Sally Jenkins

This was a great talk. We covered a large swathe of topics. Belichick, the Mannings, news organizations in the tech-social platform revolution, McEnroe...

The AI Boom’s Hidden Risk to the Economy The build-out of artificial-intelligence infrastructure is costing a fortune, straining companies and capital markets.

I've been wondering about this. www.wsj.com/economy/the-...

Well I did it. I edited my profile.

What? That's silly.

Phase 1 of stage separation is complete. Cobra, FSA, pension papers. Email shutdown.

This is the dead truth.

Well you can open up the @theatlantic.com -- I'll be writing about once a week.

So that was my day. How was yours?

Here's the thing about the @theatlantic.com and how it pried me away from my beloved Washington Post. Jeffrey Goldberg is one of those writer-editors who turns out content that reads like it was written by a jewel thief: so sharply etched you feel like it could pop a circle out of a pane of glass.

The other thing about the @theatlantic.com is that it has such a slugger's row of writers and thinkers that you can't help but lift your game and write better in their company. Or at least, that's what I hope, once I get over the sheer terror.

Today, I also said hello to @theatlantic.com -- the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Longfellow, of Henry James and Edith Wharton. And of the legendary golf writer Bernard Darwin, which would have so tickled my father.

And I will be applauding you until my hands hurt.
Love, Sally J.

I see the glimmer of a new Washinton Post – one that moves. It has to be right-sized, and young trees planted, but when the clocks all start chiming at the same time, it will be glorious. I believe that and you should too.

I will so miss the sweat, the adventure, and the unruly carping and bitching that hides our bone-deep devotion to craft, and to this place.

All of which is to say I’m not leaving out of unhappiness. I’m leaving for an opportunity – the only other job I ever coveted in this world, at The Atlantic Monthly. I have a weakness for literary pursuits, and it got me.

Now that’s a job effing well done by this newsroom, and it gives me peace and completion.

That said, can you imagine how gratifying it is to look up and see seated in our sports section the blazingly talented Candace Buckner at one desk, Ava Wallace at another, Chelsea Janes at another, Emily Giambalvo at another, and Bailey Johnson at another?

That’s been an incredible luxury, and I owe every one of them thanks for that, from Michael Wilbon to Jerry Brewer, Adam Kilgore, Barry Svrluga, Dave Sheinin, Rick Maese, right down to young Sam Fortier.

For a lot of that time, I was a woman working in a man’s business. A word about that. I’ve had an army of brothers. I went to every assignment confident that anyone who tried to hassle me, or any of us, would deal with a group of teammates ready to step forward and put that person into a wall.

In 30 years, I’ve not had an unhappy moment in its newsroom; rather, I’ve been outrageously spoiled by its editors and publishers, starting with Don Graham, Ben Bradlee, Len Downie, Liz Spayd and George Solomon right through William Lewis, Matt Murray, Liz Seymour, Jason Murray, and Matt Rennie.

The Washington Post has given me most of what I have in this life, both materially and in pride of purpose. I came to work here at a very unfinished 24 years old, and this place made me. Taught me, chiseled me, formed whatever is good and integral in the work.

When deadline was finally over at 3 a.m., we’d entertain ourselves with a liquored-up singing game Liz Clarke named, “Stupid Guy Anthems.”

So, it’s with a spear in my heart that I separate from you, my adored friends and colleagues.

Every two years, eight or ten of us would ship off to the Olympics in some fine city we rarely saw the lights of, because we were trapped in press pens in stadium tunnels, so closely packed that as my colleague Barry Svrluga says, “It’s like working inside someone’s mouth.”

Me, Jonathan Newton, and Michel Du Cille shared a two double-beds Hampton Inn room where the door wouldn’t lock because the hurricane had ruined the motel’s electronics, and we saw each other in our pajamas and brushed our teeth together.

"Well, can we get someone from the jail to do it?" the mayor asked.

Best quote I ever got.

Earlier in the day after we saw a grand piano in a treetop, we interviewed the Gulfport mayor, who’d resorted to looting because his town was cut off.  He told his police chief to hotwire a truck. The police chief shot back, “I wasn't cut out to be a crook; that's why I went into law enforcement.”

We’d spent the day covering the damage Hurricane Katrina had wrought with a 22-foot wall of water and 160 mph winds, and our dinner was whiskey and fried pickles, and it was good.

Only the people who live their work in a newsroom will understand this: one of the best tastes I ever had was in a Mississippi motel parking lot at 1 a.m. sharing shots of Maker’s Mark, neat, with Washington Post photographers out of a makeshift bar in the back of a rented SUV.

I said farewell to the @washingtonpost.com today, after 30 years. My note to my friends and colleagues, threaded:

A plea to the WNBA commissioner. #wnba #caitlinclark