Monday, August 15, 2005
(10:16 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Middle-Brow
My subscription to The New Yorker has expired, of natural causes. God willing, my subscription to The Atlantic Monthly will soon meet the same fate. I have, however, renewed my Harper's subscription for a term of two more years (deploying the "bill me later" option), and I just decided to take a chance based on so many enthusiastic recommendations and subscribe to n+1. I picked up a copy of the New York Review of Books and was impressed by the international coverage, but I'm far from ready to commit. So take this first paragraph as a request for recommendations as to my consumption of periodical literature. (Maybe I should start reading journals in my field? No! That's ridiculous!)I have some complaints about The New Yorker, but more particularly about The Atlantic Monthly. It seems that every month, there is a cover story debunking some conventional wisdom or other, seemingly for its own sake. Of course, Harper's does this, too, but they do it from a relentlessly pessimistic point of view, whereas The Atlantic Monthly seems to thrive on a tone of smug bemusement -- "aren't all these conservatives and liberals so funny?" Always with the false symmetry: "Issue X: Why Both Conservatives and Liberals Get It Wrong." I'm not asking the magazine to be a Democratic Party rag by any means, and I think the liberal mainstream view of things (to the extent that it even exists) is likely to be wrong in a significant number of cases -- it's just the superficial way of packaging everything that bothers me. They continue to publish the imperialist/militarist Robert Kaplan, apparently in the interests of having diversity of opinion. Then there's also the fact that every big paradigm-shifting story seems to come about six months too late -- the series of Fallows stories on Iraq, the story in the recent issue about how Yassir Arafat was a bad guy (which seems strangely both too soon and too late), etc.
Christopher Hitchens has a set place in the reviews section, even though he only ever talks about the politics of canonical twentieth-century authors. At first, I enjoyed the Hitchens pieces simply for the biographical background, but it's grown tiresome. Similarly, the Anglophile tendancies of the review section -- which takes up far too much of the editorial space anyway -- have grown tiresome. Their fiction selections are beyond boring, and their poetry consistently sucks (The New Yorker is much better on the latter, but only somewhat on the former).
Finally, The Atlantic Monthly simply has too many ads for the kind of publication it is. One expects to have to dig through twenty pages of ads to get to the table of contents in a magazine discussing Jennifer Aniston's personal life, but not to get to an unconventional view of Social Security. It's like a "special issue" of The New Yorker (which have basically the same amount of actual editorial content as any other issue, but are twice as thick due to the huge number of inserts, "special advertising sections," etc.), except every month. Overall: two thumbs down.
