Special Event with The Atlantic in Berlin

America at 250

In 2026, the United States will mark its 250th birthday—a milestone that invites both celebration and reflection. What has the American experiment achieved, and what has it squandered? At a time of intense polarization at home and shifting power abroad, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, and Atlantic staff writers Helen Lewis, George Packer, and Ashley Parker join Daniel Benjamin, president of the American Academy in Berlin, to discuss this current moment in American history and what might be next. 

Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic and the moderator of Washington Week with The Atlantic on PBS. He joined The Atlantic in 2007 as a national correspondent and in 2016 was named the magazine’s the fifteenth editor in chief. Before joining The Atlantic, Goldberg served as the Middle East correspondent and then the Washington correspondent for the New Yorker. Earlier in his career, he was a writer for the New York Times Magazine and New York magazine. He began his career as a police reporter for the Washington Post. Goldberg is the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror. A former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, he also served as a public-policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and as the distinguished visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of 10 books, including The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (a winner of the 2013 National Book Award); Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (the winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize); Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal; and the novel The Emergency (November 2025). Before joining The Atlantic, in 2018, he was a staff writer at the New Yorker for 15 years. Packer writes about American politics and culture and US foreign policy.

Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is the author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights and the host of the BBC’s long-form interview series, The Spark. Her book The Genius Myth was published in June 2025. At The Atlantic, she writes about  the intersection of politics, society, and digital culture.

Ashley Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Previously, Parker—a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner—spent eight years at the Washington Post, where she covered all four years of Donald Trump’s first presidency, was White House bureau chief during President Joe Biden’s first two years, and covered the 2024 presidential campaign as the paper’s senior national political correspondent. Before that, Parker spent more than a decade at the New York Times, where she covered the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns and Congress. She is also a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC.

This event is part of a weeklong series hosted by the American Academy in Berlin and The Atlantic featuring public conversations, private roundtables, and high-level dialogues across Berlin and Munich. Bringing together leading journalists, thinkers, and policymakers from both sides of the Atlantic, this festival will explore urgent issues – from the future of democracy and the rise of autocracy to climate, technology, culture, and the shifting global economy. Set in two of Germany’s most influential cities and timed to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the event offers a vital transatlantic forum for reflection, debate, and fresh thinking at a moment of global transformation.

In cooperation with