One of the signature virtues of the Economist is its ability to spot and put into perspective quiet but important developments ignored by most of the mass media. A small but striking example of this was a brief, boxed item in “The Americas” section of the May 5issue. Headlined “Gendercide in Canada? A study shows more boys than girls are being born to some ethnic groups,” this disturbing story reported on data that indicated growing numbers of Asian-born mothers in Canada are deliberately aborting female embryos purely on the basis of their sex, especially in the case of a second or third expected child. Thus, in Ontario, a study revealed that Indian-born mothers giving birth to a third child had “1,883 sons and 1,385 daughters, a hugely distorted ratio of 136 to 100” that could only be explained by parents deliberately targeting female fetuses for abortion. “In India and China,” the Economist noted, “sex-selective abortions are seen as crimes against humanity. Why should Canada view them any differently?”

THE ECONOMIST has always prided itself on not panicking and taking the long view. The Lexington column in its May 12 issue was an example of that approach at its best. It also turned out to be Peter David’s posthumous valedictory, running two days after his death. As I write this, the Obama-Romney race for the White House is only beginning to heat up; by the time it appears, the election will be in its last stretch and Americans will have been undergoing a constant media bombardment, much of it negative and almost all of it overstated. They should take comfort from something David pointed to in his inadvertent May 12 farewell. He called it the “binary illusion”:

People tend to think in black and white. America is either in decline or it is ordained to be for ever the world’s greatest nation. Government is either paralysed or it is running amok, stifling liberty and enterprise and snuffing out the American dream. The election campaign accentuates the negative and sharpens this binary illusion. . . . On a variety of objective measures, [America] is in an awful mess right now. And yet America of all countries has plenty of grounds to hope for a better future, despite its underperforming politics, and no matter who triumphs in November.

Like the United States, the Economist has a number of glaring imperfections. But, also like the United States, it usually manages to sort things out and muddle through. Along the way it also keeps its eye out for the exotic, amusing and interesting subjects we enjoy reading about but are seldom served up by the mass media.

This is particularly true when it comes to the Economist’s books-and-arts section and its highly selective, sometimes offbeat obituaries. Two noteworthy examples appeared in the May 19 issue, the first being a detailed piece on the Turkish government’s aggressive campaign to recover art and artifacts from foreign museums and reclaim them as part of Turkey’s cultural heritage. The Economist takes a balanced approach, sympathizing with the Turkish desire to revive its neglected, multiethnic Ottoman past, which Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, deliberately disparaged in order to forge a new, ethnically unified nation-state. But it also points out that many of the “Turkish” treasures being sought were the work of other peoples and cultures—Greeks, Medes, Romans, Byzantines and possibly even Trojans—who occupied what would become the Ottoman Empire and parts of modern Turkey long before the first Turkic nomads migrated there from the Asian steppes.

The second piece, a perceptive and balanced obituary of Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s foremost modern man of letters, captured all of the flamboyant, conflicting qualities that somehow managed to coexist in an elegant, self-professed Marxist with aristocratic tastes who spoke out against tyrannies of the Left as well as the Right and was equally at home in Paris, New York and Mexico. The obituary managed to make a more coherent and likeable whole out of the bundle of contradictions that was Carlos Fuentes—whom I happened to know—in a way the man himself never quite did in either his books or his life.

The same mix of the good, the bad and the uneven ran through my immersion reading of the Economist all the way to the July 14 issue. Particularly valuable was the running coverage of the ongoing crisis within the European Union and, more particularly, the euro zone. The Economist, from its offshore perch in London, is “so near yet so far” from the European mainland in a way that gives it both a detachment and a close-up understanding of Europe that is unique.

The first glimpse at my long-awaited July 14 last number reminded me of some of the things I most admire—and a few I most dislike—about the Economist. The cover story, which turned out to be a very good one, was: “Comeback kid: Rebuilding America’s economy.” But the cover art was a silly, campy figure of a flexing bodybuilder’s torso topped with a somber “Uncle Sam Needs You” head glowering at the reader. The off-putting part was two red-white-and-blue tassels attached to Uncle Sam’s nipples as if he were now working as a male stripper. Someone in authority at St. James’s Street should keep a closer eye on the art department.

In sum, then, I came away from twenty-two weeks of monitoring the Economist convinced that it is, indeed, the very best magazine of its kind—a status made easier by the fact that it is arguably the only magazine of its kind. For all its flukes and flaws, its level of intelligent reporting and analysis and the breadth of its coverage—geographically, politically, economically, scientifically, intellectually and artistically—is simply unmatched. There are frustrating moments when I am tempted to dismiss it by paraphrasing a few lines Dean Swift penned about a drafty old Irish manor house he enjoyed visiting:

It is just half a blessing and just half a curse—I wish, my dear sirs, it were better or worse.

Yet, at the end of the day, I have to admit that it passes the Robinson Crusoe test with flying colors: if I were marooned on a desert isle and could receive only one magazine, it would have to be the Economist.

Aram Bakshian Jr., a contributing editor to The National Interest, served as an aide to presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. His writing on politics, history and the arts has been published widely in the United States and abroad.

Pullquote: One of the signature virtues of the Economist is its ability to spot and put into perspective quiet but important developments ignored by most of the mass media.Image: Essay Types: Book Review