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About this siteFor six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul Wednesday, July 28, 2004Waiting for the MovieNewsweek: "You don't usually go to government reports for arresting prose. But consider this sentence: 'Indeed, at the current rate of loss, literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century.' Yikes. And that's not the half of it. According to a report on the reading habits of Americans issued last week by the National Endowment for the Arts, less than half of the adult American population now reads for pleasure. Using Census Bureau data, the NEA found that the number of Americans who say they've even opened a single book of fiction, let alone a poem or a play, over the course of a year has declined by 10 percent, from 56.9 percent in 1982 to 46.7 percent today. It gets worse. Young adults between 18 and 34, a category that once claimed the status of most-active readers, is now the lowest, dropping 28 percent since 1982. And by literature, 'we're not talking about the number of people who reread Proust,' says Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA. Literature means simply any books that people read without guns pointed to their heads. 'If people read even three pages of a Harlequin romance, it got counted.'"Scary stuff. Now, in addition to ignorant and overweight Americans, we can have illiterate Americans too. Well, ignorant and illiterate are almost the same thing. Never mind. :) [ Posted at 9:09 AM | Permalink ]
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