A boisterous conversation recently broke out on and around The Atlantic's Web site, after we posted an old story by James Fallows, one of our national correspondents and our most accomplished technologist. The story, "Living With a Computer," originally ran in The Atlantic in 1982. A relic from the dawn of the PC age, it recounts Jim's delighted first encounter with a word processor ("I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen"). From his blog on our site, Andrew Sullivan linked to the piece, prompting a reader to point him to a Russell Baker column from 1987 on a similar theme. Then Matthew Yglesias, one of our associate editors, volleyed from his blog, wondering how much computer he could buy today for what Jim spent in 1982. (The answer: one with roughly 128,000 times as much RAM, not to mention four 750-gigabyte hard drives in place of the RadioShack cassette tapes that Jim used for storage.)
As dozens of other bloggers weighed in on the original article, Jim responded from his Atlantic blog with a post titled "Hey you whippersnappers!" He reminded everyone that back then, the notion that a writer would compose with an electronic keyboard rather than with pen in hand was downright shocking. And he ventured this observation: "As was not obvious to most people then, the 'sound' of people's writing is overwhelmingly their own sound, not that of the ThinkPad or the quill pen or the Number 2 pencil or even, gasp, the Macintosh."
A couple of days later, Andrew drove that point home. Noting that Jim's piece had provoked "major blogospheric chatter" (a term undreamed of not so long ago), he linked to another classic Atlantic story from the dawn of yet another technological age. The sound of the writing, whether encountered online or in print, was unmistakable: It was Mark Twain's. He was describing his amused befuddlement upon overhearing only one side of a telephone conversation.
So in ways even Jim could not have imagined in 1982, his story about whether we might eventually all compose on computers became fodder for new insights rendered entirely in ones and zeroes. All of which brings me (at last) to the subject of the redesigned site now before you. We've updated the site's look and functions, hoping to do just what the debate about Jim's piece did: blend The Atlantic's past and present by taking fuller advantage of our array of writers and readers, and of the series of tubes that now connects them all.
Regular visitors to this site know that it has already changed substantially over the past six months. We've added several blogs, turning the site into the same sort of platform for strong-minded writers that the paper edition of this magazine has been for 150 years. Each month in print, The Atlantic aims to tell important, provocative truths through deep reporting and carefully considered writing; every day online, The Atlantic is pursuing truth through collegial combat among bloggers who have very different points of view but who hold themselves to the same high standard of intellectual honesty. We've created a living op-ed page, where news about politics, foreign affairs, business, and culture is analyzed and debated in real time. We've also begun providing daily reported posts about politics and other matters.
The site's new design is intended to better present all of our work, whether it originates online or in print. We have added a horizontal navigation bar at the top of each page, to help guide you along. We have given more prominence to photography--reflecting its importance to the magazine--and have made space for more video work. On the home page, we've added a column called "This Just In ..." In that space, we're highlighting recent blog posts, online features, new magazine stories, and pieces from the archives that have bearing on the day's news. (Many stories that appeared originally in print remain fully accessible only to Atlantic subscribers; these pieces are marked with a white "A" set against a navy-blue background.) The Atlantic's editors and writers believe that our most successful stories, like Jim's article about his word processor, have a timeless quality: They can be read years later with as much interest and pleasure--if for different reasons--as when they were first published. The Web is giving us a great chance to prove this proposition.
This site is a work in progress. You will see it evolve in coming months. If you have any criticisms or suggestions based on what you see now--or don't see but would like to--please let me know here.
One other change I should note: the name. Rather than continue to call the site "The Atlantic Online," we decided we might as well name it after itself. Welcome to TheAtlantic.com.
Dear Editor Bennet:
I am the mother of your young employee from Kansas. He is my whippersnapper. Congratulations on the launch!
Sincerely,
Susan Bradley
Posted by Susan Bradley | August 15, 2007 2:38 PM