I highly recommend the current issue of The Atlantic. I went out and bought it yesterday morning.
Yes: bought… It has me thinking about magazines, why I like them so much (especially ambitiously intellectual magazines like The Atlantic) and what role publications like this will have in the future — or more specifically, how they will manage to adapt and whether they will continue to lead…
Richard Florida penned the cover feature, “How the Crash Will Reshape America“ (look for the differences between Canadian and US editions!) – an ideal follow-up to last week’s discussion about the “Ontario in the Creative Age” report, co-authored by Florida.
I feel like I ought to read and recommend The Walrus more — for the sake of Canadian-ness.
Unfortunately The Walrus is blocked by our intranet at work, which is where — in my down-time — I do most of my casual reading. For some reason the The Atlantic is not blocked (at least not totally — most of the blogs are blocked except Megan McArdle and Ross Douthat). Back in the summer I got in the habit of checking Megan and Ross’s blogs (and Matthew Yglesias’s when he was still there) when things got slow. (I have to give that loose, extended tribe of Washington writers, think tankers, and GMU economists credit/blame for turning me into a blogger.)
My continued affinity for The Atlantic also has a lot to do with the attachment I made to it in 2001 — back when I was exploring the periodicals section of the library every week, looking for more…
When 9/11 happened I was ready to dive into things with a little more substance. Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The New Republic sometimes too, but it was the December 2001 issue of The Atlantic that really locked it for me — not just my affinity for the magazine itself but for long-form politico-literary journalism and punditry in general, especially by ’conservative ironists’ like Michael Kelly, David Brooks, P.J. O’Rourke, and Christopher Hitchens.
I actually forgot it was Brooks who wrote ”One Nation, Slightly Divisible” — an article that captivated me during my lunch in a shopping mall food court (there’s irony — or serendipity)… It’s the first sustained treatment (as far as I’m aware) of the notion of “Red America and Blue America” — the notion Barack Obama played off of so effectively in his 2004 speech and on to the presidency… I tried pulling-off a read & walk from lunch back to the kiosk where I worked; I didn’t want to put the article down:
Everything that people in my neighborhood do without motors, the people in Red America do with motors. We sail; they powerboat. We cross-country ski; they snowmobile. We hike; they drive ATVs. We have vineyard tours; they have tractor pulls. When it comes to yard work, they have rider mowers; we have illegal aliens. [...]
It’s a great re-read alongside the current issue’s discussion of “the reshaping of America.” Also check out “Class Dismissed” by Sandra Tsing Loh, an insightful contrast to Florida’s creative class project and an excellent complement to his latest article:
The age of narcissistic creative-class strivers has brought this country cool new neighborhoods and an infinitely better selection of coffees and greens, but it has also brought shameful social stratification and a consumer binge that our children’s children may well be paying off…
The Atlantic is still doing what it has been doing for over a century and a half: leading — or helping to lead — the conversation about ideas in America. In fact that’s what the magazine’s founders explicitly set out to do. As the editors wrote in the introduction to the 150th anniversary issue,
The Atlantic was created in Boston by writers who saw themselves as the country’s intellectual leaders, and so its scope from the start was national, if rather theoretical. It was founded on an encompassing abstraction, expressed in the words that appeared in the first issue and that appear again on the cover of this one: In politics, it would “honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea.” That sounds pretty good.
The Atlantic emerged when the United States was beginning to achieve a degree of intellectual maturity. The group of writers that founded the The Atlantic — including towering figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – represented the first generation of American intellectuals to really break away from the influence of European ideas. Emerson’s “American Scholar” is the foremost document of that change in attitude:
We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself… They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him… We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence… A nation of men will for the first time exist…
Remember, at that time (and for quite a while later) the world was ruled by monarchies: Canada was still governed by the British Colonial Office. Germany was a loose confederation of kingdoms (Prussia, Austria, Weimar, Bohemia, etc). France was ruled by an emperor. European empires stretched around the globe…
Meanwhile, in the middle decades of the 19th century the world was being changed radically by industrialization. In publishing, other ambitious magazines like Harper’s and The Nation where born in the same generation. The New York Times and the Washington Post were also founded around that time.
Automated printing presses were able to produce more copies more efficiently while railroads and steamboats carried them farther afield, speeding up the spread of information and ideas. (I shouldn’t have to spell out the comparisons with our own age…)
Darwin’s Origin of Species and Marx’s Capital hadn’t been published yet when the Atlantic Monthly was founded. Research universities and graduate schools didn’t exist. American universities had about as much in common with today’s high-tech research centres as they had with medieval universities… In fact, it was in the Atlantic Monthly that Harvard’s president Charles William Eliot articulated his ideas for “the new education” in 1869.
Things were changing then as they are now. It’s funny to read resentful journalists lamenting a lost golden age of the printed word — as if the medium hasn’t been evolving since the dawn of humanity, along with the ideas conveyed and the skills used.
Reminiscing in the half-centennial of the Atlantic Monthly in 1907, Charles Eliot Norton wrote about the democratization of literature and thought — in not an altogether positive way:
… both directly and indirectly, it has had a disastrous effect upon pure literature, especially upon the literature of the pure imagination, upon poetry, and upon romance. To-day the writing about material things and of the daily affairs of men, of politics and of society, history, biography, voyages and travels, encyclopedias, and scientific treatises, far outweighs, in quality no less than in quantity, the literature of sentiment and the imagination. The whole spiritual nature of man is finding but little, and for the most part only feeble and unsatisfactory, expression.
I have more affinity for the magazine’s realistic turn through the editorship of Michael Kelly — someone I greatly admired. He probably affected the course of my career as much as anyone. Introducing Brooks’s essay on the two Americas in 2001, Kelly wrote:
The thing that is sometimes dangerous about writers is that they can express their ideas more cleverly than most people. This wouldn’t ever be a bad thing if good writers always had good—that is, sound, true—ideas. But there is in fact no necessary correlation between an ability to finesse language and a true understanding of the world.
And he adds,
It is a great blessing that it is only a poetic fancy that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. (As for columnists, the mind reels.)
Just as the democratization of information ”had a disastrous affect on pure literature” in the late 19th century, the proliferation of information is having a disastrous affect on the media empires of today. The old order doesn’t have to approve of it, but they must accept it.
Those who resist the new ways of doing things are like the monarchists and literary purists of Europe who refused to recognize that good America could produce quality ideas. Traditional purists tend not to recognize that when vast new continents are opened up for exploration, human energy is generated in ways that don’t just produce movement but the emergence of whole new sets of ends and means — new cultures, structures, and institutions — and those changes can be profound enough to leap accross oceans and consume what once gave it birth.
New ends and means are emerging — new assumptions about the discipline and purpose of managing information. But we can’t know articulately what those are until we follow through on them. As Andrew Sullivan wrote for The Atlantic last November in a cover feature titled “Why I Blog,”
In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane.
The landscape is transforming. The old maps must be redrawn — with many boundaries erased, replaced by new streets and developments. Gradual shifts are cascading into mass migrations. Like I said before: you don’t have to approve, but you must accept it — or at least recognize it. As Richard Florida wrote in his current essay:
different eras favor different places, along with the industries and lifestyles those places embody… We need to let demand for the key products and lifestyles of the old order fall, and begin building a new economy, based on a new geography.
And the new geography — and the new politics, the new economy, the new culture, the new industry – will generate new thinking… The structure of our real world informs the world of our ideas. Geography, politics, the kinds of work we do, and technologies we use, provide the metaphors and images we use for understanding the present and forecasting the future.
At the risk of being over-romantic, I’d love to see a new group of ambitious writers collaborate on creating an institution to last over centuries — an endeavour to express Our Idea.
