The July/August Atlantic Monthly

Toward the back of the July/August 2002 Atlantic Monthly, senior editor Benjamin Schwartz reviews Derwent May's "Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement," and he uses the occasion to discuss the history of Britain's intellectual and literary journalism. May, we're told, believes that the overly academic tone of today's TLS is indicative of an overall decline in the field; theorists and perpetual graduate students have replaced Virginia Woolf and Thomas MacAulay.

But for all his mourning for the decline of amateur intellectualism, Schwartz notably refuses comment on the state of affairs in the Atlantic's own country. It's certainly no better; the New York Review of Books is the dominion of a few over-the-hill authors and a scad of humanities professors, The New Yorker is written almost completely by a small group of Yale and Princeton dining club buddies, and the New York Times Book Review — though broad in its range of reviewers — is too thin by half to be compared with the likes of the Edinburgh Review or the Cornhill, even when those 19th-century greats were well past their prime.

But without implying any subtle shilling on Schwartz's part, a clear parallel can be drawn between the sort of writing that appeared in the likes of those reviews of yore and that which makes up the bulk of the current issue of the Atlantic. It is worldly and intelligent, broad in its topics but uniform in its quality. Plus it's written by a mind-boggling range of writers, folks like David Brooks and Christopher Hitchens and Ian Frazier, who write so smartly so often on so many different topics that they bear comparison with the likes of MacAulay and Carlyle.

It may seem strange, even bad form, to review a particular issue of a magazine, but the July/August 2002 Atlantic is hardly a magazine. At 196 pages of almost all text, it is the antithesis of today's image-driven, fashion-conscious monthlies, and with almost 30 non-staff contributors, a sharp contrast to the elite coterie over at The New Yorker. From the four feature stories — each long and weighty enough to carry a normal issue — to the visual marginalia inked by Istvan Banyai that appear throughout the magazine, the current Atlantic is, hands down, one of the best single issues of a monthly magazine to appear in recent memory.

Anchoring the issue is the first of three installments of William Langewiesche's "American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center," the sum of which will later appear in book form. Langewiesche, a solid writer and former pilot, is the perfect example of the sort of correspondent the Atlantic excels in promoting — naturally talented, an outsider who began his relationship with the magazine by submitting two unsolicited pieces on Algeria in 1991. "American Ground" follows a number of threads through the first few months of the WTC recovery process, unpacking not only the technical details of the site but its politics as well; Langewiesche fleshes out the key, though often unheralded, actors and displays them in all their glory, pain and pettiness. Although the title may sound a bit trite and saccharinely patriotic, the piece itself is anything but.

What's truly great about this issue is that even without Langewiesche's contribution, it would still be a compelling read. Michael Benson's "A Space in Time," a meditation on satellite imagery available on the Internet, is one of the most sublime, captivating essays on our solar system and beyond since the late Carl Sagan hung up his pen. Walking the fine line between lighter-than-air pontificating and overwrought pseudo-scientific prose, Benson gives us the joy of discovery, underpinned by a brace of anecdotes and facts about NASA's ongoing efforts to bring deep space into focus.

It takes time to get through the issue; from page 8 to page 196 it's virtually straight text (broken, notably, by Edward Sorel's full-page rendering of Saladin and Richard the Lionhearted's first encounter). And it's almost frustrating to find that even the smaller pieces are worth reading — Hitchens' review of the new edition of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" (less a review, really, than a discussion of Sinclair vis-à-vis industrial capitalism); P.J. O'Rouke's funny (if a bit stodgy) account of a recent anti-globalization protest; and Lawrence Weschler's mouth-watering account of Krakow, good enough to make even the most ardent aviophobe want to pack up and leave for Poland tomorrow.

At close to 200 pages, it would be too much to ask that every page be golden, and there are indeed some clunkers here. David Garrow's misleadingly titled "The FBI and Martin Luther King" focuses more on King's ties with Communist Party bag man Stanley Levison, and it draws a precipitous and specious conclusion about the impact of the wire taps on King's strained ties with the White House. Jon Cohen's "Designer Bugs" — which explores the intersection of virology and genetic engineering — is better, though it has a hard time avoiding the fear-mongering overtones that muddy similar accounts of late (Ken Alibek's "Biohazard" comes to mind). Cohen's point is to say that there is as much to be gained by allowing the twain to meet, but he nevertheless gives far too much quarter to those who would have us crack down on anything that might contribute to bioterrorism.

Given the pre-printing publicity blitz the folks at the Atlantic gave this issue, it's surprising that they didn't net a stronger contribution for its short story. Brad Vice's "Report from Junction" isn't bad by any means, but given the magazine's recent run of solid stories by known and not-so-well-known authors, couldn't they have tried a little harder? The editors do earn brownie points for getting poet Sharon Olds into the issue, though her contribution, a ramble in the voice of a recently abandoned woman entitled "A Week Later," is hardly her best work.

These criticisms, though, shouldn't be given too much weight— there isn't a single item in this issue that isn't worth reading. And at $4.95, it's probably the best deal on the newsstand. It's eclectic in ways recent issues of Harper's and The New Yorker barely approximate; it's been months since Harper's had a cover story of note, and the Remnick-era New Yorker — though stocked with fine writers and good stories — has nevertheless narrowed its focus and appeal, cozying up even more to the weekend-in-the-Hamptons set to the exclusion of flyover-state readers. But the Atlantic — and the July/August issue in particular — is a sharp, broadly engaging magazine, the sort we should have more of, the sort of magazine others should strive to emulate.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)