(The Atlantic is one of my favorite magazines)
I think most of the magazines' authors write literary pieces without overusing descriptive words. To me adjectives and adverbs are the worst culprits in terms of slowing down readers. It's usually better to pack meaning into verbs.
For example, someone could write, "A tall attractive woman with bright shiny shoes approached the fat gentleman by the bar." Alternatively, he or she could write, "The woman sauntered toward the gentleman by the bar."
While the two sentences aren't equivalent in meaning, they paint a similar picture. The second sentence is better in my opinion because it keeps a certain flow going.
Stephen King wrote about this, referring to adverbs as "flat tires": http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/13/stephen-ki...
"That Friday afternoon, resplendent in a lustrous violet button-down, William packed half a dozen friends into a private plane on a frosty Edmonton, Alberta, tarmac and jetted off to Las Vegas."
This was the second or third sentence. I was just getting into the flow of the story and felt bombarded by all that information. I could have waited to read about the color of the guy's shirt.