The Atlantic

Some people just can't wait to get on the Web. The venerable (if not downright creaky) Atlantic magazine announced its home page in the November issue. Unfortunately, a quick hit revealed that until Nov. 1, all that's available in the way of current articles is what subscribers digested two months ago in the September issue. The stories that are up now feature a few desultory links and a paucity of illustrations (why, for instance, post a travel article about Italy with exactly zero photographs--particularly when they must have already been scanned for the print version.) Luckily, the magazine hasn't completely missed the point of converging media. The online edition is supplemented with some transcripts of more-thoughtful-than-usual chat sessions from the magazine's forum on AOL (including one with cybercritic Sven Birkerts), as well as related articles from its vaults. Of course, it helps to be 138 years old. This means that you can find short stories by Louisa May Alcott from the 1860s, as well as a reprint of Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 article, "As We May Think," in which he first posited the vision of a wired-up, fully linked electronic universe of information that became the Web. (MSG)

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