Quote of the week
Mark Twain once observed: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
David Harsanyi has seen a lot of such men:
[T]he NEA is mysteriously celebrating some sort of triumph in literacy with a rollout of its new report, Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy.
Like many of you, I’ve watched “Living Lohan,” so I too profoundly fear for the future of the galaxy. But the truth is, we’ve probably never been as clueless as the eggheads at the NEA maintained, nor are we any less dimwitted for picking up another Nora Roberts “book.”
Reading, in and of itself, holds no extraordinary significance — or, rather, no more than watching a smart television show (and there seem to be many of them around these days) or surfing the Internet. In fact, one could argue that by picking up a heartbreaking work of staggering garbage like The Da Vinci Code, you can effectively knock 20 points off of your IQ.
Bonus points for the twisted Eggersism.
(Via Chad The Elder.)
Charles Pergiel »
17 January 2009 · 3:15 pm
To David Harsanyi: what do you mean “we”, Kimosabe? I’ve never watched “Living Lohan”, and I hope I never do.
I wonder what the gross statistics are for the number of people who can read, the number who do, the number who write, and the number who blog.
I suspect the numbers are something like this:
90% number of people who can read
10% number who do (anything with more than one sentence)
5% the number who write (anything that contains a sentence)
0.1% the number who blog
I suspect the NEA is concerned with the first number, and if it goes up by even one tenth of one percent, that is still 300,000 people, and probably more than the total number of active bloggers in the US.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’m happy because I just broke 10 million on the internet traffic monitor. That means there are fewer than 10 million web sites with more traffic than mine. Whoopee!
P.S. The comment formatter inserted an extra line feed in front of the last “number”.
CGHill »
17 January 2009 · 4:23 pm
At least one source contends that there are 22.6 million bloggers in the US, though I have to assume that some of them aren’t active at the moment.