Ms. Hulbert started her career at The New Republic, where she spent sixteen years and wrote Slate's "Sandbox" column. She is currently studying community college reform at a Columbia's J-School, where she is a Spencer Fellow. When the semester ends in June, Ms. Hulbert will join The Atlantic staff in Washington full time. Until then, she will pitch to the magazine.

"Ann has deep and impressive experience tilling books and culture terrain, in print and online," Atlantic editor in chief James Bennet said in an announcement. "We’ll welcome her properly when she actually arrives, but wanted to share the good news in the meantime."

Ms. Hulbert comes to The Atlantic with an impressive list of writing credits: she has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, and the Times Literary Suplement. She has also written two books: The Interior Castle, a biography of writer Jean Stafford and Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children. She is currently now finishing a third book about child prodigies.

Nobody is going to fire him anymore.

Ta-Nehisi Coates.

At 37, Mr. Coates is the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States. His Atlantic essays, guest columns for The New York Times and blog posts are defined by a distinct blend of eloquence, authenticity and nuance. And he has been picking up fans in very high places.

Fans like Rachel Maddow, who tweeted: “Don’t know, if in US commentary, there is a more beautiful writer than Ta-Nehisi Coates.” The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg described him as “one of the most elegant and sharp observers of race in America,” when announcing that Mr. Coates had won the 2012 prize for commentary from The Sidney Hillman Foundation. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who recently hosted a book reading at MIT with Mr. Coates, a visiting professor at the school, said that “he is as fine a nonfiction writer as anyone working today.”

Without a Ph.D., Mr. Coates is an uncommon visiting professor at MIT. In fact, he doesn’t even have a college degree, having dropped out of Howard University, failing both British and American literature. Before that, he failed 11th-grade English.

“If you had told me he would be a big deal, I would have said, ‘Get real,’” said Times media critic David Carr. Mr. Coates’s first writing gig was at the Washington City Paper, where Mr. Carr was his editor. “He needed work. He was not a great speller. He wasn’t terrific with names. And he wasn’t all that ambitious.”

Indeed, it was an inauspicious beginning.

The article that launched Mr. Coates toward stardom, his first for The Atlantic, came on the heels of his departure from Time. In that piece, “This Is How We Lost to the White Man,” Mr. Coates situated Bill Cosby’s attention-getting criticisms of black men within the tradition of African-American self-help conservatism championed by Booker T. Washington.

Published in 2008, the article was well-received and eventually included in the collection Best African American Essays 2010. And yet, it almost was never printed. Mr. Coates had started working on the piece the previous year, when he was at Time, and it was rejected by several publications before Mr. Coates asked Mr. Carr if he knew of a home for it. The Atlantic editor James Bennet was receptive.

“I’m very grateful to both those guys,” said Mr. Coates, who was inked to a blog deal by The Atlantic soon after the article came out, “but it shows the power of that networking. I couldn’t help notice that it was one well-placed white dude talking to another well-placed white dude to get it published.”

Ideas about race and racial identity have always been with Mr. Coates. He was introduced to the writing world by his father, a former Black Panther and Vietnam vet who ran an Afrocentric publishing house out of the family’s home in West Baltimore. “I was surrounded by books and ideas. We literally had the machinery for creating books in our basement,” said Mr. Coates, who is tall but carries himself casually. (In his Atlantic author photo, he sports thick black-framed glasses and a driving cap, which is what he wore on the day we met as well.)

The printing press existed alongside the geek paraphernalia that Mr. Coates constantly mentions in his writing—video games, comic books and Dungeons & Dragons are among his obsessions. Mr. Coates’s writings are also filled with anecdotes and lessons extracted from his time spent in an urban reality most American journalists know only from watching season four of The Wire (which was actually filmed at Mr. Coates’s old school, William H. Lemmel Middle). In this way, he finds relevant insights into debates that are mere abstraction for so many other pundits.

Of course, growing up in difficult circumstances doesn’t inherently confer wisdom. In another writer’s hands, the constant invocation of childhood adversity would seem like a ham-handed attempt to assert credibility. But Mr. Coates’s talent is a lottery-ticket-rare ability to both reveal his personal life and seem extraordinarily humble. He also has a disarming habit of smiling as he speaks.

Once, when confronted by the conservative Daily News columnist John McWhorter about something mean-spirited Mr. Coates had written about him, Mr. Coates immediately apologized, saying, “It was tremendously unkind.”

Mr. McWhorter was taken aback by the honesty. “I wasn’t expecting that,” he admitted.

And while it must be said that Mr. Coates’s memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, fails in pulling off the delicate balance between remembrance and braggadocio, the book does advance a theme that has underscored much of his work—that the dismissal of hip-hop as merely “a symbol of the decline of the West if ever there was one,” as the National Review recently argued, is only a subtler form of the same lazy ignorance that runs through centuries of racist stereotypes of young black men.

“I learned about writing from hip-hop,” he said. “More than any books I’ve ever read, hip-hop’s use of language and sense of geography influenced me—there is something about the condensed space that music forces you into.”

Nelson Fernandez, Jim Fallows, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

But he is no music critic. Mr. Coates’s writing about hip-hop is normally a segue into his main subject: race. In a February Times column, he suggested the White House study the rapper Kendrick Lamar’s new album as a way to understand the effects of gun violence, among the most unlikely public policy proposals of recent years. But Mr. Coates bristles at suggestions that race is his beat. “I think I write about America, and about things that interest me,” he told The Observer.

When The Village Voice asked Mr. Coates to write a column about black men, he objected. “The moment you put that upon yourself—‘black correspondent’—that’s always with you, you never get rid of that,” he said.

Still, racial issues are what Mr. Coates writes about most, and what he is best known for. Everything Mr. Coates has written for The Atlantic’s print magazine, for which he serves as senior editor, has regarded race in one form or another.

Perhaps his best-known piece is a 10,000-word article called “Fear of a Black President,” about Barack Obama’s inability to mention race without alienating white voters. It snakes through the importance of Mr. Obama’s presidency for African-Americans while showing the limitations of that achievement. The article “had the kind of impact for which magazines hunger,” wrote a blogger at Harvard’s Neiman Foundation.

For Mr. Coates, the job of the writer, even the pundit, is not to persuade. “The job of the writer should be one of humility, I think, one of being ignorant and learning—not to stand up and pretend to know everything,” he said. “I’m not a consultant or a race expert.”

Indeed, Mr. Coates is particularly anxious about being seen as some kind of black spokesman. And even Stephen Colbert poked fun at this idea when, in January, Mr. Coates appeared on The Colbert Report and the host asked him: “Are you guys still all excited about this first black president thing, or have you gotten over that?”

Mr. Coates says he is uninspired by the emails he receives telling him how his writing has helped someone win an argument. “That ain’t my burden. I don’t write to help others with their racism, and I’m not here to educate you,” he said. “I’m here to be insanely curious.”

It’s not hard to see how Mr. Coates’s sphere of influence has grown along with his outsized online community. Some even say he has redefined the blogging form. “There’s really nobody else who does what he does, in terms of creating a community of people around his blog,” said Mr. Carr. “He does a ton of moderating that blog and putting in time with it, and it’s become a self-policing community, which is really remarkable. He goes where he wants to go, and the community goes along with him.”

According to Natalie Raabe, communications director for The Atlantic, it has “by far the most engaged community in our comments section.”

If Mr. Coates is notable for popping into his own comments section to praise or criticize posters, it’s because he has a distinct vision of blogging. “It is its own space; it’s not the entire web—there are plenty of places to go if you want to do other things,” he said. He gestures to the establishment we’re in. “This is an individual place—if you started yelling in here or screaming that they need to be serving chicken if they don’t want to, they’d kick you out. They have the right to be their own spot.”

And yet the blog might end soon. “Managing a community is tough,” Mr. Coates admitted, adding that he’d like to be able to just be a fan of things without feeling the need to constantly comment. “I’m leery of talking too much—I feel like I need to sit with an idea for a year or two if I want. Isn’t that what a writer’s supposed to do?”

Mr. Coates is currently finishing a novel on the Underground Railroad and will soon be submitting to a publisher a book of essays about the Civil War, a subject he has been infatuated with on his blog for five years.

And blog or no blog, Mr. Coates is likely staying at The Atlantic. The Times asked him to become a regular columnist, but Mr. Coates rejected the most coveted real estate in American journalism. He would not comment on the matter, but recently wrote on his blog about the difficulties of writing a twice-a-week Times op-ed column. He suggested that he would be taxed writing so frequently at such length, and feared his writing would suffer.

“I won’t go so far as to say I’d fail,” he wrote. “But I strongly suspect that the same people who were convinced this would be a perfect marriage, would—inside of a year—be tweeting, ‘Remember when that dude could actually write?’” Of course, that humility is exactly what makes readers want to see Mr. Coates on the op-ed page twice a week. The fact is, wherever he writes next, the man has arrived.

"Please join us in welcoming your new colleagues and congratulating your newly promoted ones," said the memo, which was obtained by Capital New York. "And while you're at it, take a bow yourselves, for a month in which we shipped an awesome issue and set a new record for our total audience across our three sites."

David Graham, who has been an associate editor at TheAtlantic.com since he came over from Newsweek in late 2011, will become the politics editor for the site. Mr. Graham will take the reins from Garance Franke-Ruta, who is moving over to become a full-time politics writer.

Olga Khazan is coming over from The Washington Post to edit the Global Channel for TheAtlantic.com. Ms. Khazan was a reporter for the Post’s World section.

Elisa Glass will be the magazine's art director. Ms. Glass was the art director at Northern Virginia magazine. According to the memo, which notes that she won't get too stressed out in her new role since she is a certified yoga instructor, Ms. Glass "will be involved in all aspects of design for The Atlantic, from the look of our digital properties (websites, mobile apps, e-books, etc) to the design of the Dispatches and Culture File sections of the magazine."

And last week, the memo adds, former editorial fellow Esther Yi returned to the magazine as an associate editor.

Screenshot via Eric Wemple.

The Atlantic has issued an apology for the pro-Scientology sponsored content that ran on their site yesterday. The advertorial, which has since been pulled from the Atlantic site, drew Internet criticism.

"David Miscavige Leads Scientology to Milestone Year," the headline read. The promotional piece appeared to be an article on the site but for the unabashed pro-Scientology tone and the yellow slug alerting the reader that the post was, indeed, sponsored content.  

"2012 was a milestone year for Scientology, with the religion expanding to more than 10,000 Churches, Missions and affiliated groups, spanning 167 nations — figures that represent a growth rate 20 times that of a decade ago," the post read. The comments were no less biased.

"We now realize that as we explored new forms of digital advertising, we failed to update the policies that must govern the decisions we make along the way," The Atlantic posted today. "It's safe to say that we are thinking a lot more about these policies after running this ad than we did beforehand. In the meantime, we have decided to withdraw the ad until we figure all of this out."

The post has sparked a debate--not just at The Atlantic but also over Twitter and the blogosphere--about the nature of sponsored posts.

The Atlantic's full apology:

Regarding an advertisement from the Church of Scientology that appeared on TheAtlantic.com on January 14:

We screwed up. It shouldn't have taken a wave of constructive criticism — but it has — to alert us that we've made a mistake, possibly several mistakes. We now realize that as we explored new forms of digital advertising, we failed to update the policies that must govern the decisions we make along the way.  It's safe to say that we are thinking a lot more about these policies after running this ad than we did beforehand. In the meantime, we have decided to withdraw the ad until we figure all of this out.  We remain committed to and enthusiastic about innovation in digital advertising, but acknowledge—sheepishly—that we got ahead of ourselves.  We are sorry, and we're working very hard to put things right.

Hanna Rosin

“Last night we did a version of this where we walked down the aisle!” said Atlantic senior editor Hanna Rosin at the beginning of a debate last Wednesday at the Maritime Hotel, on occasion of the publication of her book, The End of Men. “It was like our wedding!”

She had just come onstage along with an unlikely interlocutor: her husband David Plotz, the editor of Slate. The couple were conducting a road show of sorts to debate whether or not the male gender was less nimble in the current economy, they appeared together in Washington the night before and were scheduled to appear on Today together on Thursday. The sell—woman declares male gender dead (or, at least, her book jacket does), and here’s her loving husband!—was irresistible, and the pair played it up at the Maritime reading. Mr. Plotz referred to himself, early in the evening, as “Mr. Rosin,” and instructed his debate partner, “You need to stay on mic, sweetie. Just hold it! It’s very simple.”

For her part, Ms. Rosin bristled good-naturedly at a tough question, saying “It’s weird! Because you’re my husband! And you’re Charlie Rose-ing me!”

Not every viewer was entranced, however. We noticed New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren, who excerpted The End of Men for a recent, characteristically splashy cover spread in his publication. The editor spent much of the speech whispering loudly to one male and one female friend.

“Do you like my boots?” Mr. Lindgren asked his male friend, pulling up the leg of his trousers to peacock.

“Yeah! Do you like mine?” asked his male friend, as Ms. Rosin spoke.

The debate was won by Ms. Rosin, but by then Mr. Lindgren was already gone.

Can you have it all?

I don’t think anyone would mistake me for Marissa Mayer—the newly-appointed 37-year-old CEO of Yahoo who’s raising hackles all over town with her very public promise to return to work two weeks after delivering her first baby. For one thing, I am not a blonde (it wouldn’t be a good look for me, seeing as I am the approximate color of tracing paper and hirsute enough that old Russian women speak to me on the subway in their native tongue). Also, no one has ever wanted to make me the CEO of anything, ever. I think it has something to do with the fact that when you run my credit score, instead of a number, you get a slot machine tableau in which three skulls-and-crossbones roll into a line and then start laughing hysterically. But I digress.

I’m also unlike Mayer in that I didn’t publicly vow to return to work after two weeks. Or six weeks. Or even three months. Instead, once I’d used up most of my maternity leave, I asked for more time to stay home with my baby, and I got it. And then my editor and I decided that it would be mutually beneficial for me to start this column instead of returning to my former post as managing editor. The truth is, I didn’t want to go back to a full-time job. I wanted to freelance and stay home—to be, in the acronymic shorthand of mommy bloggers, a WAHM, or work-at-home mom. It may sound like a dyslexic George Michael cover band, but it’s my choice, and so far I’m happy with it.

The question of whether to return to the office after having babies—another cultural Seussian Butter Battle that rages on with no détente in sight—has been around as long as women have been in the work force, and it’s come to the fore again lately, with Mayer’s public vow to continue to work through her (very short) maternity leave arriving on the spiked heels of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s controversial Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” If Slaughter’s thesis—that a high-powered career can only come with at least some cost to your children’s emotional needs—seemed depressing, Mayer’s appointment should have been an uplifting, knocked-up Cinderella story of a retort. After all, look! It’s a pregnant woman—fecund and famished and and chock full of crazy hormones—running a Fortune 500 company! She can have her baby and leave it with a nanny, too! If she doesn’t have it all, then who does?

Mayer’s hiring is unquestionably good news for women looking to climb the corporate ladder. But her eschewing anything approaching a reasonable maternity leave doesn’t set a great precedent. It seems to suggest that recovering from childbirth is some sort of vacation—an indulgent postpartum Shangri-La of beatific repose and the triumphant consumption of alcohol, sushi and other luxury items on the pregnancy prohibition list—that ambitious women really should be able to go without. I wish we lived in a society where it was as acceptable for a high-powered career woman to take a full three-month maternity leave without apology as it is for a high-powered career man to spend the entire month of August on golf courses in the Hamptons.

Most women I know—who are of course not nearly as high-profile as Mayer—already feel pressure to bounce back, as if they’d had all that time “off” to simply rest and recuperate. But anyone who’s had a baby knows that time spent with a newborn is not time off. It’s not like say, getting a gallbladder or appendix removed (I’ve never had either surgery, but from my understanding, neither organ is capable of screaming in the night, demanding to be fed, once it leaves the body). Instead, it’s a sink-or-swim period of training in which you are forced to be “on” all the time—a 24-hour nanny, personal chef, chauffeur, maid, court jester, teacher, tour guide, body guard, punching bag and feedlot to a miniature boss who, if left to his own devices, would surely perish, or at least urinate unwittingly on his own face.

That’s maternity leave in practice. In theory, it should serve the dual purpose of allowing a mother to heal after the decidedly taxing exercise of labor, while also giving her time to bond with her baby and catch up on her DVR queue while she waits for her nipples to stop leaking. The catch is that no one knows exactly how much time should be allotted for these activities, so governments decide ... and as with erectile dysfunction medication, results may vary.

In Austria, to use an extreme example, new parents receive a collective two years of paid parental leave. In America, the Family Medical Leave Act entitles new parents to up to 12 weeks without fear of losing their jobs, but none of that time is legally required to be compensated. Some companies offer the option for longer leaves—a woman I know who’s a junior associate at a major law firm got six months—but most don’t. (In the interest of full disclosure, I took unpaid FMLA leave from The Observer, and when I didn’t return after 12 weeks, my medical benefits automatically expired.)

I’m inclined to doubt that Yahoo’s official benefits package includes a clause ordering new mothers to fire up their BlackBerrys while waiting for the afterbirth to pass, so Mayer’s decision is probably a personal one, meant to reassure shareholders that she will only take her hands off the wheel for the half day or so it takes her to extrude another human being from her body. More power to her if this is what she truly wants. But I can’t know. Neither will she, until she pops that kid out. That’s why parental leaves are so important—they allow time to adjust to a completely different life, one in which, while  your day job may still be waiting in the wings, you’re busy learning the ropes to a frightening and powerful new position you are probably (mentally, if not biologically) totally unqualified for.

Hell, I’m 10 months in and I still don’t know anything. Except that I wish I lived in Austria. If not for the healthcare, then at least for the pastries.

editorial@observer.com

Jonah Peretti's Sandwich Recipes: Buzzfeed's launching a food vertical. It's being led by BonAppetit.com online editor Emily Fleischaker. There are going to be original recipes, which is good, because don't compiled lists of things that already exist make up a fifth of Buzzfeed's traffic? The only difference is, with the food vertical, You, The Reader get to steal borrow the ingredients from Reddit. Funtimes. [Grub Street]

Things to Print Out for Your Au Pair: The Atlantic is launching a vertical too. Hooray! Another vertical! This one is called THE SEXES and we know this because they're looking for an editor for it. As they describe it:

The Atlantic is looking for an editor to oversee a new channel on its website devoted to the intersection of work and family. Regular areas of coverage include work-life balance, parenting, gender issues, and family economics – with a special focus on how women are navigating their careers as they juggle roles of mother, daughter, and wife.

Note that one of your job duties will be "crafting headlines that can work in both social and SEO contexts." No mention of headlines that don't do anything but convey information accurately, because, let's face it, those barely exist anymore. [Atlantic Media Group]

Nate Freeman To Save New York Daily News: Former New York Observer alumnus, ArtInfo reporter, media power bachelor and softball no-show Nate Freeman is part of the New York Daily News' new gossip team that's being assembled in light of Frank DiGiacomo's departure. Former Post writer Brian Niemietz is there along with some lady who went unnamed in Capital New York's report on the matter. We hear that Colin Myler himself is behind the changes and reorganization of the gossip beat, which would make sense, because we know Nate Freeman as, quite frankly, the only thing that could ever save the New York Daily News from the kind of circumstantial peril that a daily tabloid newspaper faces in 2012, especially one helmed by the guy whose last gig involved the Concordia-like disaster that was the end of News of the World. Did we mention Nate Freeman is going to save the New York Daily News? He also didn't show up for our softball game on Friday as promised. Congratulations New York Daily News on your trusty new hire. [Capital New York]

Nice Crack: Sports Illustrated and Wall Street Journal contributor Stephanie Wei called Akron, Ohio, the "arsehole" of America in a tweet. So a local Akron reporter called her up about it. [Romenesko]

Old Flames Burn Hard: Jay Carney doesn't like Drudge Report. So, he's got that going for him. [Washington Examiner]

Know who the new Daily News hire who isn't Nate Freeman is? Tips? Sophomore-year poetry? Media Bachelor nominees? Send 'em here.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Mr. Bowden at Tribeca Film Festival in 2003.

In a bit of holiday-appropriate news, The Atlantic national correspondent Mark Bowden has sold a book about the death of Osama Bin Laden to Morgan Entrekin at Grove/Atlantic, reports Publishers Marketplace. The book, to be published in October 2012, is "an account of the Bin Laden strike written in Bowden's signature 'you are there' style, going inside the war room as decisions were made and onto the ground as directives were executed." It's titled The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden.

The Finish seems ripe for cinematic adaptation—as Mr. Bowden's career-making book, Black Hawk Down, was—but any movie version would likely have to compete with The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal's film on the same subject.

Their adaptation of President Obama's greatest military victory, due out in December, has been the source of political controversy since Rep. Peter King alleged that the White House gave the filmmakers access to classified information. Documents obtained by Judicial Watch in May showed that the filmmakers were given access to a member of the U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 and the C.I.A. Vault.

Here's hoping Mr. Bowden's been treated with similar hospitality.

Bring your baby to work day (The Atlantic)

The Atlantic, your home for ladies complaining about how hard it is being ladies (We kid! Sort of!) had a polarizing essay this week by Anne-Marie Slaughter, entitled "Why Women Still Can’t Have It All." Only seven months after Kate Bolick taught all us females that we didn't have to settle for second best in the marriage department, we're now getting the flip side of the coin: apparently it doesn't matter how great our significant others are, because if you try to have a career and a kid in this economy, you'll find yourself miserably torn between the two. And then you'll chose your kids. Obviously.

Originally, we thought the simple solution would be to wait until your career goals are met until procreating, but as that New York cover story taught us, this  is probably an unhealthy excuse for desperate old people. (It also makes for way grosser images than a hot MILF breastfeeding her overgrown son.)

While Ms. Slaughter's article has some  critics bristling at the assumption that "having it all" automatically include wet-naps and progeny, or that men don't face the exact same issues when they spawn (or even the implied white privilege that comes from the phrase "having it all"), the significance of the article goes much deeper than "work vs. children." Women still have to claw their way up to the same level of respect as men in the workplace, and gGd forbid they show any weakness or stop raising their hands in meetings, as Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg cautions against expectant mothers. Eventually, all women will have to quit their jobs at the White House to take care of their children and write a book about it, a la Mary Matalin, whose Midlife Crisis at 30  is quoted in The Atlantic article:

I finally asked myself, “Who needs me more?” And that’s when I realized, it’s somebody else’s turn to do this job. I’m indispensable to my kids, but I’m not close to indispensable to the White House.

As Ms. Matalin's job title included "President Bush’s assistant and Vice President Cheney’s counselor," we are inclined to agree with her decision. But besides our slight qualms with the piece (i.e. Why do most of the women quoted work in government, as if that was the only territory a woman can really make her mark? Just look at how Katie Rosman is balancing her life!), perhaps the best illustration of Ms. Slaughter's 12320-word uphill battle comes courtesy of The Atlantic's comment section.

Yes, this is the very first comment on the piece, which now has generated over 50k Facebook "Likes" in under 24 hours.

Women will never have it all, it appears, until they learn how to copy-edit their own damn work. Go back to filing school, Joan! You'll never make partner!

Might as well just give up now and start having babies...at least that way we can cash in on our book deal.

He wrote:

"The main way I discover information is my Twitter feed and my Facebook news feed. One of the interesting things about this Media Diet column is if people were honest, I think they would give more credit to Facebook and Twitter, which can mean totally different things depending on who you are. But social is the new starting point."

Of course, it's in his best interest to promote the notion that our social media feeds now dictate our reading habits—it's the whole idea behind BuzzFeed. (As each of his hires has dutifully reminded us.) In fact, taken as a whole, his media diet served to explain why and how he had to create BuzzFeed.

Mr. Peretti explained that he decided to hire Ben Smith and make the site a home for bipartisan, scoop-driven reporting because he was burned out by the opinion-mongering at the Huffington Post.

"I started to get fatigued by partisan journalism and partisan reporting and columnists who have to be controversial: This is wrong, this is right. Being in the belly of the beast at HuffPo drained me."

He also rehashed that Parisian cafe defense of BuzzFeed's animal photos.