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Is there a market for anti-stupidity in America? In a brilliant, counter-intuitive business move, the UK paper The Guardian is looking to bring its unique brand of intelligence to the US market in the form of a magazine:

Rather than a lot of readers at a small price, the idea is fewer readers at a greater price (whereas most U.S. magazines discount their subscription price as much as 80 percent). Rusbridger figures that the American Guardian, charging a hefty subscription price, will be in safe financial territory at a 100,000-level circulation. (Advertising, in this approach, is welcome but not the main driver.) In other words, against the trend of all other commercial media (wherein the price the consumer needs to pay or is willing to pay gets progressively lower), the job here is to make the magazine—the writing, the attitudes, the opinions, the content—worth more by being better, smarter, more exclusive.

Better and smarter may not turn out to be quite as exclusive as they predict. The record-breaking sales of Hillary's book proves that there is indeed pent-up demand for intelligent narratives as an antidote to the shrillness of the right wing's more simple-minded screeds (Coulter, Savage, et al.).

Link via the glorious Cursor.

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