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

"With Germany arming at breakneck speed, England lost in a pacifist dream, France corrupt and torn by dissension, America remote and indifferent... do you not tremble for your children?" ― Winston Churchill, 1935. The World War II Database connects people, events, photographs, and other elements of history in relational db form to tell the story of the 20th century's 2nd great war.
posted by netbros on Mar 13, 2009 - 13 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

Jennifer Figge a 56 year old mother turned adventurer is the first woman to swim across the frigid Atlantic Ocean!. Or so they thought...
posted by Mastercheddaar on Feb 11, 2009 - 36 comments

Trump Entertainment is about to run out of the third extension of its debt payments. Station Casinos is offering its investors as little as 10 cents on the dollar in a pre-packaged bankruptcy. Wynn Resorts is cutting staff hours and bonuses to avoid layoffs. MGM Mirage may see a default rate of 30% on its City Center condominiums. Harrah's long-term debt has doubled. There are no more traffic jams on the Strip. Oh... and the Borgata Hotel in Atlantic City had to settle a $70 million sexual harassment lawsuit brought by its beverage servers. In short: times are tough.
posted by Joe Beese on Feb 9, 2009 - 61 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

The Atlantic Monthly has helpfully indexed literary interviews from its archives. These include, among others, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, Dennis Lehane, Zadie Smith, Charles Simic, Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag and John Irving.
posted by Kattullus on May 31, 2008 - 5 comments

A transatlantic tunnel, hurrah!
posted by Phanx on May 16, 2008 - 43 comments

Atlantic Magazine opens its archives. Atlantic Magazine announced today that they will drop subscriber-only access to the site, giving full access to every issue of the last 12 years. Where to start? Well, I particularly recommend David Foster Wallace's fascinating examination of right-wing talk radio (DFW trademark footnotes intact), Hitler's Forgotten Library, and Eric Schlosser's The Prison-Industrial Complex. (via)
posted by Horace Rumpole on Jan 22, 2008 - 51 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

The Golden Age of Piracy [video/audio] in the Atlantic peaked as the War of Spanish Succession ended. Piracy was a natural progression for the privateers [2] and buccaneers who had lost their sanctioned prey, and faced little resistance due to a lack of strong government in the majority of the American Colonies. Meanwhile captured naval seamen and slaves often willingly joined with pirates, or fled brutal treatment for the egalitarianism of piracy. This motley crew of motives were united in pirate democracy, laid down in a pirate code, preparing the way for democracy in the United States. But as the popularity of pirate life and pirate utopias grew strong, they became a pest to be mercilessly crushed by colonial opposition and the British navy.
posted by MetaMonkey on Aug 6, 2006 - 11 comments

Start or stop Atlantica. [via CBC]
posted by boost ventilator on Jun 11, 2006 - 30 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

A Picture of the Future, You're not in It An address to the John F. Kennedy School of Government...September 11th, 2011
posted by timsteil on Jan 9, 2005 - 41 comments

Laws Concerning Food and Drink; Lamentations of the Father. Something to give all parents a chuckle.
posted by iffley on Jul 14, 2004 - 27 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

Inside the shadowy world of oppo. Interesting long article from the Atlantic about playing dirty in US election campaigns. "We think of ourselves as the creators of the ammunition in a war. We make the bullets."
posted by CunningLinguist on May 15, 2004 - 9 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

Atlantic Ocean Abrupt Temperature Drop A Mystery for Scientists.
posted by stbalbach on Aug 11, 2003 - 12 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

I am descended from Charlemagne! And you are too. I found tantalizing ideas in this Atlantic Interview of Steve Olson. Unfortunately, his Atlantic article is not available (for free, anyways). He mentioned, in the interview, the work of Humphrys and Chang. A fwe Google searches later, among a labyrinth of pages about Royal descents, I FOUND! what I was looking for [More inside]
posted by vacapinta on May 11, 2002 - 13 comments

"They are, it is true, almost laughably simple by comparison with real people and real societies, but that is exactly the point. If even the crudest toy societies take on a life and a logic of their own, then it must be a safe bet that real societies, too, have their own biographies." Things have certainly gotten more interesting in the years since John Conway invented the game of life.
posted by tdismukes on Apr 2, 2002 - 20 comments

Looking the World in the Eye Huntington, a Harvard prof., lays out his vision for the future of the clash of civilizations in an article in The Atlantic Monthly. The main points are- • The fact that the world is modernizing does not mean that it is Westernizing. The impact of urbanization and mass communications, coupled with poverty and ethnic divisions, will not lead to peoples' everywhere thinking as we do. • Asia, despite its ups and downs, is expanding militarily and economically. Islam is exploding demographically. The West may be declining in relative influence. • Culture-consciousness is getting stronger, not weaker, and states or peoples may band together because of cul tural similarities rather than because of ideological ones, as in the past. • The Western belief that parliamentary democracy and free markets are suitable for everyone will bring the West into conflict with civilizations—notably, Islam and the Chinese— that think differently. • In a multi-polar world based loosely on civilizations rather than on ideologies, Americans must reaffirm their Western identity.
posted by SandeepKrishnamurthy on Nov 28, 2001 - 8 comments

A former CIA operative explains why the terrorist Usama bin Ladin has little to fear from American intelligence. From the Atlantic an inside look at the non-existence of US intelligence in the Afghanistan region: Unless one of bin Ladin's foot soldiers walks through the door of a U.S. consulate or embassy, the odds that a CIA counterterrorist officer will ever see one are extremely poor.
posted by talos on Sep 13, 2001 - 15 comments

D-Day was 57 years ago yesterday. It was 16 years before an article in the Atlantic finally provided Americans an unvarnished account of the carnage that was Omaha Beach that day. I'm in awe of what these 19-year-olds went through.
posted by luser on Jun 7, 2001 - 1 comment

Neo-paganism is an invented tradition? A fairly persuasive Atlantic Monthly article argues that the dogma behind neopaganism is, well, made up. I swear I'm not just posting this to disprove Sean's gripe about which religions are ok to criticize on Mefi.
posted by norm on Dec 28, 2000 - 33 comments

Did you know that a woman is rowing solo across the Atlantic? She's almost done, hopefully finishing the journey in the next week or two. Just the thought of it blows me away...
posted by mathowie on Nov 21, 1999 - 0 comments