Charlotte Observer, Dec. 30, 2001

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Alumni at Duke Start Up Magazine: Mental Floss Born
from All-Night Bull Sessions on Trivia and Philosophy
By Anna Griffin, staff writer

The obsession with useless information began during their freshman year at Duke University. Will Pearson and his friends would stay up until the wee hours talking about the kinds of things college students talk about: Politics, faith, love, sex, "The Muppet Show." Crammed into someone's East Campus dorm room, they reveled in the kind of random facts and fables that fill a precocious young scholar's brain.

"We called ourselves `The Pseudo-philosophers,' " Pearson said. "Like probably everybody else who's ever gone to a liberal-arts school, we'd talk about what we thought an education should be - what does it mean to be well-educated?" Unlike most college students, they turned their rambling, all-night chats into a livelihood.

Six months after Pearson and friends graduated, their slick bimonthly magazine, Mental Floss is available at Books-A-Million, Borders and Barnes & Noble. A former Newsweek editor just signed on as publisher, and The Washington Post recently gave a rave review, calling it delightfully eccentric.

Early sales figures suggest potential readers may share the founders' fascination with random info. The three big booksellers each reported selling at least 72 percent of their copies of the first issue. The industry average is 34 percent - 23 percent for new publications, says Samir Husni, a University of Mississippi journalism professor.

Most magazines get back between 0.5 percent and 2 percent of their subscription cards - those little paper inserts inviting you to subscribe to the magazine you just bought at the newsstand. Mental Floss is averaging about 8 percent.

Pearson and pals first published Mental Floss during their junior year in Durham. They raised $5,000, enough to print a copy for all 6,000 Duke undergrads. Positive response from classmates convinced them they could go national. They lacked little serious publishing experience or a solid source of capital. They had an Amazon-acquired paperback, "Launch Your Own Magazine," and friendly advice from Husni, a nationally renowned magazine consultant.

For now, Mental Floss comes out six times a year, with a press run of about 20,000. "When we started, we figured that since we were college kids, that would be our target audience," said Pearson, a 22-year-old Alabama native and Mental Floss' editor. "But we've had a flood of retirees send in cards. We had one retirement community call asking if we could send 30 copies. The two they had kept disappearing."

Starting a major magazine on campus isn't so unusual. Ralph Lauren's son, David, started the fashion-and-music glossy Swing with some friends at Duke in the mid-1990s. The Generation X-centered magazine went national but folded before its fifth birthday.

The American Spectator, the conservative periodical that helped prod the investigation into President Clinton's sexual exploits, began on the campus of Indiana University.

It's harder to describe Mental Floss than either the American Spectator or Swing. The young mag is part scholarly journal, part Spy magazine protege.

The first issue, published this spring just before the founders graduated, featured coverboy Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out. The second issue, published this fall, begins with a takeoff of the Beatles' Abbey Road album cover - with Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Bob Dylan and Mark Twain marching across the London streetscape.

Inside are articles on geniuses, the history of beer, a guide to understanding Baroque artwork and an analysis on the environmental hazards of coral bleaching. There's also an analysis of Pablo Neruda's poem "Walking Around," a photo essay from Burma and a quick explainer on the Federal Reserve.

The design features lots of color and plenty of gadgets. It may be dizzying for people who grew up on Life and the Saturday Evening Post. It should be eminently readable for a generation weaned on Wired magazine and flashy, CNN-style graphics.

The magazine's editorial vision is pretty basic: People want to feel smart. But they don't necessarily want to do the heavy lifting involved in gaining a well-rounded, liberal arts education. Thus, Mental Floss' writers so far have been college professors and writers from the "For Dummies" book series.

Of that original group that gathered in dorm rooms, four are on the masthead. They all work full time on Mental Floss. They also have other jobs to pay the bills.

The staff meets in Durham about once every month. Mostly, though, they communicate by computer. It's a lot less cramped than those dorm room talks. But they still stay up late, and they still like to talk about useless information.

"Our motto is `Feel Smart Again.' That feels good, doesn't it? People like to watch `Jeopardy,' or `Millionaire,' and know the answers," Pearson said. "I guess in our ideal world, we'd become the magazine that's the Reader's Digest of the 21st century. We are a lot different than Reader's Digest, though."

Copyright © 2001 Charlotte Observer.