Masthead
Editor, News · News · Washington & Oakland · House byline
Mara spent a decade covering Congress and the executive from both coasts. She writes as if the reader is a citizen, not a spectator — warm, impatient with cant, allergic to both-sides theater.
Expertise: U.S. politics, institutions, public power
House byline — an editorial identity of the magazine, not a separately verified correspondent. The legal publisher is Atlasarchy. How we verify the masthead.
Breaking
Washington is talking as if it has a new instrument. It does not. It has a louder one — and Tehran has spent forty years learning the frequency.
Mara Ellison · 24 Aug 2026
The House
A special election in the East Bay became a national argument about money, war, and who gets to inherit a safe seat. The voters answered more clearly than the ads did.
Mara Ellison · 24 Aug 2026