{"id":287,"date":"2004-07-05T10:33:51","date_gmt":"2004-07-05T18:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/netmesh.info\/jernst\/uncategorized\/in-praise-of-the-economist-the-weekly-newspaper"},"modified":"2004-07-05T10:33:51","modified_gmt":"2004-07-05T18:33:51","slug":"in-praise-of-the-economist-the-weekly-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/2004\/07\/in-praise-of-the-economist-the-weekly-newspaper\/","title":{"rendered":"In Praise of The Economist (the Weekly Newspaper)"},"content":{"rendered":"

If poetry is the way to create images, even whole lines of thought with very few words, the following quote from The Economist<\/a>‘s July 3rd edition is pure poetry:<\/p>\n

Just 15 years after the Velvet Revolution, the Czech Communist Party has found a new way to threaten democracy: by getting dangerously popular. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"webmentions_disabled":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","kind-"],"kind":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}