• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, March 24, 2005

Reading The Atlantic Monthly is a rigorous intellectual exercise. The magazine's blocky, graphics-lite design doesn't exactly encourage casual perusal; its long, involved stories demand the reader's undivided attention. This ain't toilet-reading material, unless you've got a medical condition that, uh, detains you for extended stretches.

Everything about the publication virtually screams "class!," much in the same sense that everything in Cosmopolitan screams "harpy!" or everything in Reader's Digest screams "hooked on phonics!" I mean, hell, they've got a literary editor on their masthead. Their letters page boasts more cerebral oomph than entire bound volumes of Esquire.

The April issue of The Atlantic Monthly may not be the mag's finest, but it suffers only in comparison to its own lofty standard. David Foster Wallace doesn't belie his reputation as the polar opposite of a literary minimalist (a maximalist?) with a nearly 30-page-long cover story on political talk radio. The feature beautifully frames our national fascination with excitable yappers like Los Angeles-based host John Ziegler and articulates what folks in the boardrooms of Clear Channel and Infinity figured out long ago: that political talk radio is fueled by advertiser dollars, rather than ideology.

So why does it feel more than forced? The schizophrenic design (chaotic annotations lining the side of each page, stamp-sized pictures, seemingly random splotches of color) probably has something to do with it. Also, I'm confused as to why the magazine ran a separate front-of-the-book piece on the Air America "liberal" radio network. It would have made more sense to somehow link the two.

Another questionable choice can be found within the otherwise compelling examination of Chief Justice Rehnquist's legacy. One second, you're involved in a paragraph about Rehnquist's famed Roe v. Wade dissent. Yet when you turn the page, your eye wanders to a poem that occupies a solid chunk of the succeeding column. Both story and poem are stirring; the spatial juxtaposition of the two is astoundingly annoying.

Regardless of these minor design complaints, The Atlantic Monthly's features and especially its geopolitical reporting remain unmatched in terms of depth and ambition. The pieces housed under the "agenda" banner - an explanation of why infiltrating Al Qaeda has proven more difficult than infiltrating the former Soviet Union during the Cold War, a look at how the United States plans to "shape" its exit from Iraq - meld sharp observances with lyrical prose. Even the mag's ostensible travel feature boasts a reportorial air: apparently a luxury hotel has been opened within shouting range of Hitler's mountain retreat.

And while the savage wits behind "According to Jim" don't have to worry about their comedic supremacy being usurped, The Atlantic Monthly has developed a wry, super-subtle comic sensibility of its own. The back-o'-the-book index remains as snarky as ever (sample listing: "Christ, Jesus, neighborliness of") and "A Close Read" (subheaded "what makes bad writing bad") slyly punctures the literary hot-air balloon that is Dave Eggers.

It's almost besides the point to critique The Atlantic Monthly, really. It does what few magazines bother to do anymore: it assumes a high degree of intelligence and critical capacity on the part of its readers. God bless 'em for setting the bar so high.