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Words and thoughts from the Atlantic
By Diego Vasquez
Apr 10, 2008 - 1:07:40 AM
For the second straight year The Atlantic Monthly has been nominated for three National Magazine Awards, this year in the profile writing, essays and reviews and criticism categories. The title was also nominated for reviews and criticism last year, along with public interest writing and general excellence among titles with circulations between 250,000 and 500,000, though it did not win any awards. Today, as part of an ongoing series on this year's NMA nominees, Media Life excerpts passages from three of the Atlantic pieces that were nominated.
Profile Writing
One of The Atlantic’s nods is in the profile writing category for Matthew Scully’s piece “Present at the Creation,” about Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for President Bush. The story ran in the September 2007 issue, here’s an excerpt:
When speeches by the three of us were particularly good, Mike attended meetings about them by himself, and then reassembled the team for even minor revisions, no matter how late the hour. When speeches by the three of us were more pedestrian, he made sure that his name disappeared from the draft. Reporters came and went at campaign headquarters, the drawn shades on Mike’s interior window signaling their presence and discouraging introductions. The three of us ran into E. J. Dionne of The Washington Post in Philadelphia during convention week, and Mike’s collaborators on the convention address rated an awkward, “Oh, and these guys are, uh, writers for the campaign.”
Likewise, the only time Mike ever appeared disturbed by the approach of public attention was during the preparation of the New York Times Magazine account of the making of the joint-session speech, when the magazine’s fact-checkers started calling to confirm such details as who wrote what. Fact-checkers of tomorrow will find somewhere in the presidential archives a frantic e-mail from Mike in which a colleague was ordered not to take any further calls from Times fact-checkers.
Mike once said to us, in passing, “You guys had your administration”—meaning Bush-Quayle—and this seemed to explain his program for Bush 2000. Even during the campaign, he had apparently kept our colleagues—who all had better things to think about, anyway—unsure about how speeches got written. However things worked, they worked, and that was what mattered. Mike attended senior staff meetings, and what went on there could be glimpsed in a cover note he sent his superiors that found its way to us. We had just spent hours working up some humor for the 2000 convention speech. Mike sent the material along to senior staff, with a reminder to be lenient in judgment, since “it’s not easy to write jokes sitting alone in a room.”
Essays
Another of The Atlantic’s nominations is in the essays category, for Walter Kern’s November 2007 piece “The Autumn of the Multitaskers,” about how multitasking is dumbing us down. Here’s an excerpt:
It isn’t working, it never has worked, and though we’re still pushing and driving to make it work and puzzled as to why we haven’t stopped yet, which makes us think we may go on forever, the stoppage or slowdown is coming nonetheless, and when it does, we’ll be startled for a moment, and then we’ll acknowledge that, way down deep inside ourselves (a place that we almost forgot even existed), we always knew it couldn’t work.
The scientists know this too, and they think they know why. Through a variety of experiments, many using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity, they’ve torn the mask off multitasking and revealed its true face, which is blank and pale and drawn.
Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.
What does this mean in practice? Consider a recent experiment at UCLA, where researchers asked a group of 20-somethings to sort index cards in two trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds. The subjects’ brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus—which stores and recalls information—to the striatum, which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction—but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they’d been sorting once the experiment was over.
Reviews and Criticism
The last of The Atlantic’s Ellie nominations is in the reviews and criticism category for a series of pieces written by Caitlin Flanagan: “The Sanguine Sex,” from the May issue, “Babes in the Woods,” from the July/August edition and “ No Girlfriend of Mine,” from November. Here’s an excerpt of “No Girlfriend of Mine,” about four books written by and about Hillary Clinton:
Not long ago, Hillary appeared at a La Raza conference, and once onstage in front of a huge crowd, she told her interviewer that they should talk like “two girlfriends.” This tack seems to be the latest in Hillary’s ongoing effort to humanize herself. In the campaign, she clearly believes that her automatic advantage with the female half of the electorate is best pressed by forging this type of personal connection, commiserating with us in our lots as wives and mothers. This type of intimacy requires a brand of vulnerability, and as a woman who has seen her share of glass ceilings, who has struggled to balance career and family, and who has known the complex humiliations of marital infidelity, Hillary is not without relevant material. But it’s in these matters, the intimate matters most likely to be both fascinating and helpful to other women, that she finds she can’t outrun her past.
Hillary’s girlfriend-to-girlfriend moment was awkward because if she wanted to talk that way she would have to be willing to let us women in on the big, underlying struggle of her life that is front and center in our understanding of who she is as a woman. Her husband’s sexual behavior, quite apart from the private pain that it has caused her, has also sullied her deepest—and most womanly—ideals and convictions, for the Clintons’ political partnership has demanded that she defend actions she knows to be indefensible. To call her husband a philanderer is almost to whitewash him, for he’s used women far less sophisticated, educated, and powerful than he—women particularly susceptible to the rake’s characteristic blend of cajolery and deceit—for his sexual gratification. In glossing over her husband’s actions and abetting his efforts to squirm away from the scrutiny and judgment they provoke, Hillary has too often lapsed into her customary hauteur and self-righteousness, and added to the pain delivered upon these women.
© 2008 Media Life