The other day, because of an ATC glitch, air traffic on the east coast shut down at 1:30pm.\u00a0 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:<\/p>\n
(a) lose two pounds in sweat<\/p>\n
(b) learn unwanted personal details of the family in the row in front of me<\/p>\n
(c) read three Economists<\/p>\n
(d) all of the above<\/p>\n
If you guessed (d), you would be correct!<\/p>\n
A good unit of measure for me of air travel (a function of distance and time) is how many issues of The Economist<\/em> I can get through.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I don’t read it to find out what happened yesterday, I read it to find out why it happened.\u00a0 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<\/em> (which, oddly, claims to be a newspaper.\u00a0 Whatever.)\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 (Unfortunately, the ratio keeps shifting as I realize I know less and less.\u00a0 Separate problem.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The other day, because of an ATC glitch, air traffic on the east coast shut down at 1:30pm.\u00a0 For someone like myself, seated in 30B (center seat, back of the MD88) on a flight from Atlanta to Boston at 2:30pm, … Continue reading