America at 250

Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic and the moderator of Washington Week with The Atlantic on PBS. He joined The Atlantic in 2007 as a national correspondent and in 2016 was named the fifteenth editor in chief since the magazine’s founding in 1857. Under his leadership, The Atlantic has won the first Pulitzer Prizes in its history, and for the last three years in a row received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the industry’s top honor. Goldberg is the recipient of numerous awards, including Adweek’s 2020 editor of the year. A former fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, he also served as a public-policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and as the distinguished visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Goldberg is the author of two books, Prisoners: a Story of Friendship and Terror (2008), and On Heroism: McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump (2024).

Wolfgang Krach began his career at the Donaukurier in Ingolstadt, initially as an editorial trainee and then as a city hall reporter. He studied philosophy at the Munich College of Philosophy/Philosophical Faculty. After freelancing for news agencies including ddp, AP, Reuters, and dpa, he returned to the Donaukurier, where he reported from 1989-92 from Munich as a state politics correspondent. In 1993, he moved to the German Politics section of Stern magazine, and in 1997 to the news magazine Der Spiegel. He initially served as the magazine’s Bavaria correspondent, then as the deputy head of the Berlin bureau, before taking over as head of the Germany desk at Spiegel headquarters in Hamburg. In 2003, Krach joined the Süddeutsche Zeitung as managing editor and head of the news desk. In 2007, he was appointed to the editorial board, initially as deputy editor-in-chief. Since April 1, 2015, he has been editor-in-chief of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, serving jointly with Judith Wittwer since July 2020.

George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of 10 books, including The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (a winner of the 2013 National Book Award); Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (the winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize); Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal; and The Emergency, a novel coming out in November 2025. Before joining The Atlantic in 2018, he was a staff writer at The New Yorker for 15 years. He writes about American politics and culture and U.S. foreign policy.

Before Andrian Kreyetook over the arts and culture section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, in 2007, he worked as a journalist in New York for many years. Prior, he co-founded the magazine Tempo. Since 2020, he has been a senior editor and writer at the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He has received several awards for his work, including the Theodor Wolff Prize, German Jazz Prize, and George F. Kennan Award for German-American commentary. He is also the author of several books.

Daniel Benjamin, president of the American Academy in Berlin since 2020, previously served as director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, special envoy and counterterrorism coordinator at the US State Department, and was on the staff of the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. He began his career as Germany bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal and Germany correspondent for TIME.