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There’s a new map floating around the web based on a survey several years ago on the average number of hours spent reading each week in 30 countries. It probably won’t shock a lot of people to learn that the U.S. is in the fourth of five tiers on the map.
According to something called the NOP World Culture Score, the U.S. finished 21st, reading an average of 5.7 hours per week. That compares to a global average of 6.5 hours a week. India topped the list with an average of 10.7 hours a week, followed by Thailand and China with 9.4 and 8 hours respectively). Asia also brought up the rear, with Korea at 3.1, Japan at 4.1 and Taiwan at 5.
Actually, I probably wouldn’t have guessed Americans spent that much time reading every week. The survey also looked at consumption of other media and I wasn’t surprised to see that the U.S. ranked sixth in time spent watching television each week with an average of 19 hours. Interestingly, although Thailand was second in hours spent reading, it was tops in hours spent watching television at 20.4. The global average was 16.7 hours.
Perhaps most surprising to me was that the U.S. ranked 19th in the number of hours of non-work computer and internet usage. Our 8.8 hours were just slightly off the global average of 8.9 hours. Taiwan was tops at 12.6 hours while Thailand again was second at 11.7 hours, Again, though, the survey results are several years old and do not reflect where everyone stands today.
I am very curious about one thing, though. When you include the time listening to radio that the survey also scored, Thais spent nearly 57 hours a week consuming media.
We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.
Ray Bradbury, 2003
Bulletin Board
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- Stop Defending the Humanities (“This negative stereotyping [the ‘liberal intellectual’takes wing, in part, from the sense that humanities academics and the students whom they send into the professions acquire their privilege too easily, exempt from the hard scrabble of working in small business, farming, factories, supermarkets, and so on.”)
Headline of the Week
Arrest of the Week
Worst Idea of the Week
- An Ohio A funeral home offered a couple a discount to keep them from going to police after an employee molested the corpse of a family member, according to a lawsuit the couple filed
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
The reason we need the humanities is because we’re human.
Adam Gopnik, “Why Teach English?”
I received word this morning that a friend and law partner of mine, Monte Walz, died last night. It wasn’t totally unexpected. He had a cardiac event during a medical procedure about week ago and had been in a coma since. And while Monte struggled with a variety of medical conditions for several years, it still comes as a shock — especially when I consider I’m six months older than him.
Over the 25+ years we worked together, Monte practiced in a variety of areas, including some of the most difficult. Those included the maze that is credit card regulation and health care, particularly the regulatory dense area of health information privacy. Those are areas where not only are the regulations page after page of agate type, there’s hundreds more pages the agency produces in explaining the rules as they went through the process of being promulgated. And they seemed to grow every year. His ability to not only understand these types of regs but to explain them to and help those affected speaks a ton about his ability.
I admired Monte’s legal talents — but I loved him for his humor. Especially during the lunches our lawyers have together each week, the odds were good Monte would make some comment that broke up the room. His wit was quick and sharp. Sometimes you’d hear something and in the back of your head you knew it was in Monte’s strike zone. But before that thought fully crystallized, he’d usually already pounced. I always thought this was one aspect of his perceptiveness.
Although Monte’s death accents the fact that my rear view mirror looks back on more and more distance each year, I’m fortunate it’s been populated with people like him.
I left in love, in laughter, and in truth and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.
Bill Hicks (Dec. 16, 1961 – Feb. 26, 1994), Feb. 7, 1994
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- Life after Guantanamo prison (“I stopped strangers on the street in Kabul and other provinces of Afghanistan to ask if they had heard of Manhattan or the World Trade Centre. Few of them had. But all of them knew about Guantanamo.”)
- An Unthinkably Modern Miracle (“Like poverty or climate change, medicine in this country has grown well beyond our abilities to fully understand it, much less manage it.”)
Blog Headline of the Week
Adding Your Two Cents Moment of the Week
- A California man was arrested for interrupting a U.S. Supreme Court argument to announce, “Money is not speech.” (Lawyers beware. He was arrested under a statute that bans a “harangue” in the Supreme Court building.)
Most Aberrant Crime of the Week
- Two men were arrested in New York as one was trying to film the other having sex with a cow — while covered in Jello
Best Internet KO of the Week Year
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
When the situation is hopeless, there’s nothing to worry about.
Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang
Bulletin Board
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- I Pledge Allegiance To The Pledge Of Allegiance (“Much as I love the words, meanings and traditions of our Pledge of Allegiance, I think reciting it at a time and place chosen by others is coercive and goes against the grain of the Pledge’s ultimate assertion, that we live in a nation that is committed to ‘liberty and justice for all.'”)
- In Praise of Disregard (“Rather than a simple and passive acceptance of the things you cannot control, I favor an acceptance and then a subsequent, symbolic deletion of those things.”)
- You’re making your depression worse: Self-help is bringing us down (“Ultimately, the strong cultural imperative toward being happy bumps us up against a wall: our mood system is not configured to deliver an end state of durable euphoria.”)
Arrest of the Week
- A Texas police detective was charged with assault after, among other things, farting in the face of a dispatcher
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.
Robert J. Sawyer, Calculating God
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