I recently complained to a friend that the only intelligent magazine left was The Economist. The complaint was half tongue in cheek, and happily I stumbled into a copy of The Atlantic Monthly recently and thoroughly enjoyed it. Years ago I bumped into James Fallows somewhere in Wyoming, as we were both flying small airplanes to the annual Oshkosh fly-in. He was promoting his new book "Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel." I made a mental note then to check out The Atlantic -- he's the national correspondent. (Note to self: mental notes do not work).
Fast forward a half-dozen years or so, and Northwest airlines informs me that my pitiful balance of miles will expire if I don't use them, and perhaps I'd like to look at the list of magazine subscriptions I can get for those miles? Six weeks later I have shiny new subscriptions to both The Economist and The Atlantic. Woot!
The Atlantic is a perfect compliment / antidote to the web. A half-dozen five-to-ten page articles are long enough to go into real depth, but short enough to be read in one sitting. Besides Fallows, they also have book reviews by Christopher Hitchens, among others. I don't always agree with him (which is fine of course), but he is such a master of words that he could convince you that Mother Theresa was a fraud (oh wait -- he did that). I would mind more that he is so full of himself if there wasn't so much of himself of which to be full.
The Atlantic has smart writing, interesting personalities, good book reviews, and doesn't come too often (unlike The Economist -- seriously -- does anyone read the whole thing every week?). They even seem to be willing to mail to addresses outside of New England.
While I love the Economist Magazine, the Atlantic has a broad spectrum of writers that is difficult for most other magazines to top. In addition to Fallows, there is Andrew Sullivan, Marc Ambinder, Jeffery Goldberg and others (all blog daily). I don't always agree with them either, but they are great to read and see argue amongst each other. Their archive is also great to meander through when you have a block of time, with articles dating back to the magazines founding in 1857. Obscure articles by Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt for the magazine are some of my favorites.