This summer, despite (or because of) the clichéd cover image of a toddler stuffed into a woman’s briefcase, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” was an instant sensation, attracting 1.7 million visitors to The Atlantic’s website and generating an all-time high of 200,000 Facebook recommendations. Other attention getters: Kate Bolick’s “All the Single Ladies” (November 2011), an exploration of the current state of unmarried womanhood; Lori Gottlieb’s “Marry Him!” (March 2008), an argument that women should settle for Mr. So-So lest they end up like Kate Bolick; Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men” (July/August 2010), which presented evidence that women are outstripping men in higher education and on the job market; Rosin’s self-explanatory “The Case Against Breast-Feeding” (April 2009); and Gottlieb’s “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy” (July/August 2011), an indictment of so-called helicopter parenting. These stories have sparked lively and sometimes anguished responses in other magazines, newspapers, and popular blogs, as well as on Facebook, over lunches, and during book-group get-togethers. Four of them have sparked book deals (for Gottlieb, Rosin, Bolick, and Slaughter), and CBS has purchased a sitcom based on Bolick’s meditation on the single life.

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