The Atlantic

Andrea Mitchell started it.

It was she who told viewers of NBC’s The Nightly News With Brian Williams on Thursday, Nov. 13, that Hillary Clinton “is under consideration to be secretary of state.”

Since then, nobody seems to have known what to think. But that hasn’t ground the Madame Secretary boomlet to a halt—on the contrary, it only accelerated it! Over the past few days, we’ve heard: Hillary is under consideration for the job. She’s been offered the job! She hasn’t been offered the job (which was only news because someone else had said she had).

Last night, we read that she had been offered the job, and not only that, she was going to accept it! More recently, it’s been “unclear,” but her husband is being vetted—that’s the news of the day for Nov.  read more »

The Atlantic's press reps just sent out a release announcing the hiring of Bob Cohn as editorial director of the 151-year-old magazine's Web site. Mr. Cohn, most recently Executive Editor of Wired, will be filling the newly-created job in The Atlantic's Washington, D.C. offices.

In a statement, Atlantic editor James Bennet said:

'Bob brings to The Atlantic a superb record as an editor and writer, and a deep understanding of the relationship between print and online brands. With his stewardship, we look forward to further engaging our readers with provocative and dynamic content while inspiring the national conversation.'

According to the release, theatlantic.com had 36.8 million page views in October.

We’re having trouble locating a site on our RSS feed that hasn’t been overtaken by election live-blogging. Jezebel is. Time too. The Daily Cartoonist is, we kid you not, trying to live blog presidential election cartoons. You’re probably too busy live-blogging to even read this post.

But should you have a spare second between calling Wisconsin for Obama and saying petty things about David Gergen’s brace of hair, we want to recommend The Atlantic’s Live Election Analysis—a staid and awfully Atlantic-like name for what’s actually a hilarious group twitter account.

It’s a little bit like reading a stage play about a newspaper: the whole staff shouting at and past one another, teasing, joking, screwballing around, calling out developments as they break. It’s His Girl Friday for wonks, which we guess tonight would make Marc Ambinder Cary Grant.

The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates points us towards an article by Rex W. Huppke in yesterday's Chicago Tribune in which a member of the Communist Party USA denounces Republican presidential nominee John McCain's assertion that his opponent's economic plan is tantamount to socialism.

Mr. Huppke quotes John Bachtell as saying:

'Red baiting is really the last refuge of scoundrels... It has nothing to do with the issues that are confronting the American people right now. It's just a big diversion.'

Mr. Huppke has a little too much fun cracking jokes about Mr. Bachtell and his comrades, but he's not the only one with reds on the brain this week.  read more »

With nearly every headline about the future of print media a grim one, last evening seemed like bad timing for the re-branding of a 150-year-old thought-leader magazine often seen as stodgy and behind the times.

But it was an unseasonably warm autumn night, the moon was full, the Dow had recovered a historic 936 points the day before--and The Atlantic was super-excited about their new brand.

The re-branding campaign and redesign of the magazine and website had been six months and a $1.5 million campaign budget in the making, with the help of EuroRSCG and Michael Bierut of Pentagram. The result? Serious is hip! Thinking is cool! Headlines from the magazine's last two years were wrought in aggressive neon throughout Chelsea's Exit gallery, looming like Orwellian aphorisms: "THINK AGAIN."  read more »

For the last few months, The Atlantic's Web site has featured a call for readers to submit questions for a new advice columnist. James Bennet, the magazine's editor, has been mum about the writer his magazine had enlisted as its answer to Ask Amy.

A post on Pentagram's blog reveals all: The Atlantic's new advice column will be called "What's Your Problem?" and be written by Jeffrey Goldberg. (Pentagram link comes via Kottke.)  read more »

One more addition to Graydon Carter's stable: longtime Atlantic writer and Blackhawk Down author Mark Bowden is dropping his exclusive contract with The Atlantic and signing a two-story-a-year contract with Vanity Fair.

In a landscape where there are no available media jobs, and there's virtually no mobility in the market, Mr. Bowden appears to have written his ticket. He told The Observer that after six years on contract at The Atlantic, it was a decision that largely came down to money.  read more »

The Atlantic's PR reps just sent out some PDFs of the magazine's new look, as overseen and conceived by editor James Bennet and Pentagram's Michael Bierut.

In an essay in the November issue of the 151-year-old magazine, Mr. Beirut writes:

I was both honored and daunted to receive the commission to create a new design for The Atlantic. I know the magazine well, having been a faithful reader for the past 20 years, and unlike many designers, I have a sometimes unhelpful suspicion of change. How could we make it new and better without threatening the things that readers like me enjoy so much? It's a hard problem.

One possible solution: Andrew Sullivan. A lot of Andrew Sullivan. Like, full-page spreads of Andrew Sullivan's face, as the above layout shows.

Surely one of the pleasures of having a magazine with a 150-year archive is the ability to pull stories from the past and make them a part of the news cycle. On the day of vice presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin, The Atlantic has done just that, presenting "Is the Vice Presidency Necessary?" by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. from May 1974.

Writing a generation before Dick Cheney added unprecedented power to the traditional role of vice president, the late Mr. Schlesinger, a Pulitzer prize winning historian and J.F.K. special assistant, wrote:

[T]he vice presidency is makework. Presidents spend time that might be put to far better use trying to figure out ways of keeping their Vice Presidents busy and especially of getting them out of town. The vice presidency remains, as John N. Garner said, 'a spare tire on the automobile of government.' As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California, there is no there there.  read more »

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg is reporting on his blog that photographer Jill Greenberg has been dropped by her photo agency, Vaughan Hannigan Artists. A call to the agency by Media Mob confirmed the news.

As you may have already read elsewhere, Ms. Greenberg created controversy by posting unflattering and grotesquely retouched outtakes from her John McCain cover shoot for The Atlantic on her site, The Manipulator. Among the retouched photos is one showing the Republican Presidential nominee with bloody shark teeth beneath the headline "I Am A Bloodthirsty Warmonger" and another showing a primate defecating on Mr. McCain's head. (As far as choice of target and sharpness of message goes, Ms. Greenberg's photos were far from Heartfield-level attacks on the candidate.)  read more »

As a tribute to the late David Foster Wallace, Harper's Magazine, where the writer was a contributing editor, has made his work available on the Web to non-subscribers. Included in the collection of PDFs is Mr. Wallace's "Shipping Out," which formed the basis for his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The January 1996 piece follows Mr. Wallace on an exceedingly miserable luxury cruise to the Caribbean.

Here is Mr. Wallace's bravura description of his cabin's bathroom:

The sink is huge, and its bowl is deep without seeming precipitous or ungentle of grade. Good plate mirror covers the whole wall over the sink.  read more »

The September 1/8, 2008 "Special Convention Issue" of The Nation features a striking cover of Barack Obama as a mosaic composed of hundreds of smaller images of other people, suggesting that Senator Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, doesn't just stand for himself: He is all of us united. The cover line says it all: "What He's Made Of." (Like Soylent Green, he's made out of people.)

But the image, credited to "Gene Case & Stephen Bling/Avenging Angel From a Poster by Shepard Fairey, Illustrations by Christopher Serra," is also striking for its similarity to the cover of The Atlantic from December 2007, which also featured Senator Obama as the sum of many, many parts.  read more »

In a Q&A on The Washington Post's Web site today, political reporter Anne Kornblut addresses the "lie" that Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer was spreading about her saying that she wound up at The Washington Post because she was fired by The New York Times. We all learned about this tiny bit of gossip from the Joshua Green's story in the September issue of The Atlantic that featured all those Hillary '08 internal emails, including one from Post managing editor Phil Bennett complaining that Mr. Singer was making this one up.

Ms. Kornblut says, "It was a very unfortunate incident involving a lie one of the press folks told to undermine a story I had written. I didn't get an apology from the original source, but the campaign manager, Maggie Williams, offered a very kind one. And my bosses here at The Post were beyond wonderful in backing me up."  read more »

Apparently it's not just fake monsters that drive Web site traffic during the dog days of summer: According to a press release from The Atlantic's press reps, the magazine's site has seen a traffic increase after posting internal Clinton '08 memos as part of Joshua Green's The Front-Runner's Fall, from the September issue.

From the release:

On Tuesday, August 12, traffic to TheAtlantic.com reached an all-time high as the site posted a highly-anticipated article by Joshua Green about leaked memos from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. With nearly 1.3 million pageviews, it received 150% more traffic than the previous record day (799,000) and almost three times the traffic of the daily site average (450,000).  read more »

Eighteen months after former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld retreated from his post under heavy criticism for, among other things, mishandling the invasion of Iraq and legitimizing torture as an interrogation technique, some Washington insiders are revisiting his strategies and tactics.

Notably, resurrecting Rumsfeld's idea - a comprehensive plan to overhaul the military - hasn't been reintroduced into the public dialog by die-hard neo-conservatives. The project is being led by a faction of security-obsessed Democrats.

Several weeks ago, military analyst Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution published a 60-page report, "Unfinished Business: U.S. Overseas Military presence in the 21st Century," which recommended that the next president return to Rumsfeld's "chief intellectual and policy accomplishment during his six-year tenure at the Pentagon.  read more »

"It's really easy to get killed in Iraq," says Phillip Robertson, a freelancer who covered the war for Salon and wrote the introduction to the book Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq.

"They want to kill you. All you have to do is give them a chance and somebody will kill you or kidnap you." Mr. Robertson had his own near-kidnap experience, but he managed to get away. His driver's car was totaled, but Salon paid for a replacement. "No one has ever been killed because of me," he says. "And I'm very, very proud of that. There have been repercussions because of my stories but I can look you in the eye and say no one has been seriously hurt because of me."  read more »

This month's Atlantic cover story by Nicholas Carr which asks the pressing question "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?"

After examining several ways in which our brains have been rewired by our dependence on the web, Mr. Carr notes:

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed...  read more »

In a bit of marital stunt journalism, Slate's David Plotz and The Atlantic's Hanna Rosin decided to spend a whole day 15 feet apart and report on their experiences. (They also let Slate V's camera' follow them.)  read more »

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg—who joined the magazine from The New Yorker last year—has started a blog.

His first entry, which features an endearingly retro Public Enemy reference as its title, begins with the self-effacing words, "This is almost certainly a mistake." Well, it can't be as big a mistake as championing the invasion of Iraq relying (according to Harper's Ken Silverstein), "heavily on administration sources and war hawks (and in at least one crucial case, a fabricator)."

In March, Goldberg offered a mea culpa on Slate:

I wanted very much for the liberation of Iraq to succeed, for many reasons. I wasn't sure there was an alternative to Saddam's removal, in part because the sanctions regime was collapsing. I believed that Saddam's nuclear ambitions posed an almost immediate threat to national security. I believed that Saddam was a supporter of terrorism.  read more »