Category Archives: Magazines

Magazines, Politics, Reviews

‘How Progressives Froze The American Dream’

THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE (February 10, 2025): The idea that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they are born—is a distinctly American innovation. It is the foundation for the country’s prosperity and democracy, and it just may be America’s most profound contribution to the world.

No society has ever been as mobile as the United States once was. No society has even come close. In the 19th century, the heyday of American mobility, roughly a third of all Americans changed addresses each year. European visitors were astonished, and more than slightly appalled. The American “is devoured with a passion for locomotion,” the French writer Michel Chevalier observed in 1835; “he cannot stay in one place.” Americans moved far more often, over longer distances, and to greater advantage than did people in the lands from which they had come. They understood this as the key to their national character, the thing that made their country distinctive. “We are a migratory people and we flourish best when we make an occasional change of base,” one 19th-century newspaper explained. “We have cut loose from the old styles of human vegetation, the former method, of sticking like an oyster to one spot through numberless succeeding generations,” wrote another.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, as two world wars passed, as the Baby Boom began, Americans kept on moving. And as Americans moved around, they moved up. They broke away from stultifying social hierarchies, depleted farmland, declining towns, dead-end jobs. If the first move didn’t work out, they could always see a more promising destination beckoning them onward.

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This article is adapted from Yoni Appelbaum’s new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. It appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Stuck In Place.”

Magazines, Publishing, Reviews

‘The Editorial Battles That Made The New Yorker’

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE (February 10, 2025): Harold Wallace Ross, who founded The New Yorker a century ago, had a rule that no one should ever write about writers, because writers are boring, except to other writers, and he figured the same was true about editors—only it was more true, because no one should even know an editor’s name. That didn’t stop William Shawn, who became the editor of the magazine after Ross’s death, in 1951, from naming one of his kids Wallace, for Ross. It didn’t stop Ann Beattie from naming her car Roger, for her New Yorker editor, Roger Angell. And for all I know there are Chihuahuas and nieces and motorcycles at large named Bob Gottlieb, the magazine’s editor from 1987 to 1992; Lady Evans, the titled name of Tina Brown, its editor from 1992 to 1998; and D.R., for David Remnick, its editor since then. (I once had a tuxedo cat named Shaun, with a “u,” but that came from “Finnegans Wake” and doesn’t count.)

Most editors remain unsung. To be unknown is, ordinarily, to be underestimated. “The only great argument I have against writers, generally speaking, is that many of them deny the function of an editor, and I claim editors are important,” Ross once wrote. For him, editors were worth more than writers in the way that a great batting coach was worth more than a great batter. “Writers are a dime a dozen,” Ross told James Thurber. “What I want is an editor.” Writers were children; editors were adults. “I can’t find editors,” Ross fumed. “Nobody grows up.” (The magazine’s editorial director, Henry Finder, once said of Remnick, “I think he regards the editor’s job as being not crazy,” while, on the other hand, “the writer’s prerogative is to be, perhaps, a little crazy.”) Ross also found it useful—and this was a pretty clever trick—to tell writers who balked at being edited that the more they argued with an editor, the less worthy they were of being published. “The worse the writer is, the more argument; that is the rule,” he informed one very quarrelsome contributor. Stating this rule was an exceptionally effective way of getting a writer to pipe down. Then, too: it happens to be true. (I promise that my editor did not write that last sentence—he doesn’t even agree with it.)

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