Likelihood of Success

I don’t get paid to say this: The Atlantic and me

Apr 20, 2007 Americana, Ars Longa, Medialites

There is something about a magazine that blogs are not about to put out of business. Slate, of course, achieves that something; it is, after all, a magazine that happens only to be online. Blogs can be great (can’t they?) and they can have long — sometimes really long — and very good articles, but they are not usually journalism.

Years ago I stumbled into an internship at Student Lawyer magazine at the American Bar Association Press in Chicago. I later became a contributing editor there, which was where I really began my writing career (let’s just say). Talking to the sparkling editrices there at the time, Liz Poppens and Sarah Hoban, they asked me what sort of magazines I read. I told them: The [old] American Spectator, the National Review, The New Republic…. they asked, how about some general interest magazines? Don’t you get the Atlantic or Harper’s? I admitted I didn’t, so then I did.

Harper’s I could not take. The famous Harper’s Index, to me, epitomized how easy it is to lie with statistics. And in general the magazine was insufferably liberal. But the Atlantic, it turned out, was a godsend. Yes, by and large its outlook is more liberal than mine, but — the writing! It was and is fantastic. So, too, is the breadth of topics intelligently covered there. You should read it. Here’s what I got just on the ride home yesterday (yeah, I read fast):

• How American interrogators in Iraq, stripped of even remotely coercive techniques after Abu Ghraib — but with the spectre of Abu Ghraib hovering in the minds of their prisoners — “cracked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s inner circle“
• About the growth of a weird suicide cult in Japan, where bored and listless young adults — in a society one Japanese says has never had to face “adulthood” — meet on the Internet to find mutually satisfactory times and places to kill themselves together
• Virginia Postrel’s consistently excellent writing on fashion — writing so good (and this is the test) that I read it even though I don’t care much about women’s fashion
• The sensitive, multifaceted thoughts (read to the end before you react — the whole article is available for free) of a middle-aged feminist on abortion in our time
• A topic I won’t touch but John Burgess will
  
• And, of course, HITCHENS.

You can’t consider yourself a person who lives the life of the mind, no matter how weensily, and depend on blogs to feed your brain. So I read the Atlantic, and to less of an extent I read Slate, regularly for my secular learning. (I still get The National Review, read the book reviews and short pieces and then stack it up three or four deep before I throw it away. I gave up on TNR a long time ago, while The American Spectator just plain gave up.)

You should find your quality slick-paper magazines, too — not just because you will learn things, but because you will be exposed to points of view that differ from yours and yet, unlike what is generally found on blogs (or partisan rags such as The Nation), you will read them expressed in a manner that will not insult your intelligence. This is a good thing to know how to do if you are ever to have a conversation with someone, and the writers at The Atlantic do it exceedingly well.

And that is my only prescription, by the way, for the Internet social dysfunction I complained about here. Of course there will be no systemic resolution. There are some blogs where name-calling, vulgarity, and basically a gang-up mentality will always reign, and their proprietors are happy with that. That’s fine; they have their fun, and we may join in at our risk, and, as John points out here, there is often wisdom in the bedlam. Others seek to be intelligent and reasoned voices of intellection, reflection and expression. If you prefer the latter type, or if you, as I do, seek to write one of that type, you must read real journalism, with all its faults, regularly.