Circular Cruises/Judging Covers

Judging Covers

27 March 1998

I read The Economist. It's a nice magazine, but it has an unusual reputation. People expect it to be this repository of harsh, dry fiscal data, read only by little men with receding hairlines who push their spectacles back up onto their noses every fifteen minutes.

I like to read it on the subway. It's broken into little articles, none extremely long, which make it great subway reading. Plus - I admit it - I like getting the reactions from the three-piece suit and briefcase crowd when they look over the tops of their newspapers and see what I'm reading.

I try to make sure they get a look at the cover, just in case they don't recognize the typography.

Truth is, the magazine is the best way I've found to find out what's going on all over the world - I read the newspaper for daily and local; I read The Economist for weekly and global. I could read the Wall Street Journal and get global too, but frankly, the back two-thirds of the WSJ is financial reports and stock listings, and I can live without that.

But surely most of the content of The Economist is, yes, economics? Well, yes; but it all depends on your definition of "economics." The magazine has a follow-the-money approach to everything - to them, almost anything happening in the world comes down to economics eventually. So what they might consider a financial article is, to me, a piece on rioting in Uganda or the slow demise of trade guilds in Germany.

It's a very dense magazine. Full of words. It takes me a whole week to read one - although admittedly, I only read it for about fifteen minutes a day. I admit it took me a while to pick up on the money jargon, but even if I skipped the driest, most obviously fiscal parts, it would be worth buying.

It has a great sense of balance - since it is really only interested in following the money, and the articles are written anonymously by a team of people with wildly diverse views, it's very difficult to detect any biases in its reporting. And it has a blessedly warped sense of humor, something you have to read several issues to even notice.

I bring all this up because the magazine does have this stodgy reputation, and I'd like to see more people under the age of thirty - that is, my usual peer group - reading it. Nobody makes a face when I tell them I subscribe to Smithsonian, nor when I tell them I read Scientific American fairly regularly (a magazine I find much harder to follow than The Economist, for the most part). But I mention The Economist, and people get sickly looks.

And the people who do know about the magazine and appreciate it tend to wonder what a thirty-year-old hacker-without-portfolio is doing reading it, as if one should have at least $100,000 in investments to be allowed a subscription.

I can only hope they assume I'm one of those hacker geniuses whose garage startup just went public and is standing on huge amounts of liquid assets.

It's always been true that you can't assume someone's successful just because he or she dresses the part. The beauty of the present-day is that now the reverse is true as well.

I'm not usually too concerned about appearances, but if people are going to jump to conclusions about me anyway, I want them to be favorable ones. Is that unreasonable of me?

Copyright © March 1998. All rights reserved.