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THE people ride in a hole in the ground." But what do they read when they ride?
Murray Kempton once wrote that the New York newspaper columnist has one shot at capturing the heart and attention of the outer-borough kid riding the subway who's moved to Manhattan and questioning the world for the first time-so the columnist has to make it good. It was a thrush's aria, lovely and sentimental, like much that Kempton wrote, but it isn't true anymore. People don't read English-language newspapers in the subways, except the sports sections of tabloids.
They read Bibles, often in Spanish, and Korans; also evangelical tracts, usually clever (election-season picture of a donkey and an elephant: "TOO CLOSE TO CALL!" Inside: "God has voted for you, Satan has voted against you! You break the tie!"). Drugstore-rack paperbacks are always read by women (women are the guardians of literacy; who will guard quality?). Teenagers read Jane Eyre, because they have to. College-age Asians read ringbound manuals of computing/chartered accountancy/thecareers-that-will-make-them-rich. You do see foreign-language newspapers. I once sat next to a Japanese man reading a paper in Portuguese, and puzzled, until I remembered that thousands of Japanese went to Brazil early in this century as sugar-cane cutters. Here was a descendant. A pale, thin youth once read the Daily Worker at...