The other day, because of an ATC glitch, air traffic on the east coast shut down at 1:30pm. For someone like myself, seated in 30B (center seat, back of the MD88) on a flight from Atlanta to Boston at 2:30pm, this presented an opportunity to:
(a) lose two pounds in sweat
(b) learn unwanted personal details of the family in the row in front of me
(c) read three Economists
(d) all of the above
If you guessed (d), you would be correct!
A good unit of measure for me of air travel (a function of distance and time) is how many issues of The Economist I can get through. It’s the perfect reading material for Airportlandia because of its density — many thin pages of text versus thick pages of photos — and because of a certain timelessness to the writing. I don’t read it to find out what happened yesterday, I read it to find out why it happened. So the timeliness of the issue is not critical; the date on the newspaper is usually its most important descriptor, but not for The Economist (which, oddly, claims to be a newspaper. Whatever.) Even though I’ve been a more-or-less diligent reader since college, for many years now I’ve had the habit of primarily reading it on airplanes; I think I would have to buckle my seatbelt at home to read it in my lounge chair.
An indication of the quality of the ‘newspaper’ is the way it deals with issues that I’m familiar with; I usually find that I agree with their analysis on things I know about, which increases my trust in their analysis of things I don’t know about. (Unfortunately, the ratio keeps shifting as I realize I know less and less. Separate problem.)
Congratulations on your prodigious reading capacity. I have never been able to get through a single issue of the Economist in less than two weeks. Of course, that was before I started traveling, so I might find that my 3c0n0m1s7 skillz have increased these days.
The Economist has to be one of the best magazines out there, and Iam not a big fan of flying anyway, and (d) would be my choice too,