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Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes about the intersection of politics and entertainment for the website and the print magazine. The recipient of a Mirror Award for her writing about the media, she previously worked as a technology reporter for Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab and as a critic for the Columbia Journalism Review. Garber is the co-host of the podcast How to Know What’s Real and the author of the essay collection On Misdirection, which examines the rise of misinformation in American political culture—and the fractures that come when people stop believing, and believing in, common facts.

Garber is currently working on a book examining how entertainment, as both escapism and ideology, is reshaping American culture, politics, and everyday life. Raised in central California, she has also lived in New Jersey, Massachusetts, China, Vietnam, and New York City. She now lives in Washington, DC.

Selected Work

• : An Atlantic cover story that describes what happens when reality blurs with fiction, when boredom comes to feel intolerable, and when everything—our politics, our news, our sense of other people—gives way to entertainment.
• : We are in dire need of earnestness, this essay in The Atlantic suggests. But can our culture meet the moment?
• : An article in The Atlantic about how, in 1985, Neil Postman observed an America imprisoned by its own need for amusement. He was, it turns out, extremely prescient.