Victoria Blake told NPR today that she started her own publishing company when she realized she was just wasting her free time reading Gawker. Have trashy websites like ours killed literature? Au contraire, yall!

Clay Shirky—a professional smart man—tells CJR that hey, it's all reading. Why not embrace the internet?

It seems to me, in fact, from the historical record, that the idea of literary reading as a sort of broad and normal activity was done in by television, and it was done in forty years ago...

What the Internet has actually done is not decimate literary reading; that was really a done deal by 1970. What it has done, instead, is brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people.

For real! Has everyone forgotten about the television menace? That's what originally turned Americans to zombies. At least on the internet you have to read and write a little bit, even if it's in idiot AOL commenter-style. We are the new vanguard of the literary revolution! Everyone can still feel good about themselves. [Including the aforementioned Victoria Blake, who also called us her favorite site in the whole world pretty much, shout out to you, Victoria!] Reading!