Ah, Lileks. In you I have a soul brother. I can't get enough of Discovery/History Channels. But with me it has more to do with ADHD. I can't focus without multimedia. To read books, I almost have to buy them and underline every other sentence to keep my mind from wandering. With bifocals, I have a hard time just tracking the sentences from one line to the next. But with the History/Discovery Channels, I can watch and listen. The bad part is that the viewer will never attain the depth of understanding that a real scholar can. Can you imagine advertisers paying for a program that teaches how to read hieroglyphics or delivering the entire Proust oeuvre?