The Worst Magazine In America

September 21, 2024 9:46 AM

"I want to explain exactly what it is that I think makes The Atlantic terrible and why I think we’d all be better off if it stopped publishing." Nathan Robinson in Current Affairs
posted by german_bight (48 comments total)

There was a weird moment with this article where, if you tried to post it to Facebook, FB would immediately remove it with a warning about spam.
posted by mittens at 9:54 AM on September 21 [9 favorites]

I really enjoyed Robinson's take-down of that execrable Packer essay.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 10:24 AM on September 21 [7 favorites]

From the article: "one of the main tendencies that makes The Atlantic a bad magazine: its editors allow writers to make unsubstantiated claims, ignore contrary evidence, and use sloppy reasoning."

And, out of many infuriating examples in The Atlantic of "basic factual dishonesty, because it deliberately leaves out important facts that would undercut its persuasiveness", Robinson carefully deconstructs Simon Sebag Montefiore’s 2023 “The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False” which dismisses those who view Israel as a settler-colony as anti-semitic nonsensical marxists.

Egregiously, Montefiore heaps scorn on the idea that Israel is in any way colonial without noting that this is how it was described by many Zionists themselves.
...
Now, any intellectually honest person must ask themselves: Why would Montefiore leave this unmentioned? Why would he not explain that early Jewish settlers called their project the “colonization” of Palestine? That the “Jewish Colonisation Association” was founded in 1891... The answer is obvious: because if he admitted this fact, it would make it much harder for him to insist that the “settler colonialism narrative” was transparently absurd and historically illiterate. He would be forced to concede that there is at least something to it, that it does not come out of blind antisemitism.

It is possible to admit the full historical facts and not see Israel solely as a “settler-colonial” venture. This is what Khalidi does. He says that Israel “is not a typical settler colony” and is of course also “a refuge from persecution.” It is also possible to admit the colonial aspect and still reject the “settler colonialism” narrative completely. This is what Simha Flapan does in Zionism and the Palestinians, which concedes that Zionism had colonial aspects while ultimately concluding it should not be classified as “settler-colonial.” But these are honest historians: they have to face the truth.

posted by spamandkimchi at 10:45 AM on September 21 [40 favorites]

Current Affairs, previously: Socialism for Me But Not for Thee
"The founder of socialist magazine Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson, has fired most of the staff for trying to start a worker co-op."
posted by rodlymight at 11:13 AM on September 21 [19 favorites]

So is this article just counter propaganda intended as a distraction from the article they just put out on liberal public health officials having sex parties during what should have been COVID lockdown? It certainly feels that way.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 11:45 AM on September 21

The piece about how the only real problem is that "the left" won't accept a Trump win was pretty much my last straw with the Atlantic.
posted by tavella at 11:51 AM on September 21 [17 favorites]

So is this article just counter propaganda intended as a distraction from the article they just put out on liberal public health officials having sex parties during what should have been COVID lockdown? It certainly feels that way.

If so, they distracted a week ahead of time. The more likely explanation is that the Atlantic is just so reliably bad that someone finally got annoyed enough to write about it.
posted by whm at 11:53 AM on September 21 [20 favorites]

I did appreciate how he pointed out that Ed Yong’s reporting for the Atlantic has been very good, contrary to a lot of other crap they publish.
posted by congen at 12:08 PM on September 21 [32 favorites]

I did appreciate how he pointed out that Ed Yong’s reporting for the Atlantic has been very good, contrary to a lot of other crap they publish.

They've been like that going back a decade and a half, at least; Ta-Nehisi Coates was writing for the Atlantic at the same time as people like noted race/IQ crank Andrew Sullivan, forced-birth advocate Ross Douthat, and Ayn Rand fangirl Megan McArdle.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 12:18 PM on September 21 [31 favorites]

and don't forget Jesse Singal!
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 12:31 PM on September 21 [15 favorites]

What is a similar but better magazine?
posted by NotLost at 1:21 PM on September 21 [2 favorites]

The Master and Margarita Mix, if it is, it's incredibly insufficient - that story is chock full of what it takes to get clicks. I just thought that it was a print up of the casual observation that the Atlantic will dependably offer intellectual rationalizations for bootlicking. I will check out an article out of curiosity about what the rationalization would consist of, but...
posted by Selena777 at 1:25 PM on September 21 [3 favorites]

and don't forget Jesse Singal!

While also employing noted British TERF Helen Lewis (formerly of the New Statesman).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 2:02 PM on September 21 [8 favorites]

I'm not the biggest fan of Current Affairs (see rodlymight's link above about Little Lord Fauntleroy shitcanning everybody) but the idea that they published this just to run interference for NYC "liberal public heath officials" is pretty funny.
posted by Vulgar Euphemism at 2:03 PM on September 21 [14 favorites]

Little Lord Fauntleroy

I think of him as "bargain bin Tom Wolfe", personally (the suits with contrast-colour vests, boutonnieres, Panama hats, etc are a very particular sort of affectation).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 2:08 PM on September 21 [5 favorites]

Two words. David Frum.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 2:26 PM on September 21 [7 favorites]

I got 2/3 of the way through and was like yeah, The Atlantic does indeed do the "we're going to gain credibility by publishing the occasional conservative thing", but I hated this smug snob of a writer way more than any of the people he critiques.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 3:21 PM on September 21 [6 favorites]

Back in 2000 during the 2nd intifada we referred to the Atlantic as 'those zionist looneys'.

Doesn't matter who this writer is his criticisms stand in spite of the ad hominem attacks.
posted by mygraycatbongo at 3:31 PM on September 21 [7 favorites]

I would also suggest looking past the perceived personality defects of the writer to the substance of their words, which seem factual and compelling.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:00 PM on September 21 [13 favorites]

Anyone who follows the Michael Hobbes universe (particularly If Books Could Kill) has been exposed to the many, many times that Atlantic writers will ignore their own evidence to make a conservative point. In particular, the Atlantic has done this to spread transphobia, mostly through the with of Jesse Singal.
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:20 PM on September 21 [22 favorites]

This was published before the Atlantic's recent soft focus piece on insurrection supporters who have established themselves in DC and harassed and attacked people but that's another solid example of this magazine being at minimum dangerous and irresponsible, I'm absolutely livid about it.
posted by an octopus IRL at 4:30 PM on September 21 [10 favorites]

I don't know shit about Current Affairs, but The Atlantic pisses me off to no end. What sucks about it is how deceptive it is. The illustrations that accompany the articles are generally good, the articles themselves are generally literate, and inevitably it takes a few paragraphs for it to really dawn how full of shit the whole thing is. If it were obviously the work of morons it would be different. Instead you have to put work into it to discover that it's the work of morons.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:36 PM on September 21 [32 favorites]

"Its editors allow writers to make unsubstantiated claims, ignore contrary evidence, and use sloppy reasoning"

This is true of all print journalism. Robinson is singling out The Atlantic, but the exact same could be said of all other self-proclaimed high-brow publications:The Economist, The New Yorker, The NYT...
posted by BadgerDoctor at 4:38 PM on September 21 [4 favorites]

Instead you have to put work into it to discover that it's the work of morons.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:36 PM

Yes, this is the thing. Intellectual clickbait.

Their ridiculous piece on Louisiana old-money settler Gray-Stream and carbon waste injection is only one example of this trickery
posted by eustatic at 5:04 PM on September 21 [5 favorites]

NotLost, perhaps try the LA Review of Books or the London Review of Books?
posted by clew at 5:37 PM on September 21 [7 favorites]

Thanks for this.

I read The New Yorker for decades and occasionally had subscriptions but finally gave up after a puff piece on Ross Douthat. There were so many wonderful pieces over the years but that has been massively impacted by the rise of click bait journalism and I can't do it anymore.

I would buy the Atlantic from time to time but Andrew Sullivan cured me of that, and the self inflated normalizing of atrocious things and people became too much.

One of my brothers used to send me links to articles by people like David Brooks and Douthat from the Times, and a massive argument after dinner one night ended that. He truly believes listening to them makes him somehow more informed. It's horribly frustrating and I have no idea how to get through to him.

He's very bright but over time it's like a version of The Fox News effect has happened to him and his interest in 'getting the full discussion' but his version of it has become the tiny, self contained world of the mainstream press and it's odious pundits and their trite, binary discourse.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 6:06 PM on September 21 [11 favorites]

The Atlantic has a long history of publishing a mix of truly smart and insightful articles, along with pseudo-intelligent articles stuffed with bad arguments and bad research, advancing specious points of view.

I had a subscription, decades ago, but got exhausted by the wildly varying quality and reliability of the writing.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 7:20 PM on September 21 [9 favorites]

Yeah, the editorial lapses in the Atlantic are not good. However, I detect just a little bit of professional envy on the part of the article writer about the success of Atlantic compared to his own magazine.

One idea to fix both: Have a regular column in Current Affairs that criticizes the problematic articles in the Atlantic -- raise the readership numbers of CA while damping down the harm of the Atlantic.
posted by storybored at 8:03 PM on September 21 [4 favorites]

The intellectual depth of time magazine mixed with the willingness to make shit up and terrible views of the economist and covered in a sickly glaze of transphobia.
posted by zymil at 9:09 PM on September 21 [8 favorites]

Current Affairs is operated as a passion project by one guy (ever since he drove off the other staff). It regularly features random pictures of him wearing the most ridiculous outfit he can find. I don't think he is attempting to compete with the Atlantic or compares his work to them at all.
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:43 AM on September 22 [6 favorites]

It might be worth pointing out that most of The Atlantic's "intellectually dishonest" articles are those that push the conservative view. ("Why the US must never try to implement National Health," etc.)
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 6:43 AM on September 22 [7 favorites]

Ed Yong left the Atlantic last year and I was so happy because that magazine was no longer a millstone

And also, almost all conservative views are intellectually dishonest; it's like saying humans require oxygen or that the sun provides light and heat to the earth.

I'm glad the FPP article mentioned that the Atlantic is one of the publications most responsible for the acceptability and mainstreaming of anti-trans talking points in the United States.
posted by i used to be someone else at 6:49 AM on September 22 [11 favorites]

yeah intellectual dishonesty is central to conservative argumentation because in the public sphere they have to argue in terms of how their policy goals will benefit society as a whole. but they don’t want policies that are universally beneficial, they want policies that benefit the few at the expense of everyone else. but you can’t just say that, so you have to lie
posted by dis_integration at 8:46 AM on September 22 [10 favorites]

MetaFilter has a long history of publishing a mix of truly smart and insightful comments, along with pseudo-intelligent comments stuffed with bad arguments and bad research, advancing specious points of view
posted by Wolfdog at 10:38 AM on September 22 [10 favorites]

For real, though, I would pick Metafilter comments over the Atlantic any day of the week
posted by eustatic at 11:01 AM on September 22 [10 favorites]

Current Affairs, previously: Socialism for Me But Not for Thee
"The founder of socialist magazine Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson, has fired most of the staff for trying to start a worker co-op."

I thought about this too! I’ve tended to think about it whenever Robinson comes up. Did a google finally, and found this very long read by Current Affairs editor Yasmin Nair (who stresses she was reporting this out independently) that generally comes down on the whole thing being a hot mess of leftist infighting but that Robinson was generally misconstrued and the letter writers were way over their skis. I’m still in the middle of it, but it seems worth your time.


Anyhoo, The Atlantic is mostly bad but for some reason this particular take on it came off as a little precious to me at the start, a little too “I disagree with these theses so will claim the facts are wrong.” I should give Robinson his due time and dig into the whole thing.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:33 AM on September 23 [3 favorites]

meanwhile on this very site ...

Legalized Sports Gambling Was a Mistake (slTheAtlantic)
posted by philip-random at 1:45 PM on September 23

I mean, gambling does really suck. But this isn't exactly breaking news here. If The Atlantic published "Car Accidents: Not that Cool!" it would be right, but hardly insightful.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:25 PM on September 23 [4 favorites]

Few headlines, especially in these clickbait times, are.

While it does not seem to be the prevailing view in the comments, I think The Atlantic is a pretty good general-interest print magazine. Probably not the best, but well above average, especially in that centrist middlebrow lane.

Which means that there are completely valid critiques to be made of it from the left.

But it does leave me wondering what magazines people think are better.
posted by box at 4:58 PM on September 23

But it does leave me wondering what magazines people think are better.

Well, Current Affairs, for one.
posted by adrienneleigh at 5:11 PM on September 23 [2 favorites]

But it does leave me wondering what magazines people think are better.

Maybe a cross between Catalyst and Highlights.
posted by mittens at 5:15 PM on September 23 [2 favorites]

In These Times, The Baffler
posted by tofu_crouton at 7:34 PM on September 23 [3 favorites]

But it does leave me wondering what magazines people think are better.

The abovementioned London Review of Books, n+1
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 7:57 PM on September 23 [3 favorites]

if it's The Worst Magazine In America isn't every other magazine (in America) better?
posted by philip-random at 8:08 PM on September 23 [3 favorites]

The basic problem with this article is that if you take its thesis seriously, it undermines the critique of the Atlantic.

For example, the "broken windows theory," which has been weakly supported by subsequent research at best (at its minimal claim, that a window is broken tends to result in more broken windows, or that not cleaning up graffiti leads to more graffiti is kind of trivially true; the idea that this prevents more serious crime doesn't seem to be). Robinson declares that this theory has had major consequences — but while attacking the previous research for poor fact checking, and posing a series of rhetorical questions, fails to demonstrate how much of an impact the broken windows theory actually had. The notion of social disorder policing goes back at least as far as Jane Jacobs, continues through the notion of "defensible space," and myriad other "tough on crime" reactions to the urban collapse of the '60s and '70s.

But while he appends imagined editorial notes to other Atlantic articles, he fails to live up to this standard himself: How many arrests did "broken windows" lead to that wouldn't have happened otherwise? What's the dollar amount that having a slogan for this style of policing was worth — not just as represented by the Broken Windows authors, as we've already identified them as self-serving and unreliable. If Robinson thinks the Atlantic should die because of a lack of fact checking, it seems churlish to not hold himself to the same standard (and, to engage in a little churlishness of my own, an inability to hold himself to the standard he demands of others has been a significant feature of his own labor relations).

Further, the entire piece is cherry picked, something Robinson repeatedly complains about the Atlantic doing. If he can complain about Broken Windows, he should acknowledge the Case for Reparations, rather than breezily waving towards Coates.

This all reads like another bit of masturbatory ranting by Robinson in his own organ about how the rest of the libs can't possibly also read these issues and divine some of the same criticisms, and ignores his own tendentious biases to present himself as an honest broker — the article on why "settler colonialism" is a bad lens both already acknowledged some of the points he makes, just not with the vehemence he'd prefer, and he ignores the broader point about how the complications of the "settler colonialism" theoretically framework break down the probative and explanatory value of the ideological tool. Just because it's one of Robinson's favorite tools doesn't mean it's always appropriate (i.e. when folks on twitter dismiss Druze casualties of Hezbollah as settlers on stolen land).

Frankly, with Robinson's sustained tendentious indignation and ideological, hypocritical contrarianism, it's only a matter of time until we see his byline in the Atlantic, too.
posted by klangklangston at 10:20 PM on September 23 [3 favorites]

I like The New Yorker, me (scandalous!) and the New York Review of Books - but realistically, I never actually read the NYRB. The New Yorker has pretty good phone apps that keep it front and center, tho’ I am still quite pissy at them about Biden. Pro Oublica and The Marshall Project I both think of as real gold standards, tho’ the latter is a bit niche. Mother Jones is also great, but like all of these not a regular part of the rotation.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:24 AM on September 24

The NYRB is by far my favorite journal, every freaking month they bring it, an and bring it hard. I'd never encounter poetry or opera in the wild otherwise, but I love they're pieces on those two and a zillion other areas. Someday I'll make a post comparing that amazing journal (and N+1. the LARB etc) against the atrocious NYT et all.
posted by WatTylerJr at 2:13 PM on September 24 [3 favorites]

On the other hand, the Atlantic - yeeeeeeesssssh! Many year subscriber, and it wasn't the pro-genocide pieces, the Cletus safaris, or even the transphobia (although that should've been enough).

It was when thatchy Atlantic contributors and beyond know it all twit Derek Thompson (holy crap he may be the most insufferable person in media) had some fake 'feminist' anti-woke vigilante on his podcast (she wrote some bullshit right wing crap in some sort of 'serious' journal) and she was on to be the fake expert explaining the gender gap esp. among younger women. Entire premise was that it is on young women to change themselves and their behavior to appease young men who don't like them anymore. It was unreal!

But the most amazing part was when the twit Thomson asked her what the most pressing issue facing young women was (again in the context was how they should conform themselves to the intel communities needs) - she answered, in all seriousness, that the epidemic of 'cancel culture;' and 'anti-first amendment' policies pushed by so called progressives, ON CAMPUSES, were far and away the most important issues facing young women. And this was a few weeks after DOBBS! And the idiot Thomson, after drooling over the excellence and brilliance of his guest actually said he was glad they had such a wide ranging discussion cause it ensured that they didn't miss anything important. ANYTHING... after Dobbs....

Cancelled that subscription immediately, never giving them a dime....
posted by WatTylerJr at 2:26 PM on September 24 [3 favorites]