By my very rough count, about one in three contributors are women and about one in five are people of color-both of which fractions, it’s only fair to acknowledge, are probably higher now than they would have been in any previous four-year period of the magazine’s history.īut what really comes through is the institutional voice of The Atlantic, which makes itself felt in nearly every contribution: clean, authoritative, high-minded, rigorously empirical, more than a bit self-righteous-and, once you’ve heard it enough times, utterly tedious. Williamson, the right-wing troll who was controversially employed by The Atlantic for about two weeks in 2018, is nowhere to be found. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who left The Atlantic in 2018, has an article included, while some other prominent voices associated with the magazine, like Conor Friedersdorf or Yascha Mounk, do not. Newkirk II, George Packer, David Frum, Adam Serwer, and James Fallows, as well as some high-profile contributors like Drew Gilpin Faust, Angela Nagle, James Mattis, Ibram X. The book features contributions by Atlantic staffers such as Caitlin Flanagan, McKay Coppins, Annie Lowrey, Vann R. More notable than the story the editors have tried to tell is the tone they have aimed to create, the parameters they believe appropriate for political debate in this country in 2020.
On these narrow terms, it generally succeeds, but it does so in a way that can be exhausting to work through and unsatisfying to complete, doing justice neither to the best nor the worst writers the magazine employs. While built from standalone pieces, the book is meant to tell a unified story, with the articles slotted thematically into four sections-one on America’s wider social crises, one on the failure of politics in general, one specifically focused on the Trump administration, and one calling for a civic renaissance. How We Recover.-a 500-page collection of 40 articles published in print or online between 2016 and mid-2020-the editors have curated a kind of museum of their efforts.Īlthough I had read many of these articles online, I dutifully went through the entirety of The American Crisis in the order in which it was intended to be read, including the introduction by Goldberg, the conclusion by staff writer Anne Applebaum, and the transitional sections between each article by editor-at-large Cullen Murphy. Now, with the publication of The American Crisis: What Went Wrong. The past four years have severely tested those ideals, and under the leadership of Jeffrey Goldberg, who became editor in chief the month before Donald Trump’s election, The Atlantic has dedicated itself to the defense of American liberalism in the face of Trump’s clownish barbarism.