The Axis of Understanding If you're a regular to these parts, you know it is my habit to read magazines while shaving each morning.  And so it was that on this particular morning, I found these particular magazines in my bathroom: the latest issues of Il Tridente (a puff piece from Maserati), The New Yorker, Reason, and The Economist.  And as I was looking at them it occured to me that in some sense they were each opposites of each other, each endpoints of a two-dimensional "axis of understanding".  And this insight was so exciting that I had to share it with you :)