NEW YORK — It was that rare essay that stopped the American chattering class in its tracks.

Just as we thought our attention spans were collapsing and our thoughts reducing themselves to what could be texted or tweeted, the magazine The Atlantic published a nearly 13,000-word cover story by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton University scholar and former Obama administration official. It was about whether educated professional women can still have it all: Can they be involved mothers and superstar workers and perfect wives? And it concluded that, in the world we inhabit in America, they can’t.

The essay went ferociously viral in America, at least among the intelligentsia — and rippled out to the world. Ms. Slaughter found herself on one television broadcast after another. A Twitter dialogue, employing the hashtag #HavingItAll, flourished. Women and men alike passed the article around through e-mail.

The controversial crux of Ms. Slaughter’s argument is this: that alpha women with alpha opportunities should, if they wish also to be mothers, accept beta careers. This is not to say that women should aim lower, Ms. Slaughter says. Rather, women should become content with peaking later (but still peaking at the top) and with a leadership trajectory of “irregular stair steps, with periodic plateaus (and even dips)” when needs and impulses beyond work require it.

Ms. Slaughter also suggests — though without much hope of imminent change — that men with children could elect similarly structured careers, and that employers could do things to make the beta path more of a respectable option.