Now, I don’t read Esquire, but I happened to be looking over the shoulder of someone who does, and spotted this:
I don’t exactly prescribe to the ‘more of them to love’ mantra, but I do prescribe to the truism ‘more of them to manipulate’.
‘Prescribe’? That, surely, should be ‘subscribe’.
‘Prescribe’ is what a doctor does when recommending and authorising a medicine. It also means to state authoritatively that something must be done. See Oxford Dictionaries.
‘Subscribe’ has a few different meanings: See Oxford Dictionaries. In the case of the Esquire piece, ‘subscribe to’ should have been used (to mean ‘agree with’).
I haven’t seen this particular error before; it’s far more common to confuse ‘prescribe’ with ‘proscribe’. The latter means to forbid or denounce. See Oxford Dictionaries on this particular confusion (scroll down to ‘usage’).
Wordwatch Towers 