Congratulations to Ryan Lizza, who'll be replacing Jeffrey Goldberg as The New Yorker's Washington correspondent. Goldberg was always an odd fit for that job, given his evident distaste for the actual mechanics of American politics. He's much happier promoting disastrous wars and demagoguing Democrats for insufficient levels of hawkery than actually digging into the innards of a campaign. Lizza, by contrast, is a real live political reporter, and he should improve the magazine's political coverage substantially. Goldberg's heading to The Atlantic, where he'll assumedly join Robert Kaplan in writing very long stories about the upsides of American imperialism, and, usefully, they won't have to pretend to actually be about the 2008 Democratic race. By all accounts, Goldberg is very skilled at reporting from the Middle East, as opposed to jamming his opinions on the Middle East into other types of reporting, so these are good moves all around.
