The Atlantic was one of the places I started free-lancing pieces to. It only took me about 15 years to break in. The Atlantic doesn't run a lot of movie columns. The challenge of selling a movie piece to The Atlantic is to try to do something that talks about a set of movies at hand and not to go on endlessly about theory or trends. Deal with the actual works.
Readers like to have criticism that is connected to the object being criticized.
The challenge for someone like me is to come up with a particular thing that will open up different issues that are important for general consideration. In each of the pieces I've done I've tried to do that. It is hard to explain why some things have a deeper resonance than other things. And what those are and if they're just in the film world or outside the film world. You just try to explore as many of the aspects as possible.