Andrew McCarthy—Weekend at Bernie's Andrew McCarthy, not "the crypto-fascist—is now a travel writer forThe Atlantic. He joins Liz Phair. See? There are awesome magazine gigs available for people who didn't go to some fancy journalism school!

This menu from last night's Atlantic holiday party at Spitzer's looks great, until you look closer: magazines obviously can't afford menu proof-reading, anymore. "Vegitables"? That'd never fly at one of their "sponsored dinners" in DC. Monsanto spell-checks.

"In an email roundtable, Atlantic correspondent and Vassar College assistant professor professor Hua Hsu, frequent Atlantic.com culture contributor Alyssa Rosenberg, and Government Executive staff correspondent Gautham Nagesh discuss rap's future in the age of Obama." [XXL The Atlantic]

The Atlantic Monthly's re-branding evidently includes intern/slaves for, as our tipster fumes, "their [internship] position. AT LEAST 40 hrs a week unpaid!?? really? what kind of fucking student can do this?"

It seems like just last April that the venerable old Atlantic Monthly (wait, sorry, it's just The Atlantic now) launched a web-focused redesign based on the helpful input of presumably expensive "brand consultants." And, what do you know, it was just last April! But now we're in phase two of the magazine's makeover, which means increasingly insane covers and slightly more attractive blogs for their hundred bloggers (NB: we do actually like most of their bloggers, especially Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Fallows, and crazy Andrew Sullivan—all better than TNR, basically). Here's the announcement! But will this save the magazine? While the newish Harper's website fits that magazine's fusty, "who needs to turn a profit anyway" aesthetic (and subscribers get full access to the indispensable indexed archives), The Atlantic's recent branding campaigns don't seem to have anything to do with the magazine's identity, whatever the hell that is anymore (plus: 300 articles for $100 with nothing from 1964-1992 just doesn't compare to the Harper's deal.) Honestly the Atlantic's identity crisis still stems from the move from lame Boston to miserable DC followed by a new focus on, you know, politics, though that crisis has actually produced what might be a better magazine with more interesting (to us) features. And hey, the website looks good, the new logo is a cool appropriation of their '60s logo, and the mag redesign will probably look very nice (unless it's as pointlessly busy as that first cover). Still, a massive ad campaign and a expensive rebranding for a smart current events mag seems a bit '90s, right? BUT! Atlantic Media also owns the expensive subscription-only political trade journals of the National Journal Group! And if there is a market for political journalism in this nation, that is the model, so far, that seems the best able to weather the storm. So, thankfully, Global Security Newswire will subsidize Andrew Sullivan well into the Obama administration and on until he turns conservative again.

The Atlantic has said it didn't vet Jill Greenberg's politics before hiring her to shoot John McCain. Even if it had known about her controversial anti-George Bush photographs, it wouldn't have cared, as a matter of policy. The policy may soon change: Greenberg is gloating she left McCain's eyes bloodshot and skin gnarly for the Atlantic's October cover. Worse, from the magazine's perspective, is that she tricked the Republican presidential nominee into standing over an unflattering strobe light, then posted the worst shots and Photoshops to her personal site:

Ha ha, Atlantic blogger accuses the GOP of resurrecting scare tactics from the era of Joycelyn Elders teaching masturbation to preschoolers by resurrecting the era of Christina Aguilera's nine clit piercings. [Atlantic]

For her Atlantic Monthly blog, early econ-blogger Megan McArdle talks about Skinny Bitch, the insanely popular health-fad book that's a vegan diatribe in disguise. She hates on it in the best of ways:

The 150-year-old magazine the Atlantic, whose "influential and highly engaged readers turn to [it] for intellectual stimulation," has a very serious and brainy discussion of Britney Spears that necessitated her use on the cover, plus the word "Rabelaisian" inside the magazine. The Atlantic of course is just the most recent and highbrow magazine to take its cover downmarket in the pursuit of Serious Journalism; a somber Rolling Stone earlier this month did a big cover story on the "American Tragedy" of Britney Spears and, with a heavy heart, saw its website traffic double. New York magazine published a naked Lindsay Lohan in an artistic homage to Marilyn Monroe and melted its Web servers because it did not anticipate needing to deliver 20 million instances of art across the internet. For its part, the Atlantic intellectualized tabloid material by applying the term "gynophobic" to a Spears-related website comments section:

Atlantic Monthly Editor-at-Large and Washington Post correspondent in Iraq, Michael Kelly, has been killed in a Humvee accident while traveling with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division.
Atlantic Monthly Editor killed in Iraq [WaPo]