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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Empire's End
Hadrian's Wall, which demarked Roman Britain's northern boundary, still marches across the rugged landscape—and through the mists of time
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The George W. Bush Presidential Library
An unauthorized preview, with never-before -seen drawings of the interior
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Fatwa City
Behavior modification gets down to business
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Feeling Entitled?
Huey Long's aspiration—"Every man a king!"—is at last within our grasp
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People to People
Some say that liberals and conservatives need to build bridges of understanding. Drawbridges might be better
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Knock It Off
The art of the unreal
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Let Someone Else Do It
The impulse behind everything
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Never Mind
Old science doesn't die ...
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Witless Protection
Coping with the sixteenth minute
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Wonders Never Cease
Updating Philon of Byzantium's famous list
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Fat Target
It's starting to look like 1536 all over again
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Primary Considerations
If the first presidential primary were held in the "most representative" state, which one would that be?
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The Next Testament
If the Bible were being compiled for the first time right now, what would we put in it? Making the case for a NEW New Revised Standard Version
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Looking for Trouble
Get a life—at your own risk
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Setting The Bar
When our standards don't live up to our standards
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The Path of Brighteousness
Godless Americans launch a semantic crusade
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Feudal Gestures
Why the Middle Ages are something we can still look forward to
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On Second Thought
Ideas whose time has come, unfortunately
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Manual Labors
The can-do spirit and the culture of handbooks
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Moving On, and On
From the Transition Index to the Rapture Index