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January 29, 2005
Current Atlantic is a must-read
I'm about through reading the current issue of Atlantic (my first to-read - and often only - monthly rag), and though they're all good, this one's got some articles I have to mention, and I hope you read.
The whole issue is terrific, but If nothing else, read my friend Jim Fallows' "Success Without Victory", which is also online, if you're a subscriber (please do subscribe - I'd sure like to know more and more people are getting tapped into that pipe). Stunning, in every sense. I have to profess to knowing just enough about politics to figure I'll never know what the hell is really going on until twenty years later anyway, so I often just cop out of the responsibility of staying informed. Thanks to Jim and others at the Atlantic, I feel like I'm at least partially tapped into some objective analysis in current time. And I'm afraid Jim's article this month just validates the gap between intelligence and policy.
And if that's not enough, try William Langewiesche's article in the same issue, "Letter from Baghdad," for a gigantic taste of reality vs headlines.
And with just enough similarities to my own college-age experiences, Walter Kirn, in one of the most well-written stories I've read in a long time, "Lost in the Meritocracy," rattled my cage with a brutally honest and vulnerable expression of the angst of being cleverly bright, ambitious, and with a desire to escape the lower middle class to "be somebody" in the vague world of the intelligent elite.... brrrr....
Posted by David at January 29, 2005 03:25 AM
Comments
David: You are so right. I just finished the current issue. Jim's article (and the "future history" by Richard Clarke) are must-read thought pieces. I had the good fortune to meet Jim at one of your seminars (Dallas 2001) and the three of us had a great chat afterwards. I subscribed to the Atlantic as soon as I got back from that seminar and have learned something important from every issue since.
BTW, nice to see you posting a bit more. Can we call this the "reciprocal Scoble effect"? You inspire him to get back on the GTD wagon, he inspires you to blog more? :^)
Posted by: Marc Orchant at January 30, 2005 07:39 AM
Marc, yeah, no kidding. Where two or more are gathered... Hanging out with great folks, doing good work, helping lots of other folks, and having tons of fun... now, there's a master plan.
Posted by: David Allen at January 30, 2005 12:52 PM
The Atlantic is really the only magazine I try to read on a monthly basis. I actually drop the latest issue in my briefcase when it arrives every month. Whenever I reach that point where I just cannot think anymore, I grab the magazine. Not that you do not have to think when you read it, but sometimes it’s nice to let someone else drive.
Langewiesche's long piece about the aftermath of the WTC attacks was one of the pieces of journalism I have ever read. He should have won a Pulizter. I took a detour a few years ago to become a professional firefighter/paramedic after law school. Langewiesche took a lot of heat from the “heros” for his work. As someone who knew the “tribal” traits he was describing I knew he was dead on. I recognized him as one of those rare writers who can convey not only the hard facts, but the intangible background elements as well.
Apparently it has always been an insightful magazine. A couple of years ago I read a very insightful article about the stock market bubble. The article - January 1933 The Royal Road to Bankruptcy by One Who Took the Ride... – was republished sometime in 1997. Unfortunately, I was not a subscriber at the time. I did not read the article until sometime after the bubble burst.
If you worked in tech during the late 1990s you will find this piece stunning. You could use a word processor to find and replace a few words (electricity to bandwidth, train to plane, convention to conference, utility to dot.com) and have concrete proof that history really does repeat itself. If you are a subscriber you can get access at their web site.
That article was what got me to subscribe.
Incidentally, I learned about GTD by reading an article in The Atlantic a few months back. I had been using some of GTD without realizing it because I had copied best practices from successful people I had worked for in the past. I recognized all these great ideas I had seen over the years and bought the book the next day.
I’ll stop gushing now.
Posted by: Thomas Suhadolnik at January 31, 2005 04:06 AM