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Bob Cohn

Bob Cohn - Bob Cohn is editorial director of Atlantic Digital. He has worked as executive editor at Wired and The Industry Standard and as a writer at Newsweek. More

Bob Cohn is editorial director of Atlantic Digital. He oversees editorial operations for TheAtlantic.com, The Atlantic Wire, and The Atlantic's mobile platforms.

Prior to joining TheAtlantic.com in January 2009, Cohn was for eight years the executive editor of Wired Magazine. He oversaw all editorial aspects of the magazine, helping to supervise a staff of 40 journalists and dozens of freelancers. Under his leadership, Wired was nominated seven times for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence and won the honor three times.

For nearly two years during the dot-com boom, Cohn was executive editor at The Industry Standard, a newsweekly covering the Internet economy. He directed a staff of writers and editors, planned and edited cover stories, and was in charge of editorial special projects, including the company's extensions into television, radio, international publishing, and new domestic magazines. During the late '90s, he worked four years as editor and, later, publisher of Stanford magazine, and as editorial director of the Stanford Alumni Association, overseeing the bimonthly magazine, the online department, electronic newsletters, and other communications programs.

Cohn began his journalism career at Newsweek, where he worked in the Washington bureau for 10 years. He served as the magazine's legal affairs correspondent, with responsibility for the Supreme Court, the Justice Department, and the FBI, and later was named the magazine's White House correspondent. He covered the presidency of Bill Clinton from 1993 to early 1996.

Cohn's work has been recognized with a variety of national awards for editing and writing. TheAtlantic.com won a Webby Award for Best Magazine in 2009 and in 2010 was nominated for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in two categories: Best Magazine Web Site and Magazine of the Year (Print/Digital). During his tenure at Wired, the magazine was nominated for 11 National Magazine Awards and won six, including the three citations for General Excellence. At Newsweek, where he shared in more than a dozen awards, he was honored with the American Bar Association's prestigious Silver Gavel Award for coverage of the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation process. At Stanford magazine, a story he wrote on the university's affirmative action policies was named best article of the year in college magazines. The next year, Stanford was named the best university publication in the country by Folio magazine.

Cohn graduated from Stanford with high honors and later earned a master's degree in the Study of Law from Yale Law School as a Ford Foundation Fellow. A native of Chicago, he lives with his wife and two daughters outside Washington, D.C.
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O'Connor on the Court

By Bob Cohn

Jul 15 2009, 12:42 PM ET Comment

You gotta like Sandra Day O'Connor. She's spirited, direct, no-nonsense and, three years after stepping down from the Supreme Court, gives the jaunty impression she is telling you things she ought not be saying. So it was in our conversation earlier this month at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where O'Connor was among 16 public officials, politicians, writers, and business leaders to sit with TheAtlantic.com for video interviews.


One thing she's often asked about is the place of gender on the Court. For 12 years, O'Connor, appointed in 1981 as the first woman on the Supreme Court, was the sole woman. She welcomed Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993 with "enormous pleasure," thrilled to no longer be "the only." And when O'Connor stepped down from the bench in 2006, she said that she hoped George W. Bush would name a woman to replace her. Bush chose John Roberts (who weeks later was nominated instead to fill the seat of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who had just died, and O'Connor was succeeded instead by Samuel Alito), and it was Ginsburg's turn to be "the only."
 
But not for long. If Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed by the Senate, there will once again be two women on the Court. O'Connor, for her part, seems less elated than relieved. In Aspen, she said "it made a huge difference to me" when Ginsburg was confirmed, bringing important symbolism as well as the substantive value of a second female perspective. "It was so much better an atmosphere to have two," O'Connor said. "I wouldn't have minded three or four, but that didn't happen." (Ginsburg, for her part, told the New York Times Magazine last week that on a majority-female court, "The work would not be any easier. Some of the amenities might improve.")
 
Sotomayor was preparing for her hearings at the time I spoke with O'Connor, who remembered her own confirmation process as "absolutely miserable." The senators peppered her with questions. "They didn't yield any time, as I recall." Her advice for Sotomayor: "Take a big breath and realize it will all be over in a few days."
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