As a wholehearted supporter of trashy novels, far be it from me to argue with that recommendation! And in general, I do prefer reading to television for undemanding input for basically the reasons you state (among others).

However, a couple of counterpoints, just to further the debate:

Television is capable of presenting things that are difficult in books (the opposite is also true, of course). I find watching PBS NewsHour fairly undemanding, but I think I get something different out of it from reading news summaries. The images help. It's a different way to connect with what's going on in the world. Or on a different front, portions (portions!) of the Food Network are great entertainment *and* help inspire me to eat more healthily, or at least with more knowledge about what I'm doing. I'd be hard-pressed to get the same sort of involvement and interest out of reading books about food. Some things are inherently visual to me.

Second, and this goes a bit against the grain of the article but I think it's real, I can't do something else at the same time as I read. I can do something else at the same time as I watch TV. While multitasking is something I do way too much of, it remains true that there are some tasks that simply do not and cannot consume all of my brain, but which make reading impossible while I'm doing them. Folding the laundry. Washing dishes. Chatting with non-local friends in IM who are not fast typers. When doing something else that doesn't consume one's full thoughts, it's nice to have something else to soak up the spare cycles, and for that purpose TV is often ideal. (Books on tape or Teaching Company courses work for some things as well, but often I want to pay *too much* attention to them and don't have enough cycles for whatever else I'm doing. I rarely have that trouble with TV.)

The difficulty I have with the oft-stated advice of getting rid of television or making some similar change to remove distraction is that I think it runs the risk of working a bit like a crash diet. When it's all shiny and new, it's effective and you concentrate better on other things, but it's the underlying mismanagement of attention that caused TV to be such a lure. Without changing that focusing, I wonder if we'll just find something else that will be as distracting.

This is not to diss getting rid of television, a tactic that has worked for a lot of people. But I think it's important to look at the underlying goals, and to also be realistic about the limits of concentration. The average person isn't going to be able to think high-quality thoughts all the time. We can reduce distractions, but some evenings we're just going to be beat and will want to lose ourselves in something that's undemanding. That in and of itself isn't a problem; the problem comes when we turn to those things when we do have the capacity for doing something deeper. And in knowing the difference.

No easy solutions. Just as with effective healthy eating habits, it involves changing how you think about the problem, making small and sustainable changes, and not embarking on a huge overhaul that will fail once it loses the momentum of being new.

There's an older book that deals with this same topic that wasn't mentioned in this article, but which I highly recommend: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow. It has the interesting distinction of being written by a primary researcher in psychology about, among other things, his own research, so while it has the same self-help edge to it as many of these books, I found the science a bit more immediate and more detailed.

I realize that we're seeing different opinions from different commentators here, but looking at Salon as a unified publication, you got this right in War Room: "And then, when the shoe's on the other foot, the same drama plays out -- right accusing left, left accusing right, and plenty of hypocrisy all around. It's probably time to just declare this sort of political exploitation of tragedy ghoulish, and to forswear it, no matter who's responsible."

Exactly.

You're falling into exactly the same causation trap that you would probably oppose in other contexts, such as violent video games. Insane people find (and warp to fit) ideologies that justify their insanity; ideologies do not, in general, create insane people.

I see some of the other posters are questioning why Salon is spending any time or resources on this, so I wanted to post my thanks for one of the funniest things I've read in quite a while. The story was totally worth it to put a smile on my face after a rather bad day. It's occasionally nice to have a good laugh at a political group that isn't likely to be able to make my life worse and that doesn't have to be taken seriously.

Huckabee wasn't at all cryptic if you know the coding. He was comparing McCain to Jesus Christ, or put more generally (and a bit more fairly) was comparing the relationship between military veterans and the free people of a country to Jesus Christ and saved Christians.

That's what all the otherwise strange bits in that story about how students couldn't do anything to earn their own desks but that the veterans already did it for them was about. That's clear to the point of being blatant if you were raised with evangelical preaching.

http://takingsteps.blogspot.com/2008/09/did-someone-whistle-i-couldnt-hear-it.html takes it apart in detail, and as someone with a background in that symbology, I can support that analysis.

I expect Huckabee knew that analogy was going to be cryptic to anyone without that background. He wasn't giving the speech for non-believers; it was targeted at evangelicals who hear those symbols all the time.