The Case Against Hating This Headline
The case for trailer parks? They’re a cheap, energy-efficient path to homeownership. The case for Facebook’s success? It has nothing to do with MySpace. For pickled onions? Well, they’re delicious.
Over the years, The Atlantic’s writers have argued the merits of things and ideas both silly and serious—and also made the case against things, like performance reviews, breastfeeding, and Modest Mouse.
A casual reader may be acquainted with some of the more recent works of the genre—say, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s June 2014 cover story, “”—but this framing device has been in use at the magazine for more than a century. In fact, our staff has argued for and against so many things that “The Case” headlines have become somewhat of an inside joke among staffers and subscribers. “How many ‘cases’ have the staff argued against at this point?” wrote one in reaction to in 2016.
