“Those who stay in rural Iowa are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking in educated) to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that ‘The sun’ll come out tomorrow.’”
Just ahead of the
Iowa Caucus, New Jersey native turned University of Iowa Professor
Stephen Bloom has published a
piece in The Atlantic that
has caused quite a stir in the heartland. The piece, which is very critical of the Hawkeye State and her inhabitants, has a lot of
Iowans on the defensive, with one article calling Bloom the
"Michelangelo of hick-punching." Stephens has said the
"feedback has been frightening," but he stands by his story. Perhaps a
1971 Harper's piece on Iowa captures the state with a bit more nuance.
posted by Lutoslawski
on Dec 13, 2011 -
134 comments
The Atlantic's Ta-nehisi Coates sparks months of debate with his contention that
The Civil War Isn't Tragic. "The Civil War is our revolution. It ended slavery, and birthed both modern America, and modern black America.
That can never be tragic to me."
[more inside]
posted by Danila
on Aug 25, 2011 -
116 comments
"With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches," [Google CEO Eric Schmidt] said. "We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been.
We can more or less know what you're thinking about... We can look at bad behavior and modify it."
The Atlantic's editor James Bennet discusses with Schmidt how lobbyists write America's laws, how America's research universities are the best in the world, how the Chinese are going all-out in investing in their infrastructure, how the US should have allowed automakers to fail, and ultimately Google's evolving role in an technologically-augmented society in this
broad, interesting and scary interview (~25 min Flash video) [
via]
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Oct 4, 2010 -
55 comments
Who's Your Daddy? Atlantic Monthly staff writer Caitlin Flanagan considers the impact of father-daughter relationships and once again opines about the emotional inner life of adolescent girls. Building off Alec Baldwin's
much-publicized voicemail invective to his 11 year-old daughter, Flanagan concludes that apart from the celebrity personages, the Baldwin feud embodied all the classic traits of filial love between men and their little girls: "amorous engagement, maternal jealousy, and paternal protectiveness."
posted by zoomorphic
on Apr 20, 2009 -
49 comments
"American air superiority has been so complete for so long that we take it for granted. For more than half a century, we’ve made only rare use of the aerial-combat skills of a man like Cesar Rodriguez, who retired two years ago with more air-to-air kills than any other active-duty fighter pilot. But our technological edge is eroding. ... Now we have a choice. We can stock the Air Force with the expensive, cutting-edge F‑22—maintaining our technological superiority at great expense to our Treasury. Or we can go back to a time when the cost of air supremacy was paid in the blood of men like Rodriguez." -
The Last Ace, a feature article in this month's
The Atlantic by author
Mark Bowden.
posted by billysumday
on Feb 15, 2009 -
63 comments
From
The Atlantic, a
fun bunch of montages of interesting people answering questions like "What is the cost of being a nerd?", "When is evil cool?" and "Are good books bad for you?" (Accompanies a
redesign of magazine as well as of the
web site.
In seeking readers and advertisers, publications like The Atlantic and The Economist, known as thought-leader magazines, have long tried to make up in cleverness what they lack in wallet power.)
posted by Non Prosequitur
on Oct 25, 2008 -
27 comments
Legendary record man and music producer
Jerry Wexler died on August 15, at the age of 91. His keen insight, and his deep love and appreciation for the artists he worked with resulted in an extraordinary enriching of American music.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Aug 17, 2008 -
16 comments
Is Google Making Us Stupid? "My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
[more inside]
posted by WCityMike
on Jun 10, 2008 -
85 comments
Sex and the College Girl, by Norah Johnson A view from an educated woman in the 1950s: "Two criticisms rise above the rest: people in college are promiscuous, for one thing, and, for another, they are getting married and having children too early. These are interesting observations because they contradict each other."
posted by shivohum
on Nov 20, 2007 -
24 comments
Goodbye to All That. A great look at the Obama candidacy, and the culture wars behind it, by Andrew Sullivan, featured in the December 2007 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
posted by matkline
on Nov 4, 2007 -
143 comments
SaveLivesInMay - "I have received information psychically, which is corroborated by scientific data, according to which on
May 25, 2006 a giant tsunami will occur in the Atlantic Ocean, brought about by the impact of a comet fragment which will provoke the eruption of under-sea volcanoes. Waves up to 200 m high will reach coastlines located above and below the Tropic of Cancer."
Are you at risk? Meanwhile,
FEMA just happens to be preoccupied on the
Wrong West Coast.
posted by jahmoon
on May 24, 2006 -
51 comments
The Atlantic Ideas Tour It's been almost 150 years since a group of writers that included a group of writers that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and James Russell Lowell founded
The Atlantic Monthly. The magazine is klcking off a year–long celebration of its
upcoming 150th anniversary by having each issue this year based around articles from their archives.
[more inside]
posted by kirkaracha
on Jan 19, 2006 -
15 comments
Joshua Green wrote an interesting and insightful piece regarding the current state of political advertisements.
Here is an example of an ad by a media consultant he refers to, based in Pittsburgh.
Another spin here. I've often wondered why they're so predictable. The Atlantic gives us a glimpse into poly. ad history and, quite possibly, its future.
posted by BlueTrain
on Jul 6, 2004 -
8 comments
Those towering Dutchmen The height of the average American is roughly the same as it was during the Revolutionary war. The heights of many northwestern Europeans continue to shoot up. Is this simply genetics at work, or could Bush and the Republicans possibly be at fault here?
posted by rks404
on Mar 30, 2004 -
38 comments
An American in Mongolia. A new breed of American soldier—call him the soldier-diplomat—has come into being since the end of the Cold War. Meet the colonel who was our man in Mongolia, an officer who probably wielded more local influence than many Mongol rulers of yore.
posted by kablam
on Feb 20, 2004 -
7 comments
The State of the Union & The Super Bowl: Two of the biggest television events of the year occurred at almost the same time in 2003, and from where I'm sitting, each seems about as relevant as the other. Both events are pageants of performance and strategy, featuring a lineup of carefully selected
special guest stars, played to an audience that mostly supports one of two sides, whose preference is largely dependent on geographical and demographical influences.
So, now that both are over, for your continued entertainment, I present
The Real State of the Union, as posited by the good folks of the Atlantic Monthly. If no more relevant than the other two, I hope this one's at least more enjoyable.
posted by grrarrgh00
on Jan 30, 2003 -
12 comments
Canada's forgotten weapons of mass destruction. Shortly after the end of World War II, the Canadian navy began to dispose of its surplus chemical weapons by dumping them off the shore of Atlantic Canada. Large quantities of chemical agents, including mustard gas, were loaded onto barges and scuttled at undisclosed locations.
Over 50 years later, some of these military dumpsites have become lost due to poor record keeping. With increasing offshore oil exploration and a commercially successful shellfish industry, there's a possibility that these forgotten chemical agents could
return to the coasts of "Canada's Ocean Playground".
posted by Caffine_Fiend
on Jan 13, 2003 -
14 comments
