Ruby, who comes to The Post from Politico Magazine, will helm some of National’s most ambitious long-form stories about the people and movements shaping American politics. We anticipate her character-driven narratives will contain scoops and new insights, expanding the unrivaled coverage of candidates and campaigns from The Post’s Politics and Features staffs.
Ruby’s mission will be to understand and illuminate the forces that propel the most intriguing political figures of our day, reveal their interior lives and the contradictions with how they present themselves to the public, and elucidate the ways they use power.
She has worked for the past year at Politico Magazine as senior staff writer, specializing in short and long profiles of characters famous and unknown from across the political spectrum. She told us about Bill de Blasio’s aimless afternoon walks through Prospect Park, explored Eric Adams’s contradictions and multitudes, and captured Pete Buttigieg wrestling over how much of his true self to show the public in a documentary about his 2020 presidential campaign.
Before working at Politico, Ruby spent nearly nine years at BuzzFeed News, traveling the country to cover the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Her deeply reported and distinctive profiles of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Bernie Sanders in 2020 asked readers to reconsider what they thought they knew about two of the most-covered candidates in modern political history. She is gifted at narrative reconstructions as well, assiduously chronicling the collapse of the 2020 Iowa caucuses and the end of the Sanders campaign. Along the way, Ruby witnessed Bill Clinton picking a fight with a 24-year-old Sanders voter at a restaurant in Santa Fe, N.M., and illuminated the grief that politics can create when she introduced us to the 30-year-old Clinton staffer who processed Hillary Clinton’s mail, including from thousands of strangers after her defeat to Donald Trump.
Ruby started out in journalism as a fact-checker at the CBS Evening News and a research assistant for the late author Michael Hastings.
Ruby’s first day will be June 6.