The Atlantic today

 The Atlantic numbers among the many publications we pay for. Often, that means it's among the many publications I don't read. But sometimes I pick it up and read it. Of late, it often seems like a voice of moderation and sanity in today's often overwrought and cartoonish world of hyperventilating obsequious social justice warriordom. The most recent issue, for instance, contains a reasoned piece about Woodrow Wilson, who despite being a prig and a particularly racist and a guy who made some very bad mistakes around WWI (not pressing for peace in 1916, sending many thousands of US trips to their deaths by not digesting the lessons already learned on its battlefields -- all of this war stuff is entirely news to me in the last couple of hours, by the way) was a real force for good both in enacting progressive reforms and in setting out a vision for America's place in an insitution- and rule-governed world order that we are still striving to achieve, nationalist-isolationsts be damned.

There's also a great piece on playwright Michael R. Jackson, a guy I'd never heard of but am now very intrigued by, and how Jackson seeks to surmount all the reductive focus on race, sexual orientation, blah blah blah and create good and deep work that elicits a variety of human responses in different audience members.

This is all despite being owned by the Emerson Collective, the non-profit arm of the empire of Laurene Powell Jobs (spouse of Steve), which sounds like it is generally an empire of firmly left-leaning money seeking to do trendy things, most of which I agree with, of course. It's good the Atlantic appears to have some editorial and intellectual independence.