Before Susan Glasser became a weekly interpreter of Washington, she was a teenager watching a very local experiment in political journalism. After her first year at Harvard, she interned at Roll Call, then a Capitol Hill community paper being refashioned into a place that could break news for the people who worked under the dome. The idea sounds ordinary now: find a defined audience, understand what it needs, and serve it with speed and specificity. In the late 1980s, it felt like a glimpse of the future.
Glasser stayed. The internship became eight years at Roll Call, and the intern eventually became the editor. It is tempting to read the progression as a tidy opening chapter. Her career is less tidy and more useful than that. Reporting taught her how power speaks; editing taught her how information acquires shape; foreign correspondence taught her that Washington is not the only capital with habits worth comparing.
The consistent subject is not a party, office, or election. It is power under pressure. Who consolidates it, who yields it, which institutions hold, and which convenient phrases begin to disguise a change already under way?
A newsroom education in real time
Glasser arrived at The Washington Post in 1998, one week before the investigation surrounding President Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky became the consuming story of the capital. She was a deputy national editor for investigations. Peter Baker was a junior White House reporter assigned to the court cases around Clinton. They also happened to live a few hundred yards apart.
Years later, Glasser would offer the episode a characteristically dry verdict: she and Baker like to say they were the good thing that came out of the scandal. They married in 2000. The line lands because it compresses a Washington epic into a private origin story, and because their lives since have braided independent reporting careers with a durable writing partnership.
We like to say we're the only good thing that came out of the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal in Washington.Susan Glasser, recalling how she met Peter Baker
At the Post, Glasser edited national news and the Sunday Outlook section, helped oversee Clinton impeachment coverage, reported on money and politics, and moved overseas. She and Baker served as Moscow co-bureau chiefs from 2001 to 2005. The posting supplied more than a dateline. They watched the early Vladimir Putin years at close range as authority gathered in the Kremlin and independent media came under pressure.
The first gunfire
After September 11, correspondents based in Moscow were dispatched toward Afghanistan. Geography made the decision seem obvious, although Glasser has joked that it took the bureau about a day to look at the map. The reality was less glib. Raised in suburban Montclair, New Jersey, she had never heard a gun fired until she covered the Battle of Tora Bora.
She entered Afghanistan under the protection of a warlord after journalists had been killed on the same route from Peshawar. When she reached a hotel in Jalalabad, anti-Taliban commanders arrived in the lobby and announced the opening of the battle. The trip to the White Mountains took hours across terrain with barely a road. Glasser later called the experience terrifying. Then she supplied the reporter's codicil: the hardest assignments are often the most formative.
That experience sits some distance from a Washington column, but it clarifies the seriousness beneath Glasser's wit. Institutions and official statements are not abstractions when you have seen what happens beyond them. The Moscow years also created a comparative habit. A political move in Washington could be considered not only against American precedent but against patterns she had already watched elsewhere.
The editor as product builder
In 2008, Glasser became editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy. The job coincided with a decisive migration from the periodical web to the daily one. The site became a continuous publication, its online readership grew tenfold, and the magazine won three National Magazine Awards during her tenure. This was not simply a matter of putting print articles online. It required changing rhythm, recruiting voices suited to that rhythm, and preserving authority while expanding the aperture.
Politico offered the next experiment. Glasser joined in 2013 to create Politico Magazine. She remembered telling the founders that sharp political thinkers would contribute if the publication built the right platform for them. Their surprise amused her. The opportunity, she said, was irresistible. She later led Politico's newsroom of roughly two hundred journalists through the 2016 election cycle.
Begin with an audience problem. A format earns attention when it helps readers do something they could not do before.
Change the unit of attention. When minutes produce noise, a week can reveal pattern, sequence, and consequence.
Her editing career is a quiet argument against treating editorial work as mere taste. It is closer to product design. Roll Call served the Capitol Hill village. Foreign Policy learned to publish for the daily web. Politico Magazine created a home for ambitious political writing inside a fast newsroom. Each project began by identifying what a particular group of readers lacked.
A weekly defense against forgetting
Glasser began her New Yorker column in the spring of 2018. The title has changed with administrations, but its structure has endured: a letter from Washington at the end of a week that might otherwise become a heap of alerts. She has explained the premise plainly. By Thursday or Friday, it had become hard to remember the extraordinary thing that happened Monday or Tuesday.
The column makes memory part of the reporting method. It slows the feed just enough to recover sequence. For a writer preoccupied with how democratic institutions bend, sequence matters. Pressure rarely announces itself as a completed transformation. It arrives as a series of episodes, each presented as singular, temporary, or too noisy to place beside the last.
If you can't name a problem and understand in pretty unsparing terms what it is, then you're definitely not going to be able to fix it.Susan Glasser on looking directly at institutional problems
Glasser also hosts conversations on The New Yorker's Political Scene podcast. The medium changes the texture. A column can make an argument with the door closed; a roundtable exposes the testing process. With colleagues and guests, she examines the campaign message, the presidential performance, the foreign-policy turn, or the strain on Congress. The result is not a pundit's floating certainty. It sounds like reporters comparing notes at the end of an unusually long week.
In 2025, she returned to Harvard as a resident fellow at the Institute of Politics. The symmetry is appealing. As an undergraduate, she served as managing editor of The Harvard Crimson and won a Hoopes Prize for a thesis about amicus briefs, outside expertise, and Supreme Court decision-making. Decades later, she came back to engage with students while working on a fourth book.
History at the dinner table
Glasser and Baker have written three books together: Kremlin Rising, about Putin's Russia; The Man Who Ran Washington, a biography of James A. Baker III; and The Divider, an account of Donald Trump's first presidency. The subjects suggest an extended inquiry into the uses of power, but the collaboration is also a feat of domestic logistics. Two seasoned reporters must turn interviews, archives, memories, and interpretations into one narrative voice.
There is another Glasser reading habit, far from briefing books. She has long escaped into food magazines and old cookbooks, sometimes reading one over a bowl of cereal. She talks with real enthusiasm about an Ina Garten roast chicken recipe, amended with a few tweaks, that makes it easy to invite someone to dinner. The detail is funny because it is so ordinary. It also fits. Recipes care about order. Editors care about order. Political history becomes intelligible when someone notices what happened first.
Her career now spans the old Capitol Hill weekly, a metropolitan newspaper at full institutional weight, the early daily web, the political startup, the legacy magazine, books, television analysis, and podcasts. It has not produced a single trick for understanding power. It has produced a set of habits: compare places, preserve sequence, question euphemism, build for a real reader, and keep looking after the room has decided it would rather change the subject.
Glasser has described her weekly writing as an act of bearing witness for people who would reasonably prefer to live their lives. That may be the cleanest statement of her present ambition. Attention is work. She has made a career of doing it in public, then returning at week's end with the notes arranged.