If poetry is the way to create images, even whole lines of thought with very few words, the following quote from The Economist‘s July 3rd edition is pure poetry:
Just 15 years after the Velvet Revolution, the Czech Communist Party has found a new way to threaten democracy: by getting dangerously popular.
What do you make out of this sentence? Whichever way you look at it, it makes no sense: how can one threaten democracy by becoming too popular? But then, we are talking about a Communist Party — it clearly has this strong correlation with totalitarianism. But if democracy is about a choice, about popularity, how could anything popular be wrong? And one starts thinking how a number of totalitarian regimes in the past got into power with quite strong popular support, and whether or not the parallels apply here. And so forth.
The Economist is an awesome magazine. Sometimes I disagree with them, but not very often, and a lot less often than with any other source of information that I am aware of. They are very opinionated, in fact there is not a single sentence they deliver in the close to a 100 pages every week that is free of opinion. But the case they are making on virtually any issue is close to perfect in most cases, almost infuriatingly so.
But The Economist goes beyond just merely being right. By making statements like the above &mdash not just being right, but by being poetic — the amount of information being conveyed is orders of magnitude larger than the amount of information conveyed by the typical newspaper or magazine writing the same number of letters.
I have no idea how they do it. I do know that I really admire them. They are at the top of their game. And a measure for all of us to aspire to.