About his seminal book Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury now says it isn’t about government censorship at all. What’s it about? How television has replaced reading.

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

Misty’s two-second response to this was, “He’s trying to be relevant again.” I can’t disagree with her.