Appearance in Popular Culture
The Simpsons episode "Catch 'Em If You Can", aired 25 April 2004, alluded to the snob appeal of The Economist in an exchange between Homer and Marge Simpson while they are travelling first-class aboard an airplane:
Homer: "Look at me, I'm reading The Economist! Did you know Indonesia is at a crossroads?"
Marge: "No!"
Homer: "It is!"
Four days later, The Economist alluded to the quote, and published an article about Indonesia referring to the "crossroads". The title of the issue was "Indonesia's Gambit", as in The Simpsons' episode. About seven months later, The Economist ran a cover headline reading "Indonesia at a Crossroads." In April 2009, The Economist published an article on Indonesian democracy with the title "Beyond the crossroads". The show returned to the joke in a much later episode, "Million Dollar Maybe". In return for a favour Homer offers another character, Barney Gumble, the contents of a tree containing his stash of "adult magazines". These turn out to be issues of The Economist, one of which features the headline "New challenges for Indonesia".
In 2006, Indian actor Abhishek Bachchan starred in a Motorola KRZR advertisement where one flight attendant asked if he wanted anything to read. He said "The Economist, please", which resulted in the young lady sitting next to him rolling her eyes and his mirror image called him a "fraud". He settles for Stardust instead.
Read more about this topic: The Economist
Famous quotes containing the words appearance in, appearance, popular and/or culture:
“Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When appearance and reality coincide, philosophy and literary criticism find themselves with nothing to say.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“I know that there are many persons to whom it seems derogatory to link a body of philosophic ideas to the social life and culture of their epoch. They seem to accept a dogma of immaculate conception of philosophical systems.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)