offered an apology for having hurt the feelings of those subscribers who objected to finding Spears on the cover of the magazine. "Yes, I want to take full responsibility for destroying The Atlantic, 150-year-old pillar of American journalism," he said. "And now it's gone, thanks to me." To open his long profile of the rapper Kanye West titled "American Mozart" in the May 2012 issue of The Atlantic, Samuels told of meeting President Barack Obama at a fundraiser at the Manhattan restaurant Daniel and asking him who he liked better – West or his Watch the Throne collaborator Jay-Z. Obama said that he preferred Jay-Z, but thought that West was "smart" and "very talented." When Samuels recalled that Obama had previously called West a "jackass," Obama replied "He is a jackass. But he's talented". An angry minority of Atlantic subscribers wrote to the magazine to express their bafflement at the comparison of West with Mozart. In the April 12, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, Samuels published an account of his contacts with the Pink Panthers, a group of jewel thieves from Serbia and Montenegro who have reportedly stolen watches and jewels worth an estimated $250 million. The article, entitled "The Pink Panthers," was an idiosyncratic travelogue that detailed the group's cinematic robberies against the backdrop of recent Balkan history. The style of the Panthers piece earned Samuels a rebuke from Pietry Calcaterra – the chief of Interpol's Pink Panthers unit – who wrote a letter of complaint to The New Yorker stating that "The victim is not the man wielding the gun, however colourful his alleged derring-do. The victim in an armed robbery is the person lying on a shop floor with a gun pointed at his head." His immersive profile of White House speechwriter and deputy National Security advisor Ben Rhodes, published in the May 8, 2016 issue of The New York Times Magazine examined the use of traditional narrative techniques in the making and selling of American foreign policy in the age of social media. The article ignited a firestorm in the digital press, which was harshly criticized in the article by both Rhodes and Samuels, leading to an unusual response by Samuels to his critics in the pages of the Times titled "Through the Looking Glass With Ben Rhodes ." On August 20, 2019, Samuels published a highly personal account of an encounter with the musician