I read this article, then went and read one of the links in it, Caleb Crain's "Twilight of the Books" in the New Yorker. Crain's essay blows away anything Jacoby has to say. Crain presents the statistical evidence that Americans are reading less and less, then pursues scientific explanations of why and what happens when people read less.

The upshot is that kids today are not dumber. They are getting their information from visual sources (TV, movies, DVDs, internet) instead of from printed words. The problem with this, as Crain points out, is that people who read process information differently than people who learn visually. Simply put, readers compare and analyze ideas conceptually, while visual people are more concrete and pick up more readily on emotional cues. Thus, readers are better able to evaluate information separate from its emotional content. Visual learners have trouble with this distinction, and thus are more prone to make judgments based on emotion. Hence the attention-deficit and ideological problems of the current day.

Jacoby has her causative agents mixed up. It is not fundamentalists and ideologues that are killing intellectualism. Fundamentalists and ideologues are the result, not the cause, of poor literacy. It is the rejection of reading as the fundamental tool of learning that is at the bottom of the decline of intellectualism.

I'm a doctor. I would love to be in a situation where a nurse practitioner picked up all the easy cases and left me with the complex ones, giving me more time with each patient. The problem with this is that insurance companies don't let me bill that way.

You can bill more for more time spent in the exam room, but the range is rather limited. Insurance companies routinely pay well for procedures, and not nearly as well for talking and throughful examining.

Minute clinics could be OK if doctors were really reimbursed for doing what they do best -- cracking harder cases. Insurance companies seem to want to outsource patients to cheaper and cheaper providers and thus kill the practices of the skilled generalist.

Maybe the solution is for doctors to convert to cash only, and then charge by the minute.

. . . and it made me squirm. Matthews had a point, but he didn't have to be a bully about it. The fact that Matthews would turn on an Obama supporter like this simply proves that, whether he likes Obama or not, he is just in this for his own aggrandizement.

Matthews humiliated an elected official. I am not a fan of politicians either, but they are representatives of the people and to that degree are owed some respect. I suppose tomorrow Matthews will complain about gridlock and lack of partisanship in Washington, and fool that he is will never realize that one reason we are so divided is that politicians always have to be on guard against predatory "journalists" like him.

I watched Obama's speech last night and noticed that he hardly mentioned Clinton at all. He had just won an important victory and seized a real advantage. He knew it was time to set aside personal attacks and look forward.

This seems to be Obama's special gift. He knows when to trade punches with his critics. He also knows when to look past them and talk about the future. He did that brilliantly last night, and I am becoming convinced that he has Reagan's ability (though possibly even greater talent than Reagan) for talking over his critic's heads. We all remember Reagan telling Jimmy Carter, "Well, there you go again . . . ." Vintage Reagan. Push the critics aside and talk directly to the people.

Obama seems to be excellent at this. If he uncorks the same vintage on McCain as he did with Clinton, he wins. The Achilles heel of the Republican hit-man squad is that they have to engage their target. Get him fighting, and bring him down to their level, then take him out. Obama may be able to trade enough blows to hold them off, then speak over his critic's heads often enough to make their attacks meaningless.

The fools of the media don't get Obama's rhetoric. Unlike most other politicians, he is not talking to them. He is talking to the people, removing them from the equation. So far they only partly understand that.

I know the GOP's got Ari Fleisher and Karl Rove. But Hillary Clinton is a better campaigner than McCain can ever hope to be, and Obama has systematically rolled her up.

I clicked on your link because I was surprised to hear that the medical community agrees that morning after pills are not abortion. Your link is to an article in which two (TWO, not EVERY) medical organizations asserted that the morning after pill is safe. They did not say it was not abortion. Big difference.

The medical community cannot say morning after pills are not abortion, since science makes no judgment on this matter. Whether life begins at conception or implantation strikes me as a definitional issue. Personally I think conception is the beginning, because a fertilized egg possesses all the characteristics we usually associate with life. Implantation doesn't change anything.

You can argue that the morning after pill is not abortion if you want, but don't drag science into it. That is disingenuous.

In it, there is a little girl playing in the back yard. Then, cut to a bunch of CIA agents in the back of a truck, watching the girl on video. Cut to closeups of video cameras throughout the neighborhood.

The girl reaches for something on the ground (a rock or toy, maybe?) and one of the agents yells out, SHE'S GOT AN IED! SHE'S GOT AN IED! CALL IN THE TROOPS!

The girl is handcuffed and dragged away, screaming, with her mother in desperate pursuit.

Fade to black. Caption: "Without the government watching you, how can you be safe?"