Gal Beckerman
Staff Writer at The Atlantic
Staff writer at @TheAtlantic, formerly @nytimesbooks, and author, most recently, of "The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas."
Articles
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2 weeks ago |
theatlantic.com | Gal Beckerman
On my first weekend living in Paris, I decided I had to learn how to smoke, and quickly. I sat in the dismal studio apartment I shared with a roommate and lit up Gauloise after Gauloise until my face turned a shade of chartreuse. I was an exchange student in the mid-’90s, and this was the intensity I applied to most activities that held the possibility of transforming me into the person I wanted to be. Parisians smoked, and if I aspired to be a Parisian, which I desperately did, then I would smoke.
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3 weeks ago |
theatlantic.com | Gal Beckerman
In recent years, an impressive number of particularly charming actors have played rabbis on TV. Adam Brody, Sarah Sherman, Daveed Diggs, and Kathryn Hahn have all donned a kippah, wrapped themselves in a tallis, and shown how fun loving (even sexy) it can feel to carve a path between the rock of tradition and the hard place of modernity. I’m not sure why progressive rabbis are the clerics to whom pop culture tends to assign this role, as opposed to, say, quirky priests or wacky imams.
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3 weeks ago |
flipboard.com | Gal Beckerman
4 days agoA close reading of all the rumors about who may or may not be leaving studio 8H before season 51 of SNL. Saturday Night Live’s splashy 50th season has officially come to an end, which means it will likely be the end of the road for some of SNL’s most beloved cast members. The jam-packed season …
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1 month ago |
theatlantic.com | Gal Beckerman
Free speech is forever a matter of perspective. Unless you are an absolutist—and very few true absolutists exist—everyone draws their red lines somewhere, whether it’s at racist epithets or yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater when nothing is actually burning. But the concept becomes completely meaningless unless it allows for the hearing of ideas that one group or another is bound to find abhorrent.
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1 month ago |
flipboard.com | Gal Beckerman
NowMonday, May 19, 2025 View in browser By Jade Walker Good news, New Jersey! It appears the transit strike may soon be over, and you’ll once again have access to the nation’s third-largest commuter railroad. Negotiators for New Jersey Transit and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen …
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RT @NikkiJMarks: Why do collaborators do it? In new novel ‘The Director’, Daniel Kehlmann explores “the idea that complicity is not a line…
"He loved sex the way some of his younger contemporaries love recognition or a well-cooked egg at brunch." @Shteyngart on Edmund White https://t.co/X4DFVg1O1L
I wrote about "Reformed," a show that makes dramedy out of the effort to fit religion into a secular world. https://t.co/s31sdVU1Bb