I kept at it longer than you, KD, but found that they would mindlessly apologize for Bush no matter what. Their (at that time) new Lexington was awful, too.

I stopped reading it around 200 too, but because I found out that it was the favorite of a colleague who was a total asshole and consequently and obviously a Republican.

Kevin,

It sounds like you're throwing a soft hanging curve to the free-market fantasists who think private corporations will compete to send a uniformed representative to my house, pick up a letter, and deliver it anywhere in the United States for 41 cents.

Or the ones who will cite the superior efficiency of FedEx or UPS, who perform the same service a little faster, but for 40 times the price.

Or the ones who will incorrectly cite the US Post Office's reliance on tax subsidies, oblivious to the fact that the Post Office has not received a penny in tax subsidy in better than two decades.

The Post Office rocks.

the economist is a high brow magazine written from a centrist establishment point of view.

if your political point of view is to the far right or far left you will probably not like what you read.

You can get an online subscription and avoid all the mailing hassle. But at $80 a year, and with all the rest of the information on the internet available for free, why would you bother to pay?

A slow news day, is it?

UN: Glaciers shrinking at record rate

ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) -- Glaciers are shrinking at record rates and many could disappear within decades, the U.N. Environment Program said Sunday.

Scientists measuring the health of almost 30 glaciers around the world found that ice loss reached record levels in 2006, the U.N. agency said.

UNEP warned that further ice loss could have dramatic consequences particularly in India, whose rivers are fed by Himalayan glaciers.

The west coast of North America, which gets much of its water from glaciers in mountain ranges such as the Rockies and Sierra Nevada, also would be affected, it said.

"There are many canaries emerging in the climate change coal mine," UNEP's executive director Achim Steiner said in a statement. "The glaciers are perhaps among those making the most noise and it is absolutely essential that everyone sits up and takes notice."

He urged governments to agree stricter targets for emissions reductions at an international meeting next year in the Danish capital, Copenhagen.

On average, the glaciers shrank by 4.9 feet in 2006, the most recent year for which data are available.

The most severe loss was recorded at Norway's Breidalblikkbrea glacier, which shrank 10.2 feet in 2006, while Chile's Echaurren Norte glacier was the only one to grow slightly thicker.

"The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight," said Wilfried Haeberli, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service.

The Zurich-based body conducted the study on which the findings are based.

Haeberli said glaciers lost an average of about a foot of ice a year between 1980 and 1999. But since the turn of the millennium the average loss has increased to about 20 inches.

No worries, when the glacier-fed freshwater supplies for billions of people in the American west, Asia and South America vanish, there will be lots of interesting things to blog about.

The Economist epitomizes "too much." It costs too much, there's too much of it, and it gets tendentious too much. It lives too much in the era of Walter Bagehot, in sum.

Now if it got pithy, I might pick it up. But that would probably be too much to hope for.

We've had a subscription for a while, and it did drift to the other side of the weekend for a few months, but it has come reliably (to Seattle) on Thursday for the past 3-4 years..

Too. Many. Stacked. Economists. That's why.

fyi, I am subscribed to the online section instead (same with wsj). It'd be great to just read the entire mag, but it gets to be too much, week after week.

I ended my subscription because I was in grad school and it cost $100/yr. (It's $130, now) For that kind of money, I could get the same breadth of information from more sources, and the writing was better.

However, if the Economist published an "obituaries-only" edition each month, I would subscribe to that. Their obituaries are interesting and informative.

FWIW, it's been coming consistently on Friday, rarely on Saturday, up here in Oakland.

And if you limit yourself to the back half of the magazine (science / tech, book reviews, obit, etc.), the content is pretty good.

My experience was remarkably like KDs, although I quit the subscription because I found I didn't have the time to read it. I do look through the economists freebee internet version every week -but I find that my level of respect for them has fallen to the point where I usually only read zero to four articles/week.

I agree mostly with bluesmoke, they are largely centrist -and at least they used to state the reasons for their conclusions (which is really unamerican). Muricans are supposed to have strong beliefs about everything that never need any justification. In any case at least on this side of the pond things have drifted so far rightward that centrist and leftist has largely merged.

*

like most British magazines compared to their American equivalents, it makes our stuff look like kindergarten journals.

No shit. I read and stopped reading the Economist probably around 2000 or 2001.

As a political science undergraduate student who hadn't, like most kids, followed the news as much as I should have growing up, it seemed like a good way to increase my general knowledge. I was smart enough to be on the lookout for an ideological angle, and at least at that point there was a lot that recommended itself in the Economist to read. Kind of like reading the Wall Street Journal front page of the hard paper at least used to be-- now, NYT and WaPo are really unreliable-- Will it be propaganda? For someone who hasn't heard about it, it can be surprising how straight'n'to-the-point the conservatives actually give their ruling class a lot of the facts of what's going on through the WSJ front page.

I had a kind of unhinged college professor who once (totally coincidentally, I'm sure) railed against the Economist during a class within a year, I guess, after I'd stopped reading it (couldn't afford the subscription anymore). He was almost of the same stock as the kind of people who hand out communist newspapers at rallies, but his take on it seemed to be that the Economist was poison at that anybody who read it very possibly could be considered a right-wing extremist. If only the right-wingers had such a stigma against checking out our stuff, they'd be totally paranoid / set against each other. But, you know that type- the ones who want to be the Stalins of the next communist country, and tell everyone else what to do.

I stopped reading it a good while longer ago than most of you seem to have. With me it was the coverage of the Mexican economy, the advocacy of neoliberal economics as a form of salvation, and the the hagiography of Raul Salinas that did it. We know how that all worked out.

I think at that time I had the Nation, the New Yorker, and the Christian Science Monitor, too.

Count me as another who couldn't take their subservience on the American pages to the Republican party. Conservative is fine, but that GOP no matter what the cost view they embraced is pathetic.

Haven't seen it in a long time, but I used to love the writing until they couldn't tell right from wrong.

At least when I was reading, a lot of articles in the Economist were pretty straight-up news reporting, and didn't seem slanted to make you support one side or the other. I probably never read all the articles in an issue, though, and don't recall reading the opinion pieces.

A lot of my hippy college friends could have benefited from reading the Economist, the Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, the New Yorker and the front page of the WSJ a lot more.

But the media has gone totally haywire in recent years- it's hard to say quickly for sure what I'd recommend now.

Eh, I'm still on the press list, and it's not bad for $0. Lexington's still goofily behind the curve, and most of the American political coverage stinks of fake-fancy steakhouse conventional wisdom...I can see them winding up to have a tickle contest with McCain, too, even as they endorse Obama. Coverage of non-English speaking countries, especially ones continually overlooked by the US media, is pretty good, though, and I always look forward to the technology quarterly. I think their non-English speaking coverage is less slanted because the pool of people who understand these countries enough to write about them at the Economist's level is too small to run the political filter tightly.

I mentioned this on Matt's site. The Economist is really weird in that sometimes they just do an about face in their coverage for no apparent reason. Around 2005-2006 they were way ahead of everyone on the housing bubble, subprime issue. As cutting edge as the housing bubble blogs, with more technical coverage on issues like debt and mortgage securitization. They even hinted several times that this was a precarious situation and that it could all fall apart.

And then, just as it really was about to break in 2007, they backed off. They acted like it was no big deal, even though it was becoming clear to everyone else that this was a bigger deal than everyone but the biggest bears had imagined.

On Matt's site, another poster said they did the same with the Internet bubble. Quite bizarre.

I don't know if you're right about the conservative content being progressively more oppressive of late. I hope not. I think what you actually mean is that they are so stupid and wrong-headed about so many aspects of American political life. And they think these things don't matter, because in England they basically don't. In England you are not dealing with a huge culture and a huge population of ignorant, backwards fascists. Yes, I know the drinking and the hooliganism in England are horrendous, but by and large you are dealing with people and politicians who are at least marginally sane. Here it's very different, and it's life or death.

Your problem with reading the Economist is the same as when you read anything on any subject you know about. You say, is that journalist really so stupid? Is that journalist really so ignorant? Is that journalist really so lazy? It's the same problem you get with the Spectator, but without that pea-brained imbecile Mark Steyn.

At least these English magazines have superb cultural reporting, and that's what I love about them. You can't say that about pathetic rags like the National Review, the American Spectator, or the Weekly Standard. (The American Conservative is surprisingly well-written and interesting, by the way.)

Give me good articles about culture, including those big special sections about various countries and cities, even ones about the United States, and I will SWOON every time you talk down to me with your all-knowing, omniscient, patronizing, arch tone. Thank you, Mr. Economist Sir, may I have another!

ALSO--VERY, VERY IMPORTANT--the Economist employs one of the world's most brilliant cartoonists, Chris Riddell!!!!!! He also does BRILLIANT work at the Literary Review. Sometimes his color sense can be off, sometimes, his drawings are not as successful, but when he's on, he's on. He's like Michael Witte, but with more substance. Witte has a more reliable and flawless color sense, but Riddell can really lay on the old-fashioned, Victorian cross-hatching and illustration skills.

Lay it on me dude with that Punch-style, baby, yeah!!! You're liable to go all over my ass with that Tenniel-style, huh-huh! I can dig it!!!

There's that Political Animal Danish sense of humor again. An Austrian-born friend of mine mostly grew up in Denmark, and he's just the same.

They actually endorsed Kerry in 2004, so I think their ideology has moved more towards Andrew Sullivan conservatism, rather than Bush republicanism.

"Go all Tenniel on my ass" was the phrase that was flitting through my brain. Whatever.

Kevin, staleness is no longer a concern now that the Economist is online. Also, the Economist online edition also has a spoken-word (podcast) version where the entire content is downloadable as audio content. You can listen to it in the background or when you're driving around town. It's also fun to hear the posh British accents (especially if you've ever wanted to work on your own British accent). :)

I have trouble wading through all or even much of its content, too. But it's excellent for international news, especially its surveys of individual countries (like the one of France shortly following the riots), or Russia with all of its oil and corruption, and the economic slant helps keep the focus on political and business developments that are easier to relate to (if not always directly relevant to your life).

The political slant isn't very pronounced for much of its content; where it does occur it can sometimes be preachy, but even then it's easy to identify and generally very consistent (and in most cases logical and tolerable enough, if not always agreeable).

That being said, it's expensive and hard to keep up with. But it's worth it if you're interested in keeping up with the world around you.

They were in a very shady part of London when I visited there years ago. Bad sign.

Someone posted a link to this on Global Economic Analysis - I just finished watching all 3 hours of it. Everything I believed about our economy has been shattered.

And Walker, I bet they backed off in 2007 because they were told to back off.

The Money Masters
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936&hl=en

Kevin pretty well lays out the arc of my relationship with the Economist. I almost canceled my subscription when they had the "Just Go" headline over a picture of Clinton during Starr's Flytrap "investigation". When they endorsed Gore over Bush (a bizarre choice for a magazine called the Economist), I decided to let my subscription lapse. Which as I recall allowed me to avoid the Scandinavian global warming denier episode. I can overlook the cheesiness of the "Big Mac Index", but when ideology deteriorated into partisanship I had to give it up.

Thank Gore... I mean God for the internet!

Degraded delivery standards for periodical-rate mailings is a major cause for concern for smaller weeklies, fortnightlies and other time-sensitive publications who already are having a tough enough time getting people to pony up for subscriptions, then wait up to two weeks for a magazine to get from the printer to the subscriber. Bigger weeklies such as Time, Newsweek and the Economist can arrange to drop mailings at regional mail processing centers so they get expedited handling -- another perk of capital that smaller publications don't have access to.

I still subscribe, and here in metro Detroit it arrives like clockwork on Saturday, which gives me all day Sunday to scan through the interesting stuff (mostly back of the mag items along with coverage of Asia ex-China and Africa).

It seems the USPS has picked up its game as far as delivering magazines over the last few years. Five-ten years ago, magazine delivery was pretty much a random event. I can remember numerous times when a particular weekly magazine would disappear for a few weeks, then three issues would arrive on the same day, with at least one looking like it had been left lying around on a sorting-room floor (torn, folded, dirty, and generally looking stomped-on). Maybe some magazine publishers leaned on the USPS. I won't exactly say the USPS rocks, but it's at least gotten acceptable reliability down.

It would be interesting to see if competition in magazine delivery would pick things up a bit more or reduce prices, but of course USPS precludes that experiment by having a law in place that makes it illegal for anyone other than the USPS to use your mailbox by the street or attached to your house, or the mail slot in your front door (and they will prosecute anyone they find violating that one).

Back in the dim, dark past (pre-FedEx and pre-UPS selling to the general public), Parcel Post was a national joke, with packages taking a couple of weeks to arrive looking like they had been stomped on (and marking a package fragile was considered to be code to increase the stomping). Competition from UPS fixed that to the point that I'll use USPS to mail packages knowing their service is acceptable.

"...they could speed up their home delivery if they started using a private delivery service instead of a bloated, unionized, labor-heavy government monopoly."

Gee, are you saying that lower pay for mail carriers would make them work faster? You are getting very Orange County here, Kevin.

Relatively (what isn't?) damn good publication.

Two bits of support for my opinion:

1) Oxymoron: progressives who refuse to read dissenting opinion.
2) Reporting and editorial are distinct. We'll see about the new regime under Rupert, but at least until the takeover the Wall Street Journal had excellent reporting despite abysmal editorial page content.

I found some of their editorial slant fairly subtle in the form of blantant misrepresentations and missing facts on issues that only specialists could call them on. Makes it hard to trust the other stuff.

I first started reading them in the 60s when I was in the military (we got the "tissue paper" International edition) & then through the 70s while I was deep into economic systems and technology. Though I disagreed with a lot of their perspectives they always seemed to have interesting, well thought out opinions. As the Laffer/Reagan insanity spread I gave up because they, like most other folks, seemed to have lost their lock on reality (well, DUH !). After that I read it occasionally just to check what their slant was on specific issues I was interested in. During the 90s I read their stuff online & subscribed to their weekly email service (still get it but hardly ever pay much attention). Early in this century a friend gave me a gift sub & I read it off and on that year (when I had the time) but let the sub lapse since I wasn`t able to keep up and their perspective seemed to have gone more & more off the edge of reality.

Maybe someday they will reenter reality & I`ll pay more attention & then *sigh* maybe not.

Either way I don`t need their heavy doses of simplistic propaganda.

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist" - John Maynard Keynes

They do generally sound reasonable and intellectual. They should get kudos for that.

How serious can you take an outfit like that if in times like this you'd never ever hear them suggest an oil windfall profits tax? Anything but conservative doesn't occur to them and that leaves out constructive answers we need -- especially in these surreal times.

If there's plenty of oil being produced, then why are prices so high?

Perhaps it's that oil speculating keeps prices high because the same people are betting on oil company stocks going higher (under their guiding hands).

Tax the oil companies, take away huge profits and the oil speculating should subside (somewhat). Then we'll see more realistic gasoline prices.

That will help control this rampant inflation we're just now seeing and it will take a lot of pressure off people's wallets for a while.

Rein in the speculators!

"bloated, unionized,"
Yep, finally time to remove Kevin from the favorites list. Too much of this sort of knee-jerk garbage for me.

"Perhaps they ought to look into it and write a story about how they could speed up their home delivery if they started using a private delivery service instead of a bloated, unionized, labor-heavy government monopoly. Though it would be sort of embarrassing if they tried it and it didn't work, wouldn't it?"

It's called "irony".

When we needed real new during the early years of the Bush Admin, we went with the Financial Times and still periodically subscribe and pick it up on the road.

SA: No worries, when the glacier-fed freshwater supplies for billions of people in the American west, Asia and South America vanish, there will be lots of interesting things to blog about.

2008 is a bit of a reprieve (at least for the U.S.), with way above average snowfalls in the Sierras and Rockies, and record snowfalls in the North Central and Northeast. Here on the Pacific Coast, Carlsbad is constructing a water desalination plant powered by waste heat from its electrical power plant, and I expect other municipalites and state facilities (San Onofre Nuclear Plant) to follow suit. S. America had significantly above average snowfall in its winter of 2007. Most of Asia had record or near record cold and snowfall this winter as well.

Long-term, you might be right. It depends on whether those solar scientists are correct about a long period of below-recent-average temperatures.

they would mindlessly apologize for Bush no matter what.

That was never true of the Economist.

Most succinct comment I ever saw about the Economist - "written from the POV that they (the Economist) know everything and you (the reader) know nothing."
Buy it once in a while, but I can find far more and far more relevance and accuracy on the 'net.

I never subscribed to the Economist, but I stopped subscribing to almost all weekly magazines simply because their content usually wasn't worth paying for. Prime examples would be Time & Newsweek, which both seem to be in a race to become People magazine with a little politics, and Businessweek, which now seems to have virtually no articles longer than a page. Now I read them all at the library.

The only two weekly mags I still subscribe to are the New Yorker and Sports Illustrated, which both usually have excellent feature-length articles.

I read it occasionally, mainly when they do a feature on something or other. It provides a lot of good foreign news stories that are hard to find in other publications. I don't find them to be apologists for the Bush Administration, as much as apologists for capiatlism, which are hardly the same thing - witness the recent Bear Stearns bailout......

I gave up on the Economist in the late 90s. Strangely, it was their international coverage that caused me to throw in the towel--their coverage of my area of expertise was laughably off the mark. When I talked to other friends with different areas of expertise, I learned that they'd noticed the same issue. Nicely written, confidently presented, but factually challenged.

A few people have noted there are sources on the web which provide better international coverage. I'm curious what you'd recommend, especially for coverage of the non-Anglo world.

Count me among those who stopped reading around 2002, precisely because The Economist (a) had drunk the Cheney kool-aid (b) was NOT open and honest about that, and was therefore no longer open and honest about its point of view. You can only compensate for a point of view /when you know what it is/; like Cheney's motives The Economist's point of view is now unknown by its readers.

Cranky

I still get the Economist. I think it's delivery has improved from Kevin's experience. This week's issue arrived on Friday, and had articles commenting on developments in the US stock market that occurred the previous Tuesday. Not a bad lag for a weekly.

1) Oxymoron: progressives who refuse to read dissenting opinion.

Here's the thing: if I already know what the opinion is going to say before I read it, should I still feel obligated to do so?

The Economist was great when I was a college student and in my early 20s and wanted to answer the question, "What do rich white British neo-liberals think about the news?" However, after I become able to answer that question (let's face it, the formula is pretty simple), its purpose became redundant.

If you read only one newsweekly, read the Economist. But since one subscription to the Economist will buy you a subscription to Harper's, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books, why bother?

Kevin I have had almost exactly the same experience, I read the Economist on the advice of an uncle since the late 80s. As I was young I gradually became familiar with the topics and then the politics, since it's British I think it isn't as hard right as the WSJ I think. It's also intriguing as the authors' names aren't given and some past ones were famous (Kim Philby for one).

I also quit recently, a year or two ago, but because I was trying to move from reading paper-news to solely on the web (these days the only paper news I get is the Financial Times newspaper). I had noticed the mailing issue that you mentioned regarding the Economist, once when I let my subscription slip I got moved from Friday delivery to Monday. It was annoying, I figured that they had some ordered list for mailing and I was now stuck at the end and last to get a copy.

I work in DC, and live in Baltimore, and I am a reader of The Economist. Though I don't always agree with it editorial slant, I think it's a great magazine. Yet it rarely arrives at my house on Saturday, when it should. So I hear about Economist articles well before it has hit home for me. Frustrating.

I like the Economist, but tend to scarf its contents online well before the paper copy shows up, which is often Thursday. I had blamed that on living in a smallish Florida county that's overburdened with snowbirds. But lately, even super-cheap Newsweek has been arriving around Thursday instead of the usual Tuesday. The New Yorker is usually sometime the following week. Yeesh.

I buy it in airports and read on plane trips.

I don't think they actually endorsed Bush in 2004. IIRC they said it was a choice between incoherence (Kerry) vs. incompetence (Bush).

The first couple of Kevin's paras are a classic. They document how the dissonance-avoiding leftist can avoid uncomfortable information and opinions.

Of course, Kevin has now made a career in providing an insulating cocoon for others whose prejudices cannot withstand contradictory information and opinions.

Reality-based?

am, there's a certain phase in your life in which you absorb opinions you feel are new and interesting and transgressive. Then, as you get older, and you've heard those opinions repeated several times, rather formulaically, you realizing that they are neither new, nor interesting, nor transgressive. And given that, what's the point? I, myself, don't spend time reading the opinions of people who are against gay marriage. Not because I want an "insulating cocoon" but because I've heard it all before and don't find it compelling or interesting. I already know the formula.

Once you get to the point in your life, roughly around your 20s, where you realize that a lot of what appears in the Economist is formulaic repetition of the British neoliberal outlook on every single matter, it no longer becomes intellectually interesting or challenging, and for $130/yr, your money can be better spent.

Without comment on The Economist's political content (I'm a lefty, and I find lots to use in their big feature articles, I know how to filter for ideology), delivery has improved even here in Tucson, the last stop for every possible service. It often comes on Friday, sometimes on Saturday, and never, any more, on Monday, which it used to do consistently and annoyingly.

I liked the social and arts coverage, but never forgot Janes Fallows' crack: "A BRITISH magazine, called THE ECONOMIST?"

My copy arrives by mail almost every Friday here in NYC and for me their in-depth reports and Asia and Africa coverage fill me in on areas of the world that I otherwise tend not to read much about.

I stopped reading a few years back as well. After a while you figure out that their stories are all written to the same formula.

"This new development could have implications. Advocates say they will be X, critics say they will be Y. In the end, time will tell".

Repeat 50 times per issue, 50 times per year.

I'm your age, Kevin, and I read the Economist for 20 years on and off, till I realized that the non-free market economies they predicted would crumble any day now (England, Germany, France) outperformed their laissez-faire heroes in the U.S.

I still get it - you can download the audio edition each week and have all the articles read to you as part of your subscription - kind of nice actually - and you get the audio as soon as the magazine hits the news stands.

"the economist is a high brow magazine written from a centrist establishment point of view."

"if your political point of view is to the far right or far left you will probably not like what you read."

Except that the centrist establishment point of view in Britain and America is pretty far to the right. Even if it's Tony Blair's Labour Party or establishment members of the Democratic Party enunciating the centrist establishment POV.

So if your political point of view is centrist, but non-establishment, then you will find the Economist looks pretty far to the right.

SW: their coverage of my area of expertise was laughably off the mark

Ditto. Where I was familiar with a topic, I found the articles to be authoritative in style, but not in content.

I recommend the Financial Times. More current - every day, better point of view, and a great weekend section.

Still read the Economist. It usually comes to my door Friday or Saturday.

Yes, they've drifted. But it's still better than Time or Newsweek.

And it's on paper. For some reason I can only skim anything that appears on a computer screen.

I don't know if it was you or not, but years ago I remember hearing someone say about the Economist and its articles that "The whole article is generally great, and then I stop reading before the last paragraph so I don't have to hear their horribly wrong conclusions."

Common sense is still more reliable than economics.

Most economists seem to start with a political leaning and then cherry pick statistics.

Since there is no way economists can lab test grand economic theories like global free trade, economics remains nothing more than mistaken opinion for the most part.

I've subscribed for a while now and it's been a long time since it could have been described as being on Bush's side - it's pretty brutal on his shambolic handling of the economy and of the utter lack of thought put into the war. From a British perspective, they do have rather too much faith in the power of the free market on things like state healthcare - you don't have to be partisan to recognise that the US model has neatly brought together all the very worst aspects of the private sector - but they're robust on failures like Iraq and usefully sceptical of David Cameron and the alternatives to Labour in the UK. Their colours do show a bit when they try to pretend that the Scottish nationalists simply don't exist (as opposed to being the party in power in Scotland), particularly since so much of their "low tax" thinking depends on Scottish oil revenue, but over the piece I don't think there are many other journals as even-handed.

Oh, and I would no more vote Conservative (or Republican) than I would attempt to do my own root canal work.

Mikey wrote:

Most succinct comment I ever saw about the Economist - "written from the POV that they (the Economist) know everything and you (the reader) know nothing."

I never get that impression-- are you sure you're not just some dumb, insecure bone-head who is projecting bad personality traits on someone else just because you feel inferior to them? Not a good habit.

Anyway, like I wrote above, it's been years since I have read anything in the Economist, but the statements here about how slanted it supposedly was don't represent what I recall. The only thing that might come close to convincing me is the idea that they left out expert-only details, and were really subtle in their slant, but then they would be coming to slanted conclusions as the "goal" of their bias, and I don't recall that, I just recally pretty even-handed (and well-informed compared to our American MSM journalism) news and economics news articles and I'd like to see the specific examples people posted about in comments above (the Clinton picture with caption, etc.) in context to be able to form my own judgment about what they were. I'd actually have an easier time believing that conservatives spread a rumor among liberals that the Economist is slanted just to keep us from reading something that would make us a lot more informed then them and consequentially better able to make our arguments, and that the dumber liberals spread the rumor enthusiastically, than I would believing that the Economist is really that slanted.

I'm an on again off again subscriber, and like kevin I've always been annoyed by the lag in getting the magazine to my door-step. Im a more recent subscriber, so I've never enjoyed the more timely delivery described.

I would say that its an amazing read, and an extremely high-quality publication. I would also agree its editorial positions can be a bit difficult to stomach for most types of liberals aside form the victorian laissez-faire variety. But mature readers should be able to get past this...

Kevin,
As a died-in-the-wool lefty who nevertheless thinks that international free trade really is a good thing, I absolutely love the Economist and read it cover to cover. I've discussed the Economist with dozens of people, and you are the first person I've heard of who ever suggested that it is a right-wing publication.

And actually, I do get it on Friday, perhaps because where I live (DC) it is delivered by a private service.

What probably happened was that the publishers of the Economist decided to have the magazine printed at fewer, more centralized production facilities. Not only was you copy probably being produced at a more distant facility, bulk mail sent from that facility could in turn be serviced through a completely different and more remote postal hub.

Basically, your subsciption was collateral damage to a cost savings intiative at the Economist.

B is right. The E had obvious misinformation due to negligence or bias, also many articles went on forever w/o any new facts. I do miss the internationl section, even with its distortions and the arts.

Wow, there seems to be quite a group of 6-10 year old former subscribers -- count me in!

After their endorsement of Bush in 2000 (and an early 2001 Lexington on Cheney as Talleyrand), I got the same feeling that I'd later have during the runup to the Iraq war: That if a random DFH had better political instincts than those folks who write oh-so-well, maybe they weren't so smart as they'd sounded to me all those years earlier.

(Admitting an earlier susceptibility to the phenomenon a Brit once described to me: "a British accent seems make us sound 10 IQ points smarter in the estimation of most Americans.")

I prefer to think of it not as a grudge, but as purdence, that I'm a long time in forgiving, never mind paying a premium for, news analysis that anti-insightful.

Oh, forgot to add: "I liked the social and arts coverage, but never forgot Janes Fallows' crack: "A BRITISH magazine, called THE ECONOMIST?"

Umm, yes, actually. I grew up in the same town as Adam Smith; we have plenty of economists in the UK - they just don't all happen to think the same way (that starting wars is a good way of hiding a deep streak of Keynes without admitting to it).