Most literate city

[pegkerr]

Hurrah! Obviously, I'm living in the right place. Minneapolis ranks #1 as the most literate city in the U.S.A., based on a study coming out of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

(I am amused but not surprised to find that of the last ten cities in the ranking, five of them are in Texas.)

Comments

[bethynyc.livejournal.com]

sigh...NYC is #49. I guess my reading addiction is carrying a lot of non-readers in this city.

I read a statistic--forget where--that the average number of books read per person in the US is one per YEAR. Since I read between three and six per WEEK, I'm making up for a lot of those non-readers. Sad really. Reading takes people everywhere!

[kristenj.livejournal.com]

Woo hoo! Seattle (my hometown) is #2. :-) (And Portland, where I currently live, is #9.)

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

Well, that's got good synergy with the fairly large number of writers who live here.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Now we need a Red State/Blue state correlation. Hah!

[bordergold.livejournal.com]

A lot of Texans are illiterate because they are actually Mexican and thus are totally English-illiterate (probably Spanish illiterate too). I don't know the actual numbers, but an ungodly high percentage of the Lone Star State is comprised of illegal Mexican immigrants.

[skg.livejournal.com]

I imagine that is the sort of thing bringing NYC down in the literacy rankings also. That and the poverty in the outer boroughs.

Of course, I could be wrong.

[psychic-serpent.livejournal.com]

I think in any large metropolitan area where there are large numbers of non-English speakers and impoverished neighborhoods you are going to find a low number of people interested in reading/writing English, going to school and in general doing the sort of things this measurement of "literariness" seems to be assessing. Personally, I find the whole thing rather suspect, and not just because Philadelphia is #46 on the list. In the education section, for instance, it says that two variables were measured and then lists three. Um, Philadelphia may not be the most literary place in the country, but at least here we can do a bit of math. (The population numbers for the overall ranking and for the education ranking did not match, either.)

And I find it just plain ODD that Plano, TX is so high up on the ranking of places with highly educated folks. In fact a lot of the locations high on the list for this attribute are probably university towns (nothing else happens there, in other words). However, despite the fact that there are a lot of universities in Philly (and more doctors are educated here than in any other single place in the country), many, many of the folks associated with the universities choose to live right outside of the city. What this really seems to be is a ranking of cities with enough people to support a literary community but a place that doesn't attract a lot of immigrants/poor folks and where there might be at least one university nearby.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Interesting analysis; but it seems to me that we get a LOT of immigrants here in Minneapolis. And our city limits are drawn fairly tightly; the metropolitan area is something like 2.4 million people, over 7 times the population of the city of Minneapolis. We're getting up to the density of Spanish speakers where quite a few stores in walking distance of where I live have signs only in Spanish. We also have a large cohort of Hmong, Ethiopian, and Kenyan immigrants, and older batches of Vietnamese and other Asian areas.

[airemay.livejournal.com]

Sadly 3 of the last ten are from Orange County, near where I will be going to college. *G*

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Well, California's in there too. It looks like the list correlates pretty well to areas of higher and lower immigration/non-native speakers.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Hey, Fremont's #7 in education! Woo! (Plano, TX is #1?)

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

Well, it's too cold in Minnesota to go outside most of the year. :)

Seriously though, what *is* it with Minneapolis? Do they give tax breaks to SF writers? Do they put something in the water that turns people into SF writers?