Why We Don’t Read, Revisited ⇥ newyorker.com

Caleb Crain, the New Yorker:

Television, rather than the Internet, likely remains the primary force distracting Americans from books. The proportion of the American population that watches TV must have hit a ceiling some time ago; in the years studied by the American Time Use Survey, it’s very stable, at a plateau of about eighty per cent—roughly four times greater than the proportion of Americans who read. But America’s average TV time is still rising, because TV watchers are, incredibly, watching more and more of it, the quantity rising from 3.28 hours in 2003 to 3.45 hours in 2016.

Set aside the depressing decline in reading — this is an astonishing figure. Who has the time to watch over three hours of television a day?