Dani Rodrik wonders if he should start reading The Economist again. Like many of us, Dani was once a committed reader. But he grew tired of "ideology that masquerades too often as journalism," and concerned that "the more I knew about a subject, the less The Economist was making sense." I had the same experience. The Economist is wry and knowing and worldly and made me feel very smart. Except on issues that I actually knew something about, in which case it made me feel very annoyed. And eventually, made me very worried, as The Economist is one of those magazines that's read aspirationally, by people who want to be wry and knowing and worldly, and is thus taken more seriously than most publications. A lot of the folks I knew who read The Economist seemed to be reading it in order to learn how to have The Economist's opinion on things, as that was clearly the path to being a cosmopolitan British intellectual. Rodrik says it's getting better, and I haven't read it recently enough to make a judgment on that. For now, my magazine reading is largely confined to TAP, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, Time, GQ, Esquire, and Cook's Illustrated. And only TAP, Esquire, and Cook's Illustrated really count as regular reads. But this is a good question: Which three magazines do you think of as must-reads?
