Now that every news mag in the U.S. wishes it were more like The Economist (see the “Reagan’s Tears” cover for an example of Time‘s new Econo-like look), the New York Observer features a timely debunking of the British mag’s occasionally colourless/pompous prose style: “The Economist is less provocative than it is aggressively boring: “The last time he ran for president John McCain spent months rolling around New Hampshire in a bus, the Straight Talk Express.” “In the absence of reliable, up-to-date information, markets go awry.” The layout is even duller–thick columns of type wrapping from page to page, like a cross between the old New Republic and the telephone book. The back page is filled with currency tables (for those who would convert the 16 different cover prices longhand). The only nod to magazine aesthetics is the sheen of the paper stock.”I’ll never again read an Economist analysis of, say, the U.S. current account deficit in quite the same way.