and make them seem…manageable.
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For @TheAtlantic's new print issue, I wrote about the excruciating horrorcringe of comedies that deal with puberty—and about their surprising grace.
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Misogyny is an emergency. Misogyny is an emergency. Misogyny is an emergency.
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I just spent many minutes staring at this blankly, hoping I’d misread. I really wish I’d misread.
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Today is Thursday. Today is Thursday? .Today is Thursday— .Today is Thursday.
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There's so much wisdom in this @sophieGG masterpiece, but one of the things I appreciated most: It acknowledges—and explores—how complicated true "reckonings" can be, in practice. It's a story about the past, but in so many other ways . it's not.
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Read @sjjphd on the scourge of sentient pepper spray—and on the ways media coverage of protests can obscure and therefore abet police brutality.
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A minor detail, in this story and in the bigger one. But whew.
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An important @AdamSerwer essay that, like every important @AdamSerwer essay, manages to be both sweeping and urgent at the same time:
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I wrote about Charlie Rose and that rumored #MeToo TV show and the noxious ways we're taught to think about redemption
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I like Jeopardy because I’m a nerd, but have loved it lately because Alex has been a source of such steadiness and kindness and grace. What a career, and what a gift he’s given to so many.
Jeopardy! is saddened to share that Alex Trebek passed away peacefully at home early this morning, surrounded by family and friends. Thank you, Alex.
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“I don’t think anything would stop him. He probably did the same thing to 10 different women that night. That’s the thing. I was not special.” . This series, from the dream-team combo of @ejeancarroll and @LaurieAbraham2, is gutting. And so profoundly good
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I’m not sure what to call this @JohnGHendy essay. It's a profile, but it's so much more; it's a report about the 2020 race that steadily—lyrically—expands beyond politics. On second thought, I do know what to call this @JohnGHendy essay: a masterpiece.
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"When the dancers weren’t below her, they were marching to the perfectly staggered steps of their high-heeled leader.". (The best holiday is Super Bowl Monday, because it comes with the annual @skornhaber piece on the halftime show!) .
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There's so much news. There's too much news. But please read this, from the dream-team reporting duo @aliaemily and @lenikacruz, on one of the many stories of life and death that has, in many outlets, gotten lost in all the noise: .
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This @ethiopienne piece on Brian Tyree Henry is so so so good—a lush profile that, on top of everything else, doubles as a testament to the profound artistry of acting.
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This @sarahrich piece on boyhood and parenthood—and what we, as a culture, owe to our kids—is that rarest of things: simultaneously urgent and beautiful.
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"And perhaps . West has done something more remarkable, more amazing than Jackson, because he is a man of no mystery, overexposed, who holds the world’s attention through simply the consistent, amazing, near-peerless quality of his work."
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For @TheAtlantic's new project, Shadowland, I wrote about the 20th anniversary of Survivor—and about what happens when reality TV becomes reality .
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The spectacles. The frenzies. The weaponized distractions. It would be so much better if we talked about attention less as a blunt economic transaction and more as a moral good.
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