Oh. I thought he was talking about The Onion.

How did The Economist get to such a vile state?

The horrible answer is, it’s always been this vile. If you go back to The Economist’s beginnings in Victorian England, you’ll find, for example, the magazine’s brave stand on the Great Irish Famine, the English-led genocide that left up to two million Irish dead. When a cry went up to stop the famine, The Economist countered, “It is no man’s business to provide for another. If left to the natural law of distribution, those who deserve more would obtain it.”

And speaking of Hitlers, in the mid-1930s, The Economist even found time to praise you-know-who: “Herr Hitler is showing encouraging signs of statesmanship.” Yes, they really did write that.

The first and last example of genuine wit that The Economist ever produced.

Funnily enough, the applicant wasn’t called for interview.

It ain’t no good, no Sir. And it’s been downhill ever since they criminalized corporal punishment…

As a reporting medium, I don’t like the way Powerpoint favours putting lots of graphics on the screen and only a certain amount of text. It’s okay when the PP presentation is a summary of a complex document, but all too often (including for due diligence) the document presented is simply a bound copy of the Powerpoint slides. There are just some issues that can only be properly grasped by sitting down with raw data as well as someone’s (possibly erroneous, almost certainly partial) interpretation of said data: and Powerpoint militates against including big chunks of data and in favour of setting up a nice series of slides showing arrows connecting various geometrical shapes containing large-print text boxes (often just slogans). A lot of amateur historians know that Churchill used to demand policy documents written on ‘one sheet of paper only’, or even one half sheet. What’s less well-known is that he used to demand huge reams of original data, for example the Enigman decrypts, and spend hours poring over them and asking stubborn questions both of the senior officers or civil servants sent to brief him and the juniors who actually understood the stuff.

As an instructional tool, I recently did a trauma medicine course- much of which was ‘death by PowerPoint’. The best single instructor we had came in, switched off the projector and said ‘people just stare at these damn slides and it hypnotises them. Take out your notebooks, pay attention, write down the key points only and if you don’t understand anything ask questions. And we’re going to be doing a lot of practice.’

Now none of these learning methods are actually ruled out by the use of PowerPoint, but one does find that PowerPoint based lessons are a dream for the lazy instructor and the lazy student: one just flips the ‘next’ button on a presentation she may or may not have written herself, the other just reads a screen and listens vaguely to a voice.

PowerPoint appears to make instruction effortless, which is not a good thing. And the reliance on graphics over text means that people don’t get detail- which may sometimes be un-necessary but is often vital, particularly if someone is trying to pull the wool over your eyes- and encourages people to accept over neat schemes of causation.

all 4 of them do, I believe. which seems like a good idea, forcing the writer to focus on key issues rather than infinite waffle.

There’s no excuse to read The Economist, if you have the internet.

How true! Why read The Economist when you can read Crooked Timber instead.

(Yes, good fellows, that was sarcasm)

Personally, I’d say that for a liberal with anti-capitalist tendencies, there is no better single publication to read than The Economist. As long as one reads between the lines, it does a great job of focusing on important news around the world (rather than the latest comment so-and-so has made about the Iraq War). I’m not trying to criticize Crooked Timber here, I’m just saying that The Economist does a good job of doing what it does: finding stories that people with a direct interest in the international economy will find interesting.

“I’d also add that ‘knowing something about a foreign country’ is not equivalent to ‘repeating what you just read in the Economist …”

damn.

There’s no excuse to read The Economist, if you have the internet. You should be saying ‘hooray’, Loren.

Although you would think that would be true, try arguing to an american (of certain stripes) that universal healthcare can work, and they still contend that it is completely impossible and would lead to a breakdown of the system in short order.