Last week the government released a survey detailing the time-consuming activities of Americans, broken down in terms of gender, race and age.

Time spent working is down due to the lack of jobs and alas, an increase in reading is not compensating for this loss. Instead, TV-viewing time has increased and the rest of the stats just seem to inauspiciously reinforce gender and racial disparities.

“The cause for concern arrives with the leisure-reading rate among young minorities, which is lower than that among whites. In the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Mark Bauerlein crunches the numbers in the study and identifies a ‘leisure-reading racial gap’ that might help to explain a disparity in performance in college.”