Why I let my son eat my Economist

By Conor | September 19th, 2009 | 4 Comments »

There was a time in my life that I considered The Economist magazine to be something people only pretended to like in order to sound cool. These people were, in my mind, likely to be the same liars who pretended to like sushi.

Now, older and wizened, I concede that sushi actually does taste good. I think the problem was that I tried it for the first time when I was about fifteen years old and instead of something easy, like salmon or tuna, I was made to start with some kind of seaweed soup and move onto something even more challenging – raw Man-O-War, if memory serves. I was a macaroni and cheese guy. I would have traded anything for even a raw box of the stuff, crunching down the hard noodles and tipping the dry powder down my throat, rather than eat another sliver of whatever it was on my plate.

But The Economist. This is something else entirely. I am beginning to think that there are a few people in the world – I’m thinking double digits here – who may actually like reading this magazine. People who, whilst packing their beach towel and sunscreen and sneaking a peak at their pale stomach in the mirror, reach for The Economist and think “Ah, The Economist. Can’t wait to kick back and find out if there’s been any movement in the Nagorno-Karabakh talks.”

I never counted myself among these people, and yet I have had a subscription for years. I am at the point now where it arrives in the mail and if I get through the entire front cover headline I consider myself having “read The Economist.” If I read the subheaders of the stories inside, I have read it “cover to cover.” Yet this wasn’t always the case. I did try to read it when I was at the EastWest Institute think tank in Prague and Brussels, mostly so that I could sound less dumb. I would come to work and walk into a conversation and loudly mention a headline, something that I had read, “Oil pipelines through Kazakhstan? Now that has some crazy issues around it!” because if it’s in the Economist, there’s got to be some crazy issues around it, and then I would quietly recede into the background and agree with whomever was talking.

So why am I no longer forcing myself to read it? What’s changed? I’ll tell you what’s changed. I have finished the first year of my MBA. That was one brutal year. I love NYU Stern, I love business school, but man oh man. There were times, mostly during midterm exams, when I wondered whether I could score higher than a beached whale, lying beside me taking the same exam, pencil resting against his big whale flipper. Those days are over. Year Two seems to be more manageable. And with any luck, I’m finished with any class where The Economist would be required reading.

Yet still it arrives at my apartment. And yes, it is useful to leave out on tables when people come over to make me look brilliant. It’s the same reason we subscribe to Architectural Digest. Or why I thought we did – I recently noticed that Liz actually reads that one, even when nobody’s watching. I don’t get that. That magazine could have a cover photo of my parent’s house on it, me looking out the window, with a headline reading “Proposed Site for Cursed Sarcophagus: Poughkeepsie, New York” and I’d just toss it on the coffee table and turn on Three and a Half Men.

But The Economist is no longer only useful as the Coffee Table Lie. I have discovered that Finn, who is now seven months old, adores it.

There must be something about paper that makes seven month old boys feel like The Hulk. He takes it a piece of paper in his hand, pauses to consider it for a moment, then crushes it, two handed, while his face explodes in surprise at his own ferocious strength. I wonder if he is constantly confusing paper with sheets of steel, perhaps, or maybe thin granite slabs that he’s gotten his hands on. I wonder if it terrifies him, this power, if he wonders if maybe the next time he grabs my lip in his fist, as he is prone to do, whether he might accidentally yank me off my feet and whirl me around like a bit of tissue paper.

We often leave the NY Times next to his little chair, and we’ll come back a few seconds later to find Finn engulfed in a paper tornado with Finn’s arms whirling around like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, the Style section raining down like confetti, and newsprint all over his face. This won’t do.

But The Economist, that is made of heartier stuff. It crunches, but does not shred. Drool merely softens it, rather than disintegrates it. There are enough colorful pictures – not to mention witty captions – to keep the boy occupied, his look of absolute concentration mirroring the looks that you might see on those reading it in the subway. Except Finn’s is genuine.

So The Economist will continue to come to our house. I’ll continue to put it on our coffee table in case a house guest may need the latest Guyanese employment numbers. And I’m giving my son the best gift he can get – the gift of knowledge. Tasty, tasty knowledge.