Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic (Takedown of Atlantic Monthly in New Baffler)

http://thebaffler.com/notebook/2012/04/omniscient_gentlemen_of_the_atlantic

bam!

Ha, I thought this was going to be a poll of their regular bloggers on the site. (Ta-Nehisi by a landslide, obv.)

"Of course The Atlantic is a turgid mouthpiece for the plutocracy, a repository of shallow, lazy spin, and regular host of discussion forums during which nothing is discussed. It is, in every formal trait, a CIA front."

OH NO SHE DIDN'T!

more like Maureen TURGID amirite?

this is v. humiliating indeed:

Irving Kristol’s cofounder at Encounter, the British poet Stephen Spender, was the sole member of the CCF clique to be truly traumatized by the revelation that his beloved project was a CIA front. Then, in the early aughts, he was doubly insulted, via the revelation that George Orwell had on his deathbed listed his name on a painstakingly compiled list of “fellow travelers” whom the author suspected would conspire with the enemy in the event of a Soviet invasion—but only because he was “impressionable” that way.

I think this could have been done a lot better.

it was all over the place in the middle and kept sort of coyly flattering me for knowing cool cold war stuff i don't know. but the zings at the end were good and some of the quotes were pretty damning/hilarious.

Deng Xiaoping as the Chinese Steve Jobs was pretty amazing, regardless of what you even think of Deng Xiaoping

yeah that one in particular.

I found it a little hard to discern the critical vantage point of the author beyond just somewhere-on-the-left

so much space is spent exposing the CIA funding of 60s campus protests and then i couldn't figure out how much of an equivalence was being drawn between that and the castrated corporate labor-ejecting social leftism of the modern atlantic, like if the accusation was that SDS were imperialist stooges too, but to be honest i skimmed in places

think this could have been done a lot better.

― i don't believe in zimmerman (Hurting 2),

^^^^^^^

is the atlantic even 'important'?

I liked this part:

For all the ostensible objectivity and scientific rigor of the magazine’s questing spirit, The Atlantic’s definition of talent seems to correlate to: a current fellowship at the New America Foundation or any of the other indistinguishably centrist think tanks, though, preferably, one with a brand (i.e., “Daniel Indiviglio is the 2011 Robert Novak Fellow at the Philips Foundation”); an ability to channel one’s talent into the mastery of meritless and preposterous (“counterintuitive”) arguments, deliberately obtuse rebuttals, and miscellaneous pseudointellectual equivocation/noise on topical issues; and proven senior-level mastery of aforementioned mastery as demonstrated either by radical shamelessness or the pious and deeply felt earnestness of a motivational speaker.

That "miscellaneous pseudointellectual equivocation/noise on topical issues" describes something I feel every time I read the Atlantic, like I am getting my signal jammed on whatever issue I am reading about.

can't even understand what that article is trying to say

maybe they are culture jammers

the baffler: “Fear not,” says the Brooklyn Rail, “while the guard may have changed, the mission—to undress the Emperor and perform a full and unflinching diagnostic—has not.”

I can't tell if they got worse at doing that or if I just don't get the same giddy thrill out of it I did in college anymore.

i read this thing as some sort of freestyle battle rap written by someone who has read a ton of books i would never read. so, in a way, i kind of like it.

and she did make the crazy conference she went to in the beginning sound pretty frightening.

Atlantic sonned by a chinese girl in Baffler beef

http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/scientology/archive/2013/01/david-miscavige-leads-scientology-to-milestone-year-/266958/

lmao

As a Scientologist, I am so proud of the work our churches are doing in their communities to help with lowering crime rates and getting to kids with the truth about drugs before they get in trouble. Unfortunately, good news like this rarely gets the coverage it deserves from mainstream media. So it was great to see this story!

someone ask james fallows about it

lmao this is wonderful

the scientologists own some pretty cool old buildings.

this is really bizarre though

that is somehow vile and hilarious all at once

wow I didn't think the 2013 Sponsored Content awards would be locked up so quickly but damn

HI!

http://i.imgur.com/qMNYf.jpg

hi resolution photos of david miscavige are one of my favorite things on the internet

I've never noticed Atlantic's sponsored content before, but there is plenty of it. Here's one from Bank of America:

http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/bank-of-america/archive/2012/10/small-business-big-use-of-social-media/263544

http://api.ning.com/files/ESWwCTGQVmbI*jnj15HsggNAJo2jR14-G91t4RzpB3RAiWgVL*dp5yi-YP9qB1-hU1jTEhCtJZixVkv-x16vHdBj6J66UAS2/david_miscavige_resistance2010.jpeg

http://www.scientologynews.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/lightbox_popup/07-david-miscavige-seattle-scientology.jpg?no_lang_process=1

he kinda looks like danny kaye and a ferret fucked

http://www.scientologynews.org/sites/default/files/church-of-scientology-dallas-opening-david-miscavige.jpg

https://static.prtst.net/asset-proxy/4c2c68a256a9ae2160bd0ef7b61b7c1e7fffc9b7/687474703a2f2f7777772e696e64796261792e6f72672f75706c6f6164732f323030382f30382f32332f7365615f6f72675f6d656d626572732e6a7067/http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2008/08/23/sea_org_members.jpg

http://www.scientologynews.org/sites/default/files/church-of-scientology-rome-opening-speaker-david-miscavige.jpg

http://f.edgesuite.net/data/www.scientology.org/files/David_Miscavige_speaking_in_Las_Vegas.jpg

http://www.scientologynews.org/sites/default/files/church-of-scientology-london-opening-david-miscavige.jpg

lol @ every one of those backdrops

c.o.s. must have some kinda loaner program with the syfy props department

they are magnificent, I would like to hire the scientologist interior decorator

he's a smug-looking motherfucker with some dark secrets

starship troopers aesthetics + blingee

hahaha I was just googling for starship trooper pics =(

scientology buildings all look like they have the vague smell of industrial solvents

I wonder how much these sponsored articles cost. Would they let the Koch bros run some?

http://i.imgur.com/SkhtD.jpg

http://www.meantime.org.uk/images/general/zb.jpeg

god I wish I was watching starship troopers right now

apparently there's only one negative comment on the story because the commenter is a disqus employee and his posts aren't subject to moderation

@JeffreyGoldberg
There's no time like the present to tout my friend Larry Wright's great new investigation of the Church of Scientology: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/a-wonderful-new-book-about-scientology-by-a-wonderful-writer/267178/ …

"We have temporarily suspended this advertising campaign pending a review of our policies that govern sponsor content and subsequent comment threads."

http://nplusonemag.com/the-intellectual-situation-issue-15

not sure Rosin's "The End of Men" really fits the alleged mansplaining theme

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D8ZSbyQWkAEBf7b.png

lmao came here to post that. what a world.

You know, Goldberg is a gaping asshole, and those two paragraphs read really shitty chopped out on Twitter, but the next paragraph of the quote actually changes what came before a bit. Here's the full quote:

GOLDBERG: We continue to have a problem with the print magazine cover stories — with the gender and race issues when it comes to cover story writing. [Of the 15 print issues The Atlantic has published since January 2018, 11 had cover stories written by men. —Ed.]

It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!

That’s one way to approach it, but the other way to approach it is, huh, you’re really good at this and you have a lot of potential and you’re 33 and you’re burning with ambition, and that’s great, so let us put you on a deliberate pathway toward writing 10,000-word cover stories. It might not work. It often doesn’t. But we have to be very deliberate and efficient about creating the space for more women to develop that particular journalistic muscle.

So he's not saying "The (only) journalists in America who (can) do it are almost exclusively white males," as it's being read on Twitter. He's literally saying, "Here's the current state of play, and here's what The Atlantic is going to do to address that."

Frankly, one of the best things he could do would be to just never assign another cover story to Caitlin Flanagan. That alone would be a huge improvement.

All that said, getting more women to write cover stories for The Atlantic will not really be an improvement, because the kind of stories The Atlantic puts on its cover are poisonous trash.

we’re getting 10K from helen lewis now

otm

When you consider that the 10,000 word cover stories under discussion here are the ones The Atlantic actually runs, it seems clear that to Goldberg, diversity isn’t about simply getting the many, many, many talented and qualified women and people of color in media to write cover stories for his magazine about subjects that interest them, but about training them to write the sorts of cover stories he happens to like—ones that at least gesture at being sharp and provocative and are aimed to spark discussion and that, ultimately, affirm his worldview. The whole point of having a diverse group of people with diverse thoughts and opinions and interests and areas of expertise, though, is that you don’t end up with a bunch of turgid, boring white-guy articles that gesture at being sharp and provocative and spark discussion in narrow and predictable ways. It’s one thing that Goldberg doesn’t even seem to recognize that there are lots of non-white male journalists out there right now who are not only capable of writing in-depth cover stories but are in fact doing so; the even more serious issue, though, is that this powerful magazine man seems to think the solution to the problem under discussion is to teach women and people of color to be like him (or how to do work that satisfies him) rather than to support them in being the best possible version of themselves, and adjust his views accordingly.

That “journalistic muscle” that he says he wants to help women and people of color develop is, after all, a very specific one, involving writing overly long thinkpieces about Society, often premised on the unprovable conceit that an abstract concept is dead or dying. In the last half-year the only cover story a woman has written for The Atlantic is “The Sex Recession,” a handwringy screed about how young women aren’t fucking enough. To Goldberg, the end-all be-all of journalistic success that women should be striving for appears to be having a cover story for The Atlantic called “The End Of Men” or “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” or “Marry Him!”

It takes a certain hubris to churn out a fatally boring, loosely researched 10,000-word take (incidentally, very few stories need to be 10,000 words long, but Goldberg wouldn’t be the first to confuse length and quality) meant to be slapped on the cover of a national magazine and “drive the conversation.” It also requires a certainty that criticism will attach to your ideas and not to you, personally. It’s a hubris, or confidence, white men in media seem to have aplenty, for what should be obvious reasons. Just take a look at staff writer David Frum’s recent cover story arguing that racist immigration policies are actually good; or the one by author and journalist Charles Duhigg about why “we’re” so angry; or the one by 60 Minutes correspondent John Dickerson about how being president is hard; or the sympathetic meditation on evangelicals and Trump written by George W. Bush’s former speechwriter Michael Gerson; or that disaster by transphobic lunatic Jesse Singal, who, by the way, also thinks Goldberg is doing great.

it's all a dumb metric of anything, but doesn't the new yorker regularly publish 10,000 word pieces by writers who are not white males? how many magazine pages is 10,000 words?

fuck this terrible magazine forever

Extremely good that Helen Lewis is writing for them now.

does that offset the "thought-provoking" articles like "Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture"?

(serious question, I realize they run good stuff sometimes but I just can't take the chin-stroking anymore)

Why did the Industrial Revolution start when it did? Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Human progress is understudied, and @patrickc and @tylercowen want to change that. https://t.co/do55DQ5yHi

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) July 30, 2019

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EEsPDccXUAEr7Ps?format=jpg&name=small

look at all the idea-havers

interviewin' bob

they call him that on accounta all the interviewin' he does

https://i.imgur.com/cU6EYR7.jpg

man she has really been knocking it out of the park lately

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fn5mTnJXEAEgl57?format=jpg&name=small

https://i.imgur.com/YI5skM5.jpg

oh lol they hired Christine Emba too. she's the WaPo writer who wrote a couple of batshit pieces about masculinity last year

That magazine has shit the bed so hard in the last few years.

It's really leaning hard into this Serious Centrist bullshit.

Williams is a fucking joke, right? I can't believe anyone pays him for his 'journalism'. but they already pay Noah Berlatsky (who works with a pro-pedophilia group) so it's not like the Atlantic has any credibility whatsoever anymore.

Afaict Berlatsky hasn't had an Atlantic byline since 2015

Their basic persona — and maybe this has always been true? — is exactly MLK's "white moderate."

the titular post, for posterity

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/omniscient-gentlemen-of-the-atlantic

The Atlantic cuts ties with prominent contributor after rape allegation

The Atlantic magazine has cut ties with writer Yascha Mounk, one of its prominent contributors, after a woman accused him of rape, the magazine announced in a statement Sunday.

“We have not published any new work by the freelance contributor since being made aware of the allegation,” the Atlantic statement read, adding that the magazine “suspended our relationship” with the writer last month.

Mounk, an author and political scientist, told The Washington Post, “I am aware of the horrendous allegation against me. It is categorically untrue.”

The Atlantic’s announcement, which a magazine spokeswoman issued on social media, came hours after writer Celeste Marcus accused Mounk of raping her in her own post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Marcus’s post included a screenshot of Jan. 7 email exchange she had with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, in which she accused Mounk by name of assaulting her in her apartment in June 2021.

Mounk, a German-born scholar of democracy and populism at Johns Hopkins University, has gained renown for his writing skeptical of “woke” ideologies and “cancel culture.” His 2023 book, “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time,” which decried what he sees as an overemphasis in liberal politics on race, gender and sexuality, received positive mentions from several writers with large audiences, including New York Times columnists Bret Stephens and David Brooks.

the free-speech lover has logged on

Dear NYPD: Please, please, please arrest these faculty members. https://t.co/6zfgluNRwz

— Caitlin Flanagan (@CaitlinPacific) April 23, 2024