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@cammerman
Thanks for the link. The Atlantic has gone down the toilet and I’ve pretty much stopped reading it, but that means I’ve been missing Adam Serwer! Good to know he’s going strong as ever.
@inthehands I keep seeing people say the Atlantic is going down the toilet, but I'm not sure what kind of thing is being referred to. I still find them to be generally far better than NYT or WaPo. But maybe that's a low bar now?
@cammerman
The concern broadly is about editorial leadership. The Atlantic has nursed an anti-trans undercurrent for a while (sometimes not so “under”), and more recently have published some very disturbing points of view about the war in Gaza. I think those have been the primary irritants, though not the only ones.
@cammerman @inthehands The reason I canceled my subscription as the pandemic passed its peak, despite Ed Yong’s excellent work, was because they seemed increasingly to have that Times habit of developing an opinion and harping on it endlessly. (“But her emails!”, WMDs, Wen Ho Lee, bystander apathy, etc.) (1/4)
For example, no dumbass action by college kids or feminists seemed to go without another 2000 words about how this is absolutely symptomatic of What’s Wrong With Our Society.
Quite frequently, people were presented as being reasonable centrists, then when I did a little digging, they turned out to be crackpots using motivated reasoning and dodgy data. Jonathan Haidt is the poster child for that type. (2/4)
The tipping point was an article about pandemic school closures. The author presented herself as a dispassionate, data-driven academic, but it turned out she had a preexisting agenda and was using the pandemic as another way to push it. (3/4)
She made much of how children have a low chance of dying from Covid. She conspicuously (to me) did not address the brute fact all parents know: viruses *created* children so they (the viruses) would have an immunology naive host in which to replicate like mad and then make the leap to adults. Like frail grandparents. It was an implicitly Thatcherist take: there is no such thing as society, and it is absurd for individuals to take action to help people they don’t know. (4/4)
@cammerman @inthehands Jesse Singal is a real big part of it