Media

Michael Kelly's cautious Atlantic debut

by Dan Kennedy

SAME OLD: Kelly's first issue hews to polite tradition.

The good news about Michael Kelly's first issue as editor of the Atlantic Monthly is that he's put out a magazine very much like the one his predecessor, William Whitworth, edited for two decades. Then again, that's the bad news, too. Reassuring though it may be that Kelly has chosen to be conservative with one of our few great magazines, it would be nice if he shook up a 143-year-old institution that's grown more than a little musty around the edges.

Kelly moved into the editor's office last fall, after David Bradley, the owner of National Journal, purchased the financially shaky Boston monthly from real-estate mogul Mortimer Zuckerman. Bradley immediately named Journal editor Kelly to succeed Whitworth. The combative Kelly, whose year as editor of the New Republic was brought to a sudden end when owner Martin Peretz got sick of Kelly's incessant Clinton-bashing, was a controversial choice, but insiders say he and Bradley have done much to reassure long-time Atlantic staffers of their good intentions.

The March issue should reassure them further. The cover story, "The Kept University," about the deleterious effects of corporate funding on academic research ("the academic-industrial complex," in the words of authors Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn), is right out of the Whitworth playbook: a stolid, important piece about an underreported topic that would have been no less convincing at half the length. An essay on "The Soundtracking of America," by J. Bottum, which laments the impossibility of escaping recorded music in public (and private) places, begins promisingly but degenerates into intellectual exhibitionism. A Jim Myers piece about a murder spree that has turned his neighborhood in Washington, DC, near Capitol Hill, into a war zone, is the issue's most riveting read, and it reflects one of Kelly's obsessions: the family dysfunction that has devastated much of urban black America. Even here, though, Myers's understated tone, accented by evocative photos by Magnum's Chieng-Chi Chang, is in keeping with the Atlantic's polite tradition.

When Tina Brown took over the New Yorker, she reinvented it as a hip, sexy, literary alternative to Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report -- a formula that her successor, David Remnick, has improved upon by toning down her glitzy excesses. That route isn't open to Kelly, since the Atlantic is a monthly with long lead times and a limited budget. Still, Kelly's challenge is nothing less than to reinvent the general-interest monthly in the age of the Internet. Now that he's made the passengers comfortable, let's hope his next step is to rock the boat.