One More Thursday Night: Remembering Tatiana Schlossberg

Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg, TC ’12, defied cliche—and not just because she would say it’s bad writing. A dogged climate journalist, Tatiana cared deeply about the planet and even more about her friends and family. Tatiana died on December 30th, 2025 from complications due to acute myeloid leukemia, leaving behind her husband, George Moran SY ’11, and their two children, Edwin, four, and Josephine, one and a half. 

Tatiana, President John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, came to Yale in 2008 and majored in History. She was the editor-in-chief of The Yale Herald and a member of the all-female sketch comedy group,  Sphincter Troupe, among other extracurriculars. She was funny in-person and on the page. In her off-campus apartment at the Elmhurst, she cooked for friends, danced to perfectly curated playlists, finished her work weeks before anyone else, played games, did The New York Times crossword, and painted with watercolors. 

After graduation, she received a master’s degree in history from the University of Oxford and pursued journalism. She interned at  The Vineyard Gazette in Martha’s Vineyard before taking a job as a municipal reporter at The Record in northern New Jersey. From there, she went to The New York Times, where she would first work on the Metro desk and then cover climate change and the environment. Her work has additionally appeared in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, Bloomberg View, and Yale Environment 360. She published her award-winning book, Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have in 2019. She also wrote a regular newsletter, “Notes from a Changing Planet,” where she explored plastic pollution, forever chemicals, and deep sea mining.  

In 2017, she married George. Together, they had two beautiful children. She loved being a mother and was a fount of parenting wisdom for her friends. Tatiana found out she was sick with a rare and deadly form of cancer shortly after she gave birth to her daughter, an experience she poignantly documented in “A Battle With My Blood,” her heart shattering essay for The New Yorker. In it, she contemplated the future with bravery and mental clarity. 

She wrote: “I won’t write about cytarabine. I won’t find out if we were able to harness the power of the oceans, or if we let them boil and turn into a garbage dump. My son knows that I am a writer and that I write about our planet. Since I’ve been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person.” 

The piece detailed not just her experience with terminal illness, but also took direct aim at the policies of her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy, Secretary of Health and Human Services, and his role in defunding scientific research. As George said in his eulogy for her, Tatiana “did not suffer fools.” 

Below are some remembrances from the people who worked with her, laughed with her, and loved her at The Yale Herald. In Tatiana’s honor, they sent in their submissions long before the deadline.

***

I didn’t come to the Herald because of Tatiana Schlossberg, but I stayed because of her. Our friend Margaret had roped me into writing opinion pieces and I wound up editing them, too. The first semester I was on the editorial board, Tats was one of the managing editors. From the jump, she intimidated me–she was a perfect and hilarious genius, so, duh–but she wound up becoming one of the truest friends I’ve ever had. 

Herald nights were notoriously heinous–you’d be there until the sun came up the next morning–but I would have hung out with her in those disgusting rooms on Crown Street as long as she wanted. Tatiana didn’t identify as “cool,” not by any traditional definition at least, but she was. Hers is the soundtrack of college for me–Rill Rill, Fantasy, Nothing from Nothing, Use Me, Baby I’m Yours, and of course, Bottoms Up. It’s her handwriting that is etched in the margins of article drafts. It’s her taste that I still want to emulate (less stuff is more, stripes are good). 

Tats taught me a lot, but when I really think about it, there’s one lesson that stands out. She showed me that while a sense of humor was important (she had the best one), it was equally important to be earnest about the things you held dear. She cared about her friends and family, about the past, present, and future of this college weekly newspaper, and about our planet. There was never any shame in taking these seriously. Why should there be?

I miss my friend terribly. And I wish that she could be here right now, critiquing everything we write in the following pages. I think I’ll always want to hear what she has to say—after all, she was always right. 

~ Ariel Doctoroff, Editor-in-Chief, Fall 2011

***

To be with Tatiana was to be laughing. She was criminally funny. She had an unbelievable memory, surely to the benefit of her studies but also to the detriment of her friends because she never forgot any embarrassing thing that I or anyone else ever said or did. Conversations with her could be intense, in the best way. It felt like all of her attention channeled into this bright light barreling down on me. She was also impossibly cool and cultured. By the time she got to college she had already been everywhere, seen everything, and read everything, but she managed to convey all of this with curiosity and enthusiasm, not jadedness. 

Tatiana and I lived together for three years, first in Trumbull and then at the Elmhurst, which was crumbling at the time but Google Maps tells me it’s still standing. We’d study together at Sterling when we had a lot to do, or at the Arts & Architecture (A&A) library when we felt like actually getting dressed. She loved sandwiches broadly and Book Trader’s Tempesto specifically. She adored cooking, and almost everything she made was some celebration of tomato, mozzarella, or eggplant (or all three). 

Tatiana was an incredible gift-giver. For some occasion in our first year of friendship, she gave me a little stack of books—each inscribed with a reason she’d chosen it for me. (One of them was Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down). Over the years she’d give me more and more books, all of them somewhat esoteric selections that no one else in my orbit had read but which felt perfectly pitched to me and my interests. 

It was such a gift to feel known by someone so thoughtful and kind and generous. I felt then—and continue to feel—–honored to be her friend.  

~ Julia Lemle, Design and Graphics Spring 2010

***

I had forgotten I met Tatiana through The Yale Herald, partly because the Herald has always functioned like a collective of friends, but mostly because to meet Tatiana is to feel like you’ve known her forever. 

As an editor, Tatiana was supremely competent, a quality that carried over to every aspect of her life. She taught me to kern, to kill widows and orphans, to use the computer to the right or across from the door if I planned to do anything online. She was kind, encouraging, highlighting her favorite line from your otherwise unremarkable article. She knew when to support and when to push, casually dropping by the Arts & Architecture Library after I stopped responding to emails the night my cover story was due.

And she was fun. 305 Crown Street had a bit of a smell; the computers were old, and the hard-drives slow. It was easy to get frustrated, even mean, as Thursday night editing bled into Friday morning, proofing still several hours away. Tatiana never gave into that stress, rather became punchier, funnier, lighter—consciously or intuitively—to counter the pall of 2:00 a.m. New Haven. For her last issue as Editor-in-Chief, she ordered a keg, was the first to take the stand, before dutifully lifting us all up in turn. 

It was 2010, 2011, 2012. She played Drake’s Take Care and Sleigh Bells’ Treats; ran through the halls, pumping her fists, rallying the troops to Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida.” (“Doesn’t this make you wanna FIGHT?”); or, more reverently and on repeat, Beyonce’s “Halo.” In other words: Tatiana hit the Herald like a ray of sun, burning through those darkest nights. 

As a friend, Tatiana was all that and more. The most clear-eyed person I met at Yale, and possibly since, she knew who she was and what she wanted in a way entirely distinct from ambition, from the plans of glory and success, from the curated personas and careful constellations of interests so many of us cling to as college students. It was intoxicating, admirable, and never off-putting. As a 19-year-old and a deeply unsure person, I was always slightly incredulous of her interest in me, but Tatiana had a way of making you feel like you belonged exactly beside her. 

Tatiana was smart, as everyone knew, and funny. She was silly, which perhaps fewer knew. She was quick to laugh—a whinny, almost, or revved engine—impossible not to join, whether at herself or at you. No one was better at teasing. But she was never mean, always teasing in a way that confirmed how well she knew you. There wasn’t a bigger compliment than Tatiana having your number.

We came to spend hours holed up in her Elmhurst apartment—her by the stove, cooking something effortless and delicious while I straddled the windowsill chain-smoking—listening to each other’s best stories and impressions and skits and heartbreaks and traumas with the kind of earnestness reserved for college, first loves, and best friends. She taught me to play Heads Up, to toast pine nuts with eggplant and cherry tomatoes, to put St. Germain in my champagne; she taught me the generosity of friendship. Of sharing yourself. 

No matter how far I get from that 19-year-old, I’ll always see her as I did then: a year older, many years wiser; a role model and a friend; somehow both the most extraordinary and the most human. I see her walking down Howe Street, clipped by the orange glow of the streetlights. Her somewhat equine gait, spindly legs and boots. That blue canvas toggle coat. Her crunched grin, shining beneath the hood, an invitation.

~ Carlos Gomez, Managing Editor, Fall 2011

***

I knew Tatiana in high school and at Yale, but for whatever reason, we were ships passing until we both found ourselves in graduate school at Oxford, where we finally had a real, honest-to-goodness conversation. I was skeptical at first that she could possibly live up to her considerable hype—this was a woman much exalted long before anyone had the occasion to eulogize her. How wrong I was to doubt her. I was bulldozed by her charm, and our brief interactions made a huge impression on me. I was amazed by how little I had to explain myself—or anything at all—to her: she caught your drift; she met you where you stood. She simply knew. Talking to her was so much fun, so easy. That might sound a little like faint praise, but I’ve found that it’s extremely rare that a truly smart person should listen, really listen, as happily as talk. To have at once a probing intellect and a breezy disposition is about the best combination I can think of in a person. She was top of the line. 

~ Cally Fioderek, Executive Editor, 2010

***

Tatiana always felt like the adult in the room. Brilliant, bitingly funny, and a spectacularly talented writer, she was self-possessed and confident at a time when I was flailing around and just getting to know myself. Somehow, still, she was willing to be my friend. 

Reading through her emails from college, I can’t believe they were written by someone so young. The generosity of her friendship and the wisdom she shared, equal parts vulnerability and strength. Her observations of people and the world that still ring so true today. Her already fully developed love of writing, reading, and journalism. The Barbara Ras poem “Washing the Elephant” that she sent me appended with the note “don’t feel guilty, don’t linger on the memory of what you can’t change.”

I remember her sitting in the A&A library and the Crown Street office, playing with her hair while she worked away on her laptop. I remember her in stripes picking blueberries and toasting frozen bread the summer she interned for The Vineyard Gazette. I remember the warmth of the apartment she and Julia shared, the meals they would cook, the parties they would throw. I remember how much she made me laugh, how she always made me feel like we were on our own special adventure. 

Later, when we became mothers around the same time, she showed the same generosity, the same thoughtfulness, checking in frequently during those all encompassing months (years) of early parenthood. It will never cease to amaze me that she remembered my son’s birthday in the midst of her cancer treatments.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to honor her in my life. 

By watching my daily environmental impact, yes, by being fully present with my children, yes, by diving headfirst into things I’m passionate about, yes. But most of all what has come to me again and again, is to be a friend who shows up, who checks-in, who remembers birthdays.

~ Christina Huffington, Managing Editor, Fall 2010

***

I was still fighting imposter syndrome as a Yale sophomore when I walked into my first Herald editorial meeting. I caught a second case of imposter syndrome as a new section editor on the masthead of the greatest student publication on earth. Tatiana sat in the middle of the large oak table. She commenced the editorial meeting with casual authority, fielding stories section by section. She turned her attention to my fellow culture editors, Sam Bendinelli and Nicole Battaglia, and me. We stammered through a list of albums and movies up for review. Approving the coverage plan from three editors whose surnames all ended in a vowel, Tatiana praised “The Italian Job.”

“Sprezzatura” is a word I learned at Yale and came to associate with Tatiana. She had an effortless elegance, but also a knack for self-deprecation. Her comedic self-awareness is on display in almost every page of her book, even the acknowledgements. She thanked her siblings “for being the funniest people worldwide, and for always trying to teach me how to be cooler and better, which I am not.”

In fact Tatiana had a great, extremely dry sense of humor. Making her laugh felt like a real accomplishment, not least because her laugh was special. Tatiana’s laugh was many ha’s compressed into one big “aaah!” It sounded like she discovered something she wasn’t supposed to find, like she had no choice but to admit the thing was funny. I remember the sound of her laugh late in the Herald office on Thursdays, as exhausted editors stared down the printer’s deadline, recharging our collective battery.

During my junior year, steeling myself for a turn as editor-in-chief, I asked Tatiana to get dinner. We met at the Berkeley dining hall and settled at the head of a table near the tray bussing station. I peppered her with questions. What do you do if you don’t have enough stories to fill an issue? What if an editor quits? What if a story gets us sued? She calmly answered my panicky, naive questions. As we wrapped, it meant more than she knew when she told me, “You’ll be fine.”

On a campus with many braggadocios and peacocks, Tatiana was a counter-example. She practiced true humility. She made you comfortable being yourself. Tatiana made grace look effortless, but it never is. She set an example for the rest of us.

~Marcus Moretti, Editor-In-Chief, Spring 2012

***

I never asked Tatiana why she chose to do The Yale Herald over the YDN. Maybe it was because she had friends on staff (indeed, many of them would become lifelong, close relationships), or perhaps it was because she was invested in her social life and other activities like Sphincter Troupe and the Herald was, frankly, less of a time suck. Whatever it was, the Herald, for her and many before and after her, was a place for play, to experiment with story ideas, and to let kids develop their voice. We published some timely and occasionally profound stories, but mostly we specialized in deeply random, personality-driven pieces. 

The dingy office was above all fun, filled with the kind of crazy laughter trademark of late nights, and a true DIY experience (most of our computers, software, and modes of production were outdated at best, hardly functional at worst.) It was also hard work, a team sport, and ridden with some of New Haven’s worst pizza as a result of a sponsorship that perhaps may still be in place so I won’t name names. Tatiana was here for it all.

Tatiana had a brilliant and expansive mind consumed with fixing some of the world’s worst problems—but she was also hilarious. The combination of her intelligence and sense of humor was arresting. Getting Tatiana to laugh at one of my jokes was heaven on earth. I think Tatiana thought being on the Herald was funny, in and of itself. We all did. 

While I admired her greatly at Yale (and wish I had said so more often), the choices she made post-Yale make the hair on my arms stand tall. (This is someone who could have done anything, covered anything.). We all talked the talk that local journalism is so important, but she walked it. She interned at the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette and cut her teeth as a municipal reporter at The Record in Bergen County, N.J. Paying your dues isn’t always sexy, but for her, it was a mandate. She dove headfirst into covering natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy and man-made tragedies like Sandy Hook. She got a coveted job at The New York Times and began to cover her real passion: climate science and the environment. She saw, closer than most due to her family history, how troubled humanity could be; yet she still wanted to save it—us. She wrote an incredible book, too, about the human role in and cost of environmental calamity and had an incredible newsletter that she religiously posted on the same subject. She was prolific, but so detail-oriented and didn’t stop until she had to.  Tatiana had talent and a unique voice, and was clear-eyed about how she wanted to use it. Her last New Yorker piece, which should be required reading, was the ultimate example. 

Deciding to become a mother with the fullest knowledge of how screwed our planet is was another act of courage. She delighted in motherhood. It blew my mind that two people who met each other as teens, who slaved over D-pages and shitty servers and cried over stupid boys and my late papers, could talk about childcare, baby ailments, and diapers. 

I’ve been reading through old emails and found one where Tatiana earnestly but delicately is chiding the whole Herald for not turning their stories in on time, resulting in the editorial board staying unusually late on Thursday night. The problems we thought we had, at the newspaper, in college, as a youth; and what we would all give for one more Thursday night. 

~ Emily Barasch, Editor-in-Chief, Spring 2010