In his very first communication to his staff, back in March of this year, James Bennet, the new editor of the Atlantic Monthly had to break the news that the famed, award-winning editor-writer duo of Cullen Murphy and William Langewiesche had quit the magazine. They had gone off to glossier (and presumably more lucrative) pastures at Vanity Fair. The two had been at the source of so much of the publication’s recent excellence — David Carr, in a column, called them the “Tracy and Hepburn of the Atlantic Monthly for the last 15 years” — that their loss was bound to leave a big hole. Langewiesche alone had been nominated for eight National Magazine Awards in the last eight years (including those for his breathtaking look at the Ground Zero cleanup); as a magazine, the Atlantic itself had just received eight nominations for its work in 2005, in no small part due to Murphy’s leadership.
“We will miss both of these extraordinary men, but we will honor their record here most by finding and nurturing other great talents,” Bennet wrote in his memo. “This magazine is the proper home for the most deeply reported and powerfully told stories in journalism.”
But the loss of the two giants was only one of many potential pitfalls facing Bennet as he took the helm of the 149-year-old magazine. It had just moved its office from Boston, where it had been housed since 1857, to Washington, D.C. This, too, created a certain amount of tribulation, with much of the staff refusing to make the move.
Over half a year has passed now since the start of Bennet’s tenure and the move to D.C., and it’s worth taking a look to see where the Atlantic is — to see, mostly, if in a new town and with a new boss, it has lost its luster.
Bennet’s most recent job before the Atlantic was as the Jerusalem bureau chief for the New York Times — not an easy gig. No foreign assignment is more closely scrutinized. And by all accounts Bennet did a great job. He managed to consistently hear the smaller, whispering voices in a place where screaming is the norm. One piece in particular left a strong impression on us. In the middle of the second intifada, with buses exploding in the streets of Jerusalem almost weekly, Bennet took a three-day bus ride throughout all of Israel, recording the conversations, jokes, and worries of ordinary Israelis. His trip, Bennet wrote, “began in Jerusalem, in the randomly chosen company of a 34-year-old yeshiva student born in Rhode Island who fears for his adopted country’s soul. It ended in the same coveted city in the company of a 21-year-old German convert to Judaism, a paratrooper on fire with those Zionist pioneers’ dreams, his fingernails cracked and his hands stained purple from harvesting grapes in the Golan Heights.”
Bennet had worked at the Times for a few years before this assignment, but the task of covering the conflict seemed to free up his writing and hone his intellect and analytical skills. When he left the paper earlier this year, Bill Keller noted that Bennet was “an extraordinary talent — voraciously curious, an original thinker and a dazzling writer.” But he also had a warning, a little ominous in tone: “He’ll have to slow his heartbeat to the pace of a monthly, which may be frustrating for a guy so deeply engaged in the news …”
Well, if there is a verdict to render on what this sensibility, the newsman’s sensibility, has brought to the magazine, then we think it a positive one. The Atlantic has always strived to be topical — Langewiesche’s Ground Zero series being a case in point — but looking at the last few issues we see a consistent commitment to not just topicality, but more importantly to providing stories that add and deepen profoundly the knowledge we glean from the newspaper everyday.
Take the cover story of the magazine’s upcoming October issue. It’s a long piece by Robert Kaplan about North Korea. With our attention these days turned to the Middle East, it would seem a little off topic to look even further eastward to the long-festering and seemingly static problem of the Koreas. But Kaplan does and makes a convincing case that North Korea might be closer to internal implosion than we think and that this could create a situation for us that would make “Iraq and Afghanistan look clean by comparison.”
What’s impressive about this article is that Kaplan really does go beyond the news of what North Korea and Kim Jong Il are doing and plays out a series of scarily realistic scenarios that would be the likely outcomes if the country were to collapse. He is confident and very specific, the result, surely, of much research. Writing, for example, about what a North Korean attack on the south would look like, he eschews popular belief about the use of non-conventional warfare and, instead, describes it thus: North Korea “would likely resort instead to a low-grade demonstration of ‘shock and awe,’ using its 13,000 artillery pieces and multiple-rocket launchers to fire more than 300,000 shells per hour on the South Korean capital, where close to half the nation’s 49 million people live. The widespread havoc this would cause would be amplified by North Korean special-operations forces, which would infiltrate the South to sabotage water plants and train and bus terminals. Meanwhile, the North Korean People’s Army would march on the city of Uijongbu, north of Seoul, from which it could cross over the Han River and bypass Seoul from the east.”
The specificity and detail is helpful. It is also the kind of article that a newspaper would not do, because it is ultimately hypothetical. By being engaged with the immediate news, but giving itself the freedom to extend beyond it, this type of story provides an excellent service — similar to James Fallows’ prophetic November 2002 article “The Fifty-First State?,” about the Iraq catastrophe that was then just a glint in Donald Rumsfeld’s eye.
There are other stories since Bennet’s arrival that strike us as containing this same sensibility. The July/August issue, for example, provided two long articles that looked at the “War on Terror.” One, about the Internet-savvy adherents of al Qaeda, showed us the Islamic movement from an angle we don’t usually see. The profile of Musab al-Zarqawi, who was conveniently killed moments before the magazine went to print, dug deeper into the man than any newspaper had yet done.
It could be argued that these articles are consistent with the general excellence the Atlantic has long displayed, but we think Bennet has added something. Beyond simply keeping up the standards and adjusting, contrary to Keller’s warning, to the metabolism of a monthly, the magazine strikes us as even more relevant, more topical, more indispensable in the last few months than in recent memory.
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.