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The Atlantic takes on the Atlantic’s take on online dating

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 23:19:00 +0000

First, the Atlantic said that online dating is ruining traditional marriage. Then, a day later, they said that it wasn't.

Confused? Of course you are.

Journalist Dan Slater wrote a piece for the Atlantic print edition about a man named Jacob who, through the magic of online dating, has been able to meet and sleep with many women and he is no longer interested in getting married. In response, Atlantic editor Alexis Madrigal took to the Atlantic's website to refute Slater and his "spineless" argument with a lot of data and somewhere around 1,800 words.

Hack List No. 9: The Atlantic

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 16:30:00 +0000

This year, my annual list of the worst of political media highlights not just individuals, but the institutions that enable those individuals. The 2012 Hack List will be counting down the 10 media outlets that are hurting America over the next two days -- stay tuned! (Previous Hack List entries here, here and here.)

Magazines are great. I am a big fan of magazines. The Atlantic does a lot of things right, as a magazine. First of all, it makes money. Most magazines don't, really. I also give them credit for "figuring out The Web." Here is the secret of The Web: People like to read thoughtful people writing about and debating the issues of the day, and also they like really infuriating trolling. The Atlantic gives them both.

Here are some pieces from the latest issue: Jeffrey Goldberg on why more guns will solve gun control (counterintuitive!), Jessica Bennett and Rachel Simmons on how writing "xoxo" in emails is "feminizing the workplace," something on wacky Silicon Valley workspaces and offices. This is a fairly representative sample of the sort of thing in your average issue of the Atlantic.

The answer is not more guns

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:30:00 +0000

By now, the response isn’t even surprising. After a horrific massacre like the one in Newtown, Conn., last week, gun-rights advocates will argue that someone with a gun at the scene could have stopped the killer. They conclude that the answer to mass shootings is to arm more people.

This argument is usually made by people who can be easily dismissed, like boffo U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, or Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America. Pratt said this weekend that “gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands” for preventing law-abiding citizens from bringing guns into schools.

But the more guns/less crime argument shouldn’t be dismissed so summarily. There’s an undeniable intuitive logic to it -- if you were facing down an active shooter, wouldn’t you want to be armed? Nearly half of Americans keep a gun in their home -- and the majority say the main reason they do so is to defend themselves. Across the country, states are expanding right to carry laws, which allow permitted citizens to carry concealed weapons for their own defense.

Newtown’s massacre could happen anywhere

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 15:35:00 +0000

We’re spending a holiday season weekend at the home of friends in a small Connecticut town just a few miles up the road from Newtown. Returning from the local store, our friend Emily tells us that the talk there this morning is of nothing but the killings; every customer seems to know at least one of the families devastated by the volleys of gunshots. The headline on the front page of The Danbury News-Times is the single word, “Shattered,” in enormous type.

At The Atlantic website, I read a piece by Edward Small, a reporter who attended the school in Newtown when he was a kid and I remember my own elementary school in a small town in upstate New York. In those days, the only emergency drills we ever had were the duck-and-cover alerts that sent us into the hallways or under our desks during the depths of Cold War hysteria; the only violence was getting shoved from behind by a bully, books and binder flying.

Bloomberg: “Any president” would’ve killed bin Laden

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 21:29:00 +0000

If you hate Michael Bloomberg you will find a lot to hate in his conversation with the Atlantic's James Bennet, part of the magazine's gag-inducing "Brave Thinkers" issue. What makes Bloomberg a "brave thinker"? Banning soda, it seems like. (Also, lord, no one needs another Bloomberg interview. If you want to know what he thinks about things, he is on the radio every week and he owns a news outlet that has an opinion section devoted in part to opinions he agrees with.)

You will also find some things about Bennet to be annoyed with, like his complete indifference to Bloomberg's approval of the NYPD's various major violations of civil liberties and general complete lack of oversight. The words "NYPD," "Muslim," "frisk" and "surveillance" never come up once in the full transcript of the interview.

Anne-Marie Slaughter: “I’m a card-carrying feminist”

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:30:00 +0000

Anne Marie Slaughter is, of course, the author of that now famous (or infamous, depending whom you talk to) article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” published in the Atlantic a few months ago to great hullabaloo.

If you’re a follower of online feminism, you’re most likely familiar with the conversation around the article. It dominated conversations both online and off for weeks, sparking debate and dialogue about a number of issues including work-life balance, maternity and paternity leave, privilege in feminism, and the direction of our movement for equality. If you need a refresher, you can read a roundup of responses to the article here.

Income inequality greater than in 1774

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 20:18:00 +0000

In the past year a steady stream of articles has trumpeted the gravity of current U.S. income inequality levels. We've not seen these levels of wealth inequality since before the Great Depression, analysts remark. The Roman Empire, one study argued, was more equitable than the United States is now. And on Wednesday, the Atlantic picked up on another alarming comparison: "Income inequality is worse now than during slavery."

Jordan Weissman writes:

The conclusion comes to us from an newly updated study by professors Peter Lindert of the University of California - Davis and Jeffrey Williamson of Harvard. Scraping together data from an array of historical resources, the duo have written a fascinating exploration of early American incomes, arguing that, on the eve of the Revolutionary War, wealth was distributed more evenly across the 13 colonies than anywhere else in the world that we have record of.

Is the Atlantic making us stupid?

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 17:02:00 +0000

JAMES BENNET WANTS US to have a conversation. The editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, who took the helm in 2006, has overseen a remarkable rise in the magazine’s fortunes and profile. He has turned The Atlantic from a money bleeder into a moneymaker, from a worthy but familiar cultural artifact into a brand chattered about by people who are not usually considered part of the chattering class. And what gets the most chatter of all are The Atlantic’s frequent, and frequently controversial, articles about gender issues.

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.