This morning on the subway I had a 60-second crush on a man reading The Economist. He was dressed in a dark green and black checked blazer and dark pants, but somehow it worked in an old-schooley kind of way. I could see over his shoulder that he was reading the theatre reviews at the back of the magazine – he was working his way through a review of Macbeth. I loved him because I thought he was a stock broker who secretly flipped to the back of The Economist first to read the reviews. I mean, who cares about what Turkey’s membership in the EU is going to do to the Euro when Lady Macbeth is stalking around raving and trying to wash her hands?
Then, unexpectedly, he got off at the subway station on the university campus. I realized with a thud that he wasn’t a stockbroker reading the theatre reviews in The Economist, he was a professor of classics reading The Economist. And then I didn’t care. Context is everything, Chicklets.