Urgencyvertising and the Art of Editorial Disappointment

I subscribe to The Atlantic out of hope—a stubborn, professorial hope that somewhere amid the content buffet, I’ll stumble across an essay with enough spine and insight to assign to my college writing students. And yes, it happens. Occasionally, there’s a gem—sharp, stylish, worth dissecting. But lately, I’ve found myself wading through a rising tide of prestige mediocrity: essays that puff themselves up with self-important prose and limp into the room with subject matter so undercooked it should be wearing a hospital gown.

What’s worse than the mediocrity is the bait: the breathless, overcaffeinated titles that practically scream, “This Will Change How You Think Forever.” And then… the letdown. Instead of intellectual combustion, I get three pages on the declining quality of sweaters, a pseudo-philosophical stroll through the Best Buy showroom, or another beige sermon about the joys of conscious parenting. It’s not that these essays are terrible—they’re just not what they pretend to be.

I’ve come to call this affliction Urgencyvertising: that smug little genre of headline inflation where every piece insists on its own world-shaking significance. The titles swagger like they’re ready to topple empires; the actual essays? They read like tepid blog posts from 2008, padded with anecdote, laced with smugness, and terrified of being boring—while somehow still being exactly that.

It’s an intellectual bait-and-switch, a slow drip of rhetorical FOMO dressed in high-thread-count prose. And I fall for it again and again, like Charlie Brown with the football. Except this time, Lucy works in editorial and has a master’s in semiotics.