By Ted Landphair
Voice of America
Published June 25, 2012
Americans love lists - of the top 50 colleges, the top 10 recording artists, the top 100 movies of the millennium, and on and on. These lists sell a lot of magazines, because there’s always room for disagreement about the rankings that some expert or editor has put together.
So we can’t say for sure that the latest list of America’s smartest cities is correct, but it’s food for lively debate. Especially since there are other lists of our brainy metropolitan areas that have completely different rankings.
The latest list, by the online bookseller Amazon, doesn’t exactly use the word “smartest” to describe cities. It calls the top ones the most “well-read,” basing that conclusion on sales of books, magazines, newspapers, and electronic tablet readers.