rom the New York Times:

Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Leaving The Atlantic

By Jacey Fortin

July 20, 2018

Ta-Nehisi Coates, among the most influential intellectuals and writers in the United States, is leaving his position as a national correspondent for The Atlantic after a decade with the magazine, its top editor said Friday.

Mr. Coates, 42, gained a wide readership during his time at The Atlantic, where he published sweeping, painstakingly reported essays about systemic racism and white supremacy in the United States.

Mr. Coates, who was hired at The Atlantic in 2008, has written about a range of issues including politics, poverty, the Confederate battle flag, health care and his own name. …

He has written about the black people who were killed by their neighbors, the police or perfect strangers during those years — including Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Renisha McBride — and about an old friend of his, Prince Jones, who was killed by the police in 2000.

But his best-known pieces for the magazine are his long, deeply reported essays about racial injustice …

Mr. Coates did not respond immediately to a request for comment on Friday, but he told Erik Wemple of The Washington Post that his public prominence was a factor in his decision to step down. …

Mr. Coates also left Twitter recently, after he was publicly criticized by the Harvard philosopher and civil rights activist Cornel West, who called him “the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle.”

Outside of his work at The Atlantic, Mr. Coates’s books have won critical acclaim. “Between the World and Me,” which was written as a letter to his son and mined the experience of being black in America (and, briefly, in France), was hailed by Toni Morrison and won the National Book Award in 2015. …

In 2015, he received what is known as a genius grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

In recent years Mr. Coates, a Marvel Comics fan, has been writing Black Panther and Captain America comics.