Too Clever by Half: The Economist Is Bullying Americans into Intellectual Submission

Our American virus of declining newspaper circulation seems to be sparing The Economist, an international British weekly filled with heavy duty stats and big words, whose American circulation of over a million now snubs the shrinking 600,000 readers of the Los Angeles Times.Its absence of bylines may please some jaded American readers, while others may be hooked by its coverage of foreign climes and exotica. What’s most striking, though, is The Economist’s blatant intellectual snobbery, especially its pervasive aping of the London Times Crossword, a traditional status symbol for “too clever by half” sophisticates like Detective Inspector Morse.