Gal Beckerman is an author and a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Before coming over to The Atlantic, whose books section he also ran, Gal was an editor at the New York Times Book Review for six years. He also served as the opinion editor at the Forward newspaper and a staff editor and writer at the Columbia Journalism Review. His writing has appeared in a number of places over the years, including the Washington Post, The New Republic and Bookforum.

His previous books include The Quiet Before, which was a New York Times Notable pick in 2022, and When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone, which won two major book awards and was chosen as a book of the year by The New Yorker and the Washington Post.

Gal grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from Reed College. He holds a PhD in media studies from Columbia University.

Over the years he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, lived in Berlin as a German Chancellor Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and broke his arm almost in half while biking across France.  

Gal now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.