I 

HAVE SOME GOOD news. Next month, The Atlantic will once again

send fiction home to our subscribers, in a special supplement that will
accompany our May issue. On the newsstand, the supplement will be
bound into the May magazine.
The short story has been integral to The Atlantic since our first issue, in
1857, in which we published four stories, including “The Mourning
Veil,” by Harriet Beecher Stowe. But as longtime, generously loyal
readers know, for the past five years we have published fiction once a year
in a special newsstand issue, rather than in any of our 10 subscriber issues.
During what has been widely noted to be a “challenging” (read:
harrowing) business environment for publishing, this has been a necessary
compromise. But none of us has been particularly happy with it, and we
have been searching for ways to once again place great fiction in front of
all our readers.
With our fiction issue last year, we began a partnership with Luminato, the
Toronto Festival of Arts and Creativity, which shares our love of literature.
Building on the success of that first outing, which included participation
by some of our editors and authors in the festival, we have jointly decided
this year to raise our ambition by creating the supplement, which will
include, along with half a dozen short stories, a powerful essay on writing
and loss by Joyce Carol Oates. We think—we hope!—we are seeing
renewed interest in the short story. Last fall, we started a digital fiction
series, publishing to the Amazon Kindle two short stories a month by
authors like Christopher Buckley, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Paul Theroux. All
told, The Atlantic is now publishing more fiction than it has since the mid-
1970s.
MORE STORIES


The Real Legacy of the Suffrage Movement

DEBORAH COHEN


 The Truth Behind Indian American Exceptionalism
ARUN VENUGOPAL




Uncovering the Cultural Revolution’s Awful Truths

BARBARA DEMICK

But I should admit that these fiction initiatives are experimental,

provisional, part of our larger adventure through the seismically shifting
landscape of letters. If our hardworking developers have pulled it off, by
the time you read this note our Web site, TheAtlantic.com, will have
relaunched with a new design and a superior system for finding the
subjects you’re interested in and discovering new ideas you didn’t know
you were looking for. We’ve also released two apps for the iPhone so far
and are about to release a third, much improved, one.
We are experimenting busily, in other words, with any new technology
that emerges in this extraordinarily fertile era. If it looks like we’re making
things up as we go along, the reason is that we are. To each “platform,” as
they are now called in the trade, we are tailoring the Atlantic work that can
fit it best—trying to help you make sense of the world, to keep you
informed and entertained, through whatever medium you find most
congenial. For our print magazine and our e-reader editions, we are
continuing to devote months of reporting and writing to create pieces like
Joshua Green’s profile in this issue of Treasury Secretary Timothy
Geithner, and Robert D. Kaplan’s assessment of the war in Afghanistan.
For the Web site each day, we produce dozens of posts analyzing breaking
developments in politics, business, culture, technology, and other subjects,
some of them longtime preoccupations of The Atlantic, others fairly new
to all of us. As I write, on our site I can see posts popping up by James
Fallows about Twitter, by Andrew Sullivan about the future of gays in the
military, and by Ta-Nehisi Coates about the moral courage of Civil War
General George Henry Thomas.
What matters to us—in all the work that we do, on whatever platform may
present itself—is the quality and consequence of an idea, and the clarity
and power of its expression. We believe, and we believe that you believe,
that of the many and proliferating means for communicating big ideas, one
of the most effective, and therefore most enduring, is fiction.