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It's a spring Friday. Let us put aside our grim fixations over deficits and disasters for today, and engage in a very un-Deal Economy-like subject: arrows. As an old fashioned kind of guy, I still read magazines, or (for the most part) I paw through them like a man combing out a dog. This is not like surfing the Web; there's no mad clicking to be done or, for the iPad-maniacs out there, sending digital pages flying past with a dry fingertip and a flourish like a conductor at the end of a sprightly passage. In old-fashioned magazines, the ones with shiny paper, your eye does all the work. For many decades now, magazine devotees have been trained by generations of graphic artists to move efficiently from photo to headlines to decks to the gray wave of type itself. For many years, the height of the graphical art, magazine division, was to accomplish all this -- including directing your eye to those nice ads -- as efficiently as possible. Like a WASPy gentleman of old, magazines wanted to impress you with their classy, if understated, elegance: the English shoes, the ancient tie, the jacket that looks more beautiful the closer you get and the more you know about Hibernian tweed and elbow patches. In short, magazines sought to achieve their purposes without appearing to be trying. It was not unlike the dream of the Web folks to achieve their diabolical purposes without unnecessary click-throughs. 
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Bob Teitelman, editor in chief and a member of the company’s executive committee, is responsible for editorial operations of print and electronic products. Contact
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