Fantastic article in the Village Voice from Paul Collins of McSweeney's, rebutting the notion that the the electric light bicycles motor cars television the Internet is responsible for the destruction of all literary culture in America.

Now, as a novice practictioner of this dying art, of course I think that all people should be reading much, much more than they do.

But Collins quite persuasively argues that literary culture isn't dead, it's just evolving, and that the same type of people who decry the death of literature now were doing the same type of crying in 1959, 1909, and 1842.

Analysis of the flaws of modern polling and a few tough-but-fair potshots at El Presidente thrown in for free.