Jeffrey Goldberg: Look Who's Blogging

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By Matt Haber

April 29, 2008 | 1:18 p.m

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The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg—who joined the magazine from The New Yorker last year—has started a blog.

His first entry, which features an endearingly retro Public Enemy reference as its title, begins with the self-effacing words, "This is almost certainly a mistake." Well, it can't be as big a mistake as championing the invasion of Iraq relying (according to Harper's Ken Silverstein), "heavily on administration sources and war hawks (and in at least one crucial case, a fabricator)."

In March, Goldberg offered a mea culpa on Slate:

I wanted very much for the liberation of Iraq to succeed, for many reasons. I wasn't sure there was an alternative to Saddam's removal, in part because the sanctions regime was collapsing. I believed that Saddam's nuclear ambitions posed an almost immediate threat to national security. I believed that Saddam was a supporter of terrorism.

For the most part, his inaugural post is long on jokes ("I joined the Atlantic last year, from the New Yorker. Before writing for the New Yorker, I wrote for the New York Times Magazine, and before that, for New York Magazine. I have nearly run out of magazines. I will undoubtedly be ending my career at Cat Fancy...") and backslaps to colleagues like Andrew Sullivan ("himself, responsible for twenty-seven percent of all blog entries ever posted on the Worldwide Web") and James Fallows ("my clear role model... He also seems to be blessedly free of the urge to over-post").

His Atlantic blog is not Mr. Goldberg's first foray into the Web. He has long participated in Slate's TV Club discussions of The Sopranos and The Wire and he is a co-founder of Jews Rock, a Web site devoted to Jewish rock stars from The Beastie Boys to Yo La Tengo.

Update, April 30, 2008: Brothers Gonna Work It Out: Jeffrey Goldberg's latest.