Caitlin Flanagan began her magazine-writing career, in 2001, with a series of extended book reviews about the conflicts at the very heart of modern life—specifically, modern domestic life as it is lived by professional-class women. Flanagan has quickly established herself as a highly entertaining social critic unafraid to take on self-indulgence and political correctness, and her reviews provide penetrating and witheringly funny observations about the sexes and their discontents.
Flanagan's Atlantic articles have been named as finalists for the National Magazine Award five times, and her essay "Confessions of a Prep School College Counselor," which ran in September 2001, was included in the 2002 compilation of Best American Magazine Writing. Her work has also been included in Best American Essays 2003 and Best American Magazine Writing 2003. She is the author of the book To Hell with All That—an exploration, based on her Atlantic articles, of the lives of modern women.
Born and raised in Berkeley, California, Flanagan earned a B.A. and an M.A. in Art History from the University of Virginia. She now lives in California, where she spends her time writing and raising twins.
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Kristian Hammerstad How Helicopter Parenting Can Cause Binge Drinking
The way some white professionals raise their children is exacerbating an alcohol problem on U.S. college campuses.
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Brian Stauffer The Dark Hallways of Horace Mann
What allowed sexual abuse to go unchecked at the prestigious private school in the 1970s?
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Kristian Hammerstad / The Atlantic That’s Not Funny!
Today’s college students can’t seem to take a joke.
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The Dark Power of Fraternities
A yearlong investigation of Greek houses reveals their endemic, lurid, and sometimes tragic problems—and a sophisticated system for shifting the blame.
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White House/AP A Dad, a Cad
JFK was a loving family man who doted on his children—and a philanderer who seduced an intern in his wife's bed.
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Courage in a Pillbox Hat
Remembering Jacqueline Kennedy's public dignity in the face of catastrophe
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Hulton Archive/Getty Inventing Marilyn
Anyone who thinks the story of Marilyn Monroe doesn't warrant such attention doesn't know much about it.
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John F. Kennedy Library/Getty Jackie and the Girls
Mrs. Kennedy’s JFK problem—and ours
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The Autumn of Joan Didion
The writer’s work is a triumph—and a disaster.
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ABC The Glory of Oprah
Why the “talkinest child” understands women and the power of television better than anyone else
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Ted Streshinsky/Corbis The Madness of Cesar Chavez
A new biography of the icon shows that saints should be judged guilty until proved innocent.
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Yuta Onoda The Ivy Delusion
The real reason the good mothers are so rattled by Amy Chua
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Gracia Lam The Hazards of Duke
A now infamous PowerPoint presentation exposes a lot about men, women, sex, and alcohol—and about how universities are letting their female students down.
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Ellen Weinstein Love, Actually
How girls reluctantly endure the hookup culture
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Edel Rodriguez Cultivating Failure
How school gardens are cheating our most vulnerable students
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Marc Yankus Sex and the Married Man
How Helen Gurley Brown inspired a generation of home-wreckers, and brought down John Edwards
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The Passion of Alec Baldwin
The blustering actor’s memoir of divorce is really a love letter to his daughter.
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Adam S. Doyle What Girls Want
A series of vampire novels illuminates the complexities of female adolescent desire.
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Girl, Interrupted
How Patty Hearst’s kidnapping reflected and ravaged American culture in the 1970s
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The Uses of Enchantment
Barbara Walters got the story by giving her subjects what they wanted.
