The Atlantic Offers Hot Takes for Highbrows
Estimated reading time: 3.5 minutes (656 words)
I subscribed to The Atlantic around 2015. Back then, the world was more exciting, and in some ways, more normal. The Covid-19 pandemic was still five years away, and Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign was just getting launched. Politics were normal-ish, and the culture wars, while raging, felt like a simmer compared to the state of things in 2024. At the time, The Atlantic offered thoughtful journalism that leaned left but generally treated different views with intrigue, respect, and space in its pages. It was a good way to keep your fingers on the cultural pulse through a single subscription.
But in the nine years since then, something seems to have changed with The Atlantic. It would be too simple to say that Trump broke the magazine, even if that contains some truth. And it would be too simple to chalk up The Atlantic’s decline to negative financial incentives, even if that is largely true as well.
The Atlantic is largely no longer a home for thoughtful journalism. It still publishes longreads, poetry, fiction, and deeply reported pieces (one of my favorite in-house authors is Graeme Wood, who wrote an excellent 2015 piece on the Islamic State, as well as a more recent interview with Mohammed bin Salman). But institutionally, The Atlantic seems to be moving on from those pieces as its bread and butter, and moving towards “hot takes for highbrows:” takes on culture, medicine, religion, politics, and more that lack critical substance but use the veneer of thorough journalism to cater to an elite (or elite-chasing) audience.
Typical hot takes can be found on every website everywhere, but The Atlantic’s stand out because they are portrayed as above the fray. A real hot take — Jeffrey Epstein Maybe Didn’t Kill Himself, or A Lab Leak is the Most Likely Explanation for the Outbreak of the Covid-19 Pandemic, or The NBA is Rigged — would never make it in The Atlantic’s pages. Instead we get:
These are basic examples but they epitomize the issue. Many of The Atlantic’s articles now produce more eye rolls and sighs than any thoughtful cultural debates.
Why has such a storied publication chosen to go this route? There are probably a few factors at play. The current media environment prioritizes clicks and quantity over quality. What better way to achieve that than to publish a continuous stream of clickbait that raises intellectual eyebrows but is ultimately no more insightful than takes published by Barstool?
In March 2024, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece explaining the tweaks to The Atlantic’s business model that turned the magazine into a profitable venture for the first time since 2017. According to Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg:
Goldberg said the Atlantic was once in the traffic-chasing business, following a playbook set by BuzzFeed and Vice, two publishers that have since fallen on hard times as the programmatic-ad spigot dried up. At one point, the Atlantic had a handful of breaking news and business reporters, Goldberg said.
“That worked until it didn’t,” Goldberg said of that strategy.
As part of its turnaround, the magazine has begun “moving away from day-to-day news coverage and taking bigger swings on fewer, deeply reported stories that appeal to people from across the country and political spectrum,” according to the Journal. Most of The Atlantic’s deeply reported pieces fulfill that directive. But the day-to-day articles that fill the gap left by on-the-ground news coverage often revert to high brow hot takes.
Despite the daily clickbait, there is some hope for The Atlantic. The magazine won a Pulitzer Prize in 2022 not for publishing good, serious writing for the 20th anniversary of 9/11. If the magazine sticks with articles like that, maybe it can reclaim some of the goodwill it has accumulated across the past 166 years.