Cullen Murphy
Says Cullen Murphy, “At The Atlantic we try to provide a considered look at all aspects of our national life; to write, as well, about matters that are not strictly American; to emphasize the big story that lurks, untold, behind the smaller ones that do get told; and to share the conclusions of our writers with people who count.”
Murphy served as The Atlantic Monthly's managing editor from 1985 until 2005, when the magazine relocated to Washington. He has written frequently for the magazine on a great variety of subjects, from religion to language to social science to such out-of-the-way matters as ventriloquism and his mother's method for pre-packaging lunches for her seven school-aged children.
Murphy's book Rubbish! (1992), which he co-authored with William Rathje, grew out of an article that was written by Rathje, edited by Murphy, and published in the December, 1989, issue of The Atlantic Monthly. In a feature about the book's success The New York Times reported that the article “was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 1990 and became a runaway hit for The Atlantic Monthly, which eventually ran off 150,000 copies of it.” Murphy's second book, Just Curious, a collection of his essays that first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's, was published in 1995. The Word According to Eve: Women and The Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own, was published in 1998 by Houghton Mifflin. The book grew out of Murphy's August 1993 Atlantic cover story, "Women and the Bible." More recent works include Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America and Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe.
Murphy was born in New Rochelle, New York, and grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was educated at Catholic schools in Greenwich and in Dublin, Ireland, and at Amherst College, from which he graduated with honors in medieval history in 1974. Murphy's first magazine job was in the paste-up department of Change, a magazine devoted to higher education. He became an editor of The Wilson Quarterly in 1977. From the mid-1970s to 2004, Murphy wrote the comic strip Prince Valiant, which appeared in some 350 newspapers around the world.
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Courtesy of C. Michael Curtis's family The Literary Legacy of C. Michael Curtis
Across six decades as an Atlantic editor and a teacher, C. Michael Curtis discovered and nurtured multiple generations of American writers.
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Josephine Powell An American Art Critic’s 70-Year Love Affair With Rome
Milton Gendel’s archive offers an acute vision of 20th-century Rome—from a distinctly American perspective.
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Nagelfar AB / Thomas Mennerdahl They Bent to Their Knees and Kissed the Sand
Half a century ago, the British government forcibly removed 2,000 people from a remote string of islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. They’ve never stopped struggling to return.
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Photo illustration by Alicia Tatone. Sources: Archive Photos … Ireland’s Great Gamble
The country wanted modern prosperity and traditional values. It could only have one.
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The Atlantic The Sci-Fi Crime Novel That’s a Parable of American Society
What China Miéville’s The City & the City tells us about the state of the nation
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Illustration by Nicolás Ortega; Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, ‘The Sack … No, Really, Are We Rome?
History suggests that corrosive change can be hard to see while it’s happening.
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Getty / The Atlantic The Man Without a Country
Donald Trump was America’s first stateless president.
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ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP / Getty Trump Needs a Safe Space
A modest proposal for building the president a bubble of denial, so the rest of us can get on with our lives
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Brooks Kraft LLC / Sygma / Getty / … The Bush-Gore Recount Is an Omen for 2020
An oral history of the craziest presidential election in modern history
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Rodrigo Corral The Man Who Sacked Rome
Alaric the Goth wanted to be part of the empire. Instead he helped bring it down.
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Shannon Stapleton / Reuters Hitchens Remembered
On the occasion of this year’s Hitchens Prize, a look back at tributes to Christopher Hitchens by Atlantic writers at the time of his death
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Alex Merto Our Predictions About the Internet Are Probably Wrong
It’s easy to forget how unforeseeable the “unforeseeable” really is.
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An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry
His racism and intolerance have always been in evidence; only slowly did he begin to understand how to use them to his advantage.
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Courtesy of Michael Bauman Remembering a Man Who Had the Thing Itself
Richard Todd was an editor at The Atlantic in the 1970s and ’80s. He died in April.
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Illustration: Gluekit* The Clinton Impeachment, as Told by the People Who Lived It
Twenty years ago, Bill Clinton became the first president to be impeached since Andrew Johnson, in 1868. We offer a recounting by people who played a role.
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Courtesy of Philippe Sands / Arsh Raziuddin / … Death Comes for the Gruppenführer
A cache of letters sheds light on the final days of a Nazi holed up in Italy after World War II.
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Murphy / Marko Drobnjakovic / AP / Katie … The Press at War, From Vietnam to Iraq
The conflicts change, but the factors influencing the quality of the coverage—including ignorance, confusion, and competition—stay consistent.
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Science Museum/SSPL Torturer’s Apprentice
The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” and “waterboarding” all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture.
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The Road from Ravenna
In the footsteps of the last Roman emperor
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The Travel Advisory
Highlights of a “Fall of Rome Tour”
