BRAIN CANDY by MALCOLM GLADWELL

The New Yorker book review of “Everything Bad Is Good for You” Steven Johnson :

"I.Q. scores showed a steady upward trajectory, rising by about three points per decade, which means that a person whose I.Q. placed him in the top ten per cent of the American population in 1920 would today fall in the bottom third. Some of that effect, no doubt, is a simple by-product of economic progress: in the surge of prosperity during the middle part of the last century, people in the West became better fed, better educated, and more familiar with things like I.Q. tests. But, even as that wave of change has subsided, test scores have continued to rise?not just in America but all over the developed world. What?s more, the increases have not been confined to children who go to enriched day-care centers and private schools. The middle part of the curve?the people who have supposedly been suffering from a deteriorating public-school system and a steady diet of lowest-common-denominator television and mindless pop music?has increased just as much."