Medianatomy:
Atlantic Redux

After a year with a new editor, has The Atlantic finally awoken from its sleepy past?

By Andrew Hearst

In September 1999, publisher and businessman David Bradley bought the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly and installed Michael Kelly as its new editor. Kelly, a former editor of The New Republic, was something of a left-field choice. First, he was not known for the sort of broad cultural reportage and essays The Atlantic helped invent; he had made his name with hard-hitting political journalism in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Second, he already had a job--as editor of the small but influential D.C.-based political weekly National Journal, also owned by Bradley--and he intended to keep it.

It's been more than a year. Has Kelly been able to slingshot himself between D.C. and Boston, and between politics and the larger culture, without succumbing to editorial dizziness? And has he livened up the 144-year-old Atlantic, a legendary American magazine that in recent years has seemed somewhat dull and out of touch?

If the December issue was any indication, Kelly is handling things just fine. For starters, William Langwiesche's cover story, a 17,500-word profile of the powerful wine critic Robert Parker Jr., was a masterpiece of tone, pacing, and reportage. Langwiesche did a terrific job of relating how Parker, "a burly, awkward, hardworking guy from the backcountry of northern Maryland," has singlehandedly--or, rather, single-nosedly and single-tonguedly--forced the wine industry to change the way it has done business for decades. Carl Elliott's "A New Way to Be Mad"--one of the many other excellent pieces in the issue--explored the disturbing, Internet-fueled rise of apotemnophilia, the compulsion to become an amputee by cutting off, or having someone else cut off, one's own healthy limbs.

The January issue, on newsstands now, isn't as consistently good as the December issue; the January cover story, "The New Old Economy: Oil, Computers, and the Reinvention of the Earth," is yet another entry in a long series of seemingly interchangeable Atlantic cover stories about politics, economics, and/or public policy. The new issue contains a lot of very good pieces, though, and at least one great one: Eric Schlosser's "Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good," a funny and informative article about the so-called flavor industry.

So there's lots of evidence that Kelly is brushing away the editorial cobwebs that accumulated during the 19-year tenure of his predecessor, William Whitworth. Kelly, it seems, has revived a long-moribund magazine.

Or has he? Though I've often read individual articles in The Atlantic, the December issue was the first I'd ever read front to back, and I only picked it up because a couple of people told me about Langwiesche's great cover story. For all I know, The Atlantic has always been as good as the December issue. But I've been a magazine junkie--and a regular reader of both Harper's and The New Yorker, The Atlantic's two most obvious competitors--for more than a decade, and I've always more or less ignored The Atlantic, without really understanding why. If I thought I were the only Harper's and New Yorker reader who rarely notices The Atlantic, I'd chalk it up to my own laziness or ignorance or New York-centricness. But among my circle of friends, many of whom are as media obsessed as I am, The Atlantic has simply never been a must-read. After reading the December and January issues, I think I finally know why: The Atlantic needs a structural overhaul.

The magazine's main problem is its lack of a front-of-the-book section, the area in the first third or so of most consumer magazines that generally contains shorter pieces and smaller boxed items, as well a tone that tends to be lighter and more irreverent than that of the feature well. The Atlantic does have shorter essays and lighter reported pieces up front, but they're not particularly different in tone or layout from the longer features in the center of the magazine. For me, reading The Atlantic is similar to eating a meal that consists of a heavy main course but no salad and few appetizers: If The Atlantic were a Thanksgiving dinner, it would be a big turkey with a little stuffing inside but no cranberry sauce, yams, or other trimmings to go along with it. This analogy appears to fit Kelly's Atlantic as much as it did Whitworth's, despite the many excellent articles the magazine has run in recent issues, because structurally the magazine is the same as it was a few years ago--perhaps even a few decades ago.

Though it often runs solid pieces about subjects like music piracy on the Internet, The Atlantic as a whole has always seemed to me to be out of touch with contemporary American culture in all its wildness and weirdness. Harper's might be open to the same charge--its feature well is full of stories that are not substantially different from those in The Atlantic--but it's saved by its consistently lively front-of-the-book section, which balances out the occasional heavy-handedness of the features. The Harper's Index and the Readings section have a tone that is much more playful, and much more in tune with contemporary culture, than anything I've ever seen in The Atlantic. Just as important, the shorter pieces in the front of Harper's make me feel connected to the magazine and its sensibility even when I'm too busy to read (or uninterested in reading) any of the features. With some issues of Harper's, I sit down thinking I only have time to speed-read the front of the book, but instead I end up reading the Index, all of Readings, and half the feature well. That's exactly what a good front of the book should do: It should serve as a somewhat leisurely onramp into the feature well. Without that onramp, a reader might never make it to the six-lane highway--i.e., the 17,500-word feature story.

"One thing that The Atlantic Monthly is not is an antiquarian enterprise, a museum piece," writes Cullen Murphy, the magazine's managing editor, in an essay on the Atlantic Web site. Yet despite its nineties look and its regular coverage of contemporary issues--and despite its terrific Web site, which is much better than the meager offering from Harper's and the nonexistent one from The New Yorker--The Atlantic seems weighed down by its illustrious history. Michael Kelly will have to be willing to make the same break with the past that Lewis Lapham and Rick MacArthur did in 1984 when they reinvented venerable old Harper's by adding Readings, the Index, and various other new departments. The Atlantic is like a 144-year-old house that has new walls, doors, windows, and wiring, but whose original foundation has long been deteriorating. Kelly and his staff need to shore
up that foundation and build some new rooms.

What makes a reader want to pick up a magazine? What makes a reader want to actually read a magazine, instead of merely flip through its pages? And what makes a reader want to sit down, prop up his feet, and get comfortable with a magazine because he knows there are several hours of good reading ahead? Somewhere in that chain of events, The Atlantic has always lost me. If Kelly wants to find me--and the many other readers like me that I presume exist--he's going to have to make a trip to the editorial equivalent of Home Depot.

Andrew Hearst is a writer and editor who lives in New York. He has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Newsday, Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications.