Success Quote by Chris Hughes

Hughes is selling inevitability with a wink of urgency: five to ten years, maybe sooner. That little hedge is the classic tech-prophecy move, a rhetorical upgrade that makes the prediction feel both sober and unstoppable. It reassures the cautious (you have time) while nudging the anxious (you might already be late). Coming from an entrepreneur - and, in Hughes's case, a figure associated with Silicon Valley-style disruption - the line isn’t just a forecast about screens. It’s a claim about who gets to define the future of public life.

The specific intent is managerial as much as cultural. Predicting that The New Republic’s audience will migrate to tablets is a way of telling staff, investors, and readers that the magazine must reorganize around digital consumption: design, advertising, staffing, even editorial tempo. The tablet, in that early-2010s moment, stood for a middle path between the authority of print and the scale of the web. It promised a premium reading experience and a premium ad market - the dream that serious journalism could modernize without cheapening itself.

The subtext is more pointed: if readers are going there anyway, resistance isn’t principled; it’s denial. The magazine’s identity becomes a product problem to solve, not a tradition to defend. In hindsight, there’s irony baked in. The tablet did change reading habits, but it didn’t magically stabilize the economics of magazines. The line captures a particular era’s faith that the right device - sleeker, quieter, more "thoughtful" than a browser - could rescue the prestige press from the internet it couldn’t control.