It has been already admitted that the Atlantic is a questionable news source.

Obviously they are just as hungry as rats for your clicks onto their ads so they can continue to write up more nonsense like this article. Perhaps there's not enough rats subscribing to the Atlantic today?

So it doesn't surprise me to see the comments to this article here and that Atlantic is now turning their attention to doing hit-pieces on squirrels? Oh dear.

It really is garbage in, garbage out, for all the rats to read it and give them ad money if you are not paying. No wonder that article is free; and many others.

You mean, this New Yorker? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32044754

I completely and categorically disagree. The New Yorker has derailed on many fronts. It has become an ideological hell hole. If you have access to a public library, you can browse pre-2000's New Yorker on archive.org which was a totally different publication all together.

They are very similar publications, but I'm not sure which one is "dumbed down" relative to the other. Instead, there is a lot of variation within each magazine. Some articles are brilliant examples of "long form" journalism which sometimes later get expanded into entire books, others are puff pieces, and yet others (like this article) are somewhere in between.

They’re like every other media outlet; trying to trigger people into having an opinion that does not matter, because the public having opinions that matter would mean a low effort blogger has to get a job.