>> guest: a book that i wrote with an old friend named charles weingartner called "teaching as a subversive activity". that was a book published in 1969. it was about education, and it came during those very hectic and exciting school-reform days when many people were writing books about that subject. i think it sold about half a million copies. so my name first became familiar with leaders in the field of education through that book. but obviously, in more recent years, the book "amusing ourselves to death", which i think has sold about 200,000 copies now, and, unlike the other book, has been extremely well-selling in europe, especially in scandinavia and germany. very often i'm asked when i'm in europe if i can explain why a book like "amusing ourselves to death" and another one called "the disappearance of childhood" are popular in europe. i've given it some thought, and the best i can come up with is something like this: the europeans -- i'm speaking now of western europe -- are about 10 years behind us in their relationship to technology. the germans and the swedes and the danes and th