January 22, 2008

| The Ideas! The Ideas! >>

The Atlantic, favorite magazine of my middle youth, was kinda lame for a while there, but it’s been getting good again — a fact that had been bumming me out because, of course, I couldn’t link to the subscriber-only stories.

Until today.

So let us celebrate the magazine’s resurgence and web-savvy with a couple of pointers:

• The new James Fallows piece on China is exactly what got me into the Atlantic in the first place: Themes of politics and economics, hugely abstract ideas, giant global actors and their dilemmas, etc. I love it that there’s none of the usual attempt to concrete-ize and personalize here: No narrative intro with a factory worker in China, for instance. The only narrative in the piece involves the voyage of a U.S. dollar to China and back. I could not love it more.
• Caitlin Flanagan’s piece about Katie Couric was the last one I read in this issue, and I almost didn’t read it at all. Thank goodness my train was slow, because it was a revelation, in large part because it’s as much about Caitlin Flanagan as it is about Katie Couric. Beautifully written, too: Flanagan is a great storyteller and has perfect “tone control,” if you know what I mean.

Posted January 22, 2008 at 10:44 | Comments (4) | Permasnark
File under: Books, Writing & Such, Briefly Noted, Journalism