EXTRA! EXTRA! A prominent high-brow gazette is accused of peddling cheap panic to an aging readership, repeatedly declaring the sudden demise of sex, reading, and democracy itself! While these graying subscribers tremble at the fictional tolling of the final bell, critics roar that this lazy doom-mongering stifles real-world defiance. It is a cynical business of profitable pessimism, turning the complex tapestry of modern life into a relentless march toward the grave!
**THE DAILY INQUIRER**
*Special Edition — Late City Final*
***
# THE CREPE-HANGERS OF BOSTON!
### Highbrow Journal ‘The Atlantic’ Declares the End of Everything Under the Sun!
### ARE WE SLIDING DOWN THE GREASED CHUTE TO PERDITION?
#### *Scribblers Cry Doom to Sell Rags to the Rocking-Chair Brigade!*
**BY OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT**
**NEW YORK** — There is a weeping and a wailing coming out of the editorial rooms of *The Atlantic*, and it’s enough to give a red-blooded American the blue devils! If you listen to their ink-slingers, the whole shebang is going to the dogs. It’s a racket, see? A clever scheme to peddle papers to the graybeards and old-timers who see the Grim Reaper lurking in every shadow.
According to the latest census from the Pew pollsters—fresh off the telegraph for August 2025—the typical reader of *The Atlantic* has clocked a grand total of 51 winters on this mortal coil. That’s eight years older than the crowd reading *The New York Times*, seven years more than the *Washington Post* scribes, and four years more than the Wall Street ledger-men. Why, the only print sheet in the whole survey with more creak in its bones was *Newsweek* at a ripe 57! Meanwhile, the highbrows over at *The New Republic* sit at a slightly spryer average of 45 to 54.
***
### THE WORLD AIN’T KAPUT YET, SISTER!
Now, this writer doesn’t deny that some things are on the fritz. Sure, the local independent soda fountains are shuttering, the newsstands are being repurposed to sell cheap candy, and the neighborhood nickelodeons are putting up the boards.
But don't throw in the sponge just yet! There's plenty of life in the old world. A brainy Oxford mathematics wizard named Andrew Wiles finally cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem; deaths from bum tickers are down a whopping 66 percent since 1970; the Democrats look bet-the-farm likely to win back the House of Representatives come November; and Ann Patchett’s latest bestselling novel is the absolute cat’s pajamas!
Yet, what does the latest *Atlantic* cover shout? **“The Age of Reading Is Over!”** And the inside headline screams, **“The End of Reading Is Here!”**
Everything is always curtains over there. Did you know, folks, that **“The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending”**? Neither did I! A March 2024 piece by a gent named Franklin Foer started out as a dandy look at the troubling rise of antisemitism, but he lost his trolley entirely at the finish line.
***
### BALONEY ON THE AVENUE
Foer writes that “the forces arrayed against Jews... are far more powerful than they were 50 years ago.”
Applesauce! That’s 1974 he’s talking about, when prejudice was at a low ebb. Let’s talk about seventy years ago, back when my own Jewish father spent an entire job interview with a Madison Avenue advertising chief dodging the question, *“Say, pal, what kind of a name is ‘Noah’ anyway?”* Or sixty years ago, when folks routinely changed their surnames just to get a foot in the door. The hate today is worrying, sure, but it ain’t the bad old days of 1964 by a long shot!
Then Foer goes on to claim that societies that turn on the Jews go straight to the dogs. He tells us England entered a "dark age" after expelling them in 1290—though the Black Death didn't show up for another 58 years, so search me what he’s driving at! He says Czarist Russia limped toward revolution after the pogroms of the 1880s. Now that’s some straight talk, seeing as Comrade Trotsky and his Bolshevik pals helped lead the Red revolt.
But then Foer warns that if America keeps this up, it’s the end of the line for the US of A. Hold your horses, brother! We are only 2.4 percent of the population, and the hard truth is that America rode high and handsome right through a roaring tide of fierce antisemitism stretching from the Gilded Age straight through our own Roaring Twenties! Can't we just treat this trouble as its own headache without declaring the end of the world?
***
### THE GRAVEYARD OF HEADLINES
Get a load of the other obituaries *The Atlantic* has printed over the years:
* **“The End of Men”** (July/August 2010)
* **“The End of Diplomacy”** (February 2026)
* **“The End of High-School English”** (December 2022)
* **“The End of Minimalism”** (July/August 2020)
* **“The End of Trust”** (November 2021)
* **“The End of Democracy Has Already Begun”** (September 2024)
* **“This is the Way a World Order Ends”** (April 2025)
And, most ridiculous of all, Francis Fukuyama shouting from the rooftops: **“More Proof That This Is Really the End of History”** (October 2022)!
Even the bedroom isn’t safe from these crepe-hangers. Since sexual activity slows down as the joints get stiff, it’s no surprise these writers keep announcing the end of making whoopee. They’ve given us: *“Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?”*, *“The Bored Sex”*, *“The Death of the Sex Scene”*, and *“The Slow, Quiet Demise of American Romance”*.
Sweet Jane! What’s it going to take to get some old-fashioned necking going in the pages of *The Atlantic*?
***
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THE MECHANICAL BRAIN AGREES!
We asked the Google AI robot: "How often has The Atlantic
announced the end of something?"
The tin man clacked back:
"The Atlantic has proclaimed 'the end of' various concepts
hundreds of times... It is one of the magazine’s most famous
and frequently deployed headline tropes... a well-documented
fondness for 'apocalypse stories.'"
===========================================================
```
Now, to be fair to the robot, its sources were a bit scrambled. It pointed to a swell piece by Adam Kirsch called “Apocalypse, Constantly,” which was actually about why *readers* like doom-mongering, not a proof of the magazine’s sins. But the robot still had no trouble finding plenty of "End of" headlines.
When we asked the brass-headed machine if *The Atlantic* ever announced the *beginning* of anything, it spit out a bunch of endings in disguise! “The Beginning of a New DOJ” was actually about the end of fair trials, and “The Beginning of the End of NATO” was another funeral march. The only genuine start was a piece about a crackerjack basketball flapper named Caitlin Clark!
***
### WANTED: MORE SHOE-LEATHER, LESS SHAKE-OF-THE-HEAD!
Why the constant gloom? It’s simple, folks: *The Atlantic* cut back on shoe-leather, on-the-scene reporting decades ago to save some clams. It’s a heck of a lot easier to make grand, sweeping prophecies when you’re sitting in an armchair instead of pounding the pavement and talking to real people face-to-face!
Over at *The New Republic*, we believe in fighting back. When we printed a guide on how to resist the big boss Donald Trump, we didn't just throw up our hands—we profiled real citizens who were putting up a fight. Defiance, not defeat!
I haven’t read this new cover story about “The End of Reading.” Maybe it’s a humdinger. It’s true that high school teachers have a devil of a time getting the youth to read books these days. In Patchett’s new novel, a schoolmarm named Daphne Fuller says her high-society girls are still reading *David Copperfield* and *Moby-Dick* from cover to cover. Now, even I had to squint at that one—*Moby-Dick*!
Listen, some of these gloomy pieces have some good meat on their bones. But *The Atlantic* is hooked on the end-times dope. You’d think a grand old publication that’s been sailing the seas for 169 years would have a better grasp on the long, unbroken thread of human life.
What I’d like to see end is the “End of” stories. Here’s hoping they find some backbone before they sail into their next century!