Albuquerque Journal, Oct. 11, 2002
Entertaining Magazine Improves Your Mental Hygiene
By Leanne Potts

St. Nicholas of Myra, a.k.a. Santa Claus, is also the patron saint of beer brewers. I learned this by reading the new issue of Mental Floss, an eccentric and fun new magazine that a critic known as Mr. Magazine has called "a Reader's Digest for the 21st century." Mental Floss aims to educate readers on the sort of random minutiae that makes one feel like a liberal-arts-soaked member of the intelligentsia. Or the smartest person at the cocktail party.

Here's what Mental Floss has to say about Santa Claus' sudsy sideline: "Old Saint Nick, a fourth-century bishop in Myra, Lycia (now known as Turkey), resurrected three traveling clerics who had been slain by an innkeeper. Saving the travelers secured his patronage over other travelers, and because the whole fiasco occurred inside an inn Nicholas became a patron of brewers, who frequently worked out of inns." Wow. Why didn't anyone tell us this when we were little kids setting out cookies and milk for Santa? Imagine the loot he would have left for us if we had put a mug of microbrew porter by the Christmas tree instead!

Mental Floss is full of fascinating tidbits like this. The current issue has pieces on how instant film works, the 25 most important rock album covers, an infographic on headgear worn by heads of state through history, a primer on "Lolita" and an explainer on Shinto. What makes Mental Floss so hip and so now is its thoroughly no-brow approach. The magazine recognizes no line between entertainment and education, or culture pop and high.

An article on fallen saints includes, along with St. Augustine, the New Orleans Saints. "Some hypothesize the perennially terrible Saints lose because their Superdome was built on an American Indian burial ground," writes John Green. "But former Saints players tend to blame the close proximity of Bourbon Street."

Mental Floss also understands the modern attention span. Information is presented in bite-sized pieces; there are lots of lists, fact boxes and infographics. You can read the longest article in the magazine while waiting on your herbal tea to brew. Mental Floss was founded in 2000 by five Duke University students who were sitting in their dorm talking about the sort of egg-headed topics only college students have time to think about. Unlike most undergrads, they realized reveling in arcane knowledge was a luxury of youth that would vanish when they entered the real world. And there, the Duke kids saw an untapped market.

"We realized almost all Americans want to feel smart and educated, but few of us have the time and the willingness to sit down and learn everything you should know," said 23-year-old Will Pearson, one of Mental Floss' founders. "We thought we should start an educational magazine that would teach people what they didn't get a chance to learn in school." So smack in the middle of the worst magazine industry slump in decades, Pearson and friends started Mental Floss, a sort of Idiot's Guide to Knowledge.

The first few issues were circulated only on campus, but last spring the fivesome raised some money, found a distributor and took their little 'zine national. To their great surprise, Mental Floss was a commercial and critical success.

Library Journal chose Mental Floss as one of the top new magazines of 2001, and Samir Husni, a University of Mississippi professor (and the aforementioned Mr. Magazine) named it to his own Top 30 list. Husni says Mental Floss is unique because it is a true general interest magazine, the likes of which the niche-oriented magazine industry hasn't seen in a long time. In Mental Floss, pop culture rubs shoulders with philosophy, art and current events." The magazine is hard to put down," Husni says. The target demographic for Mental Floss is educated people aged 20 to 50, but Pearson says they've gotten fan mail from teenagers and retirement community residents as well. Mental Floss is now available at most chain bookstores where it is selling 60 percent of its newsstand copies, three times the usual rate for a new magazine. Its circulation is around 45,000. Next month Mental Floss will go from quarterly to bimonthly, and the zine and its Web site, www.mentalfloss.com, are in the middle of a redesign.

The magazine has almost no ads, which Pearson says is part of the plan." We're trying to build a model based on circulation," he says. "We want to put out a magazine that can survive on circulation alone." A magazine without reeking perfume ads?

Even Santa Claus would raise a glass of ale to that.

Copyright © 2002 Albuquerque Journal.