Great Regulars: For a national reading program, $1 million

isn't a lot of money, but that's all the National Endowment for the Arts will spend this year on its once highly hyped Big Read. It's a 73 percent reduction.

The current NEA bosses have cut $2.7 million and 193 participants from the shiny jewel of the former Dana Gioia regime, a devastating rejection of a federal initiative that Mr. Gioia once suggested reversed the country's decline in reading.

from Bob Hoover: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: NEA dims lights on Big Read

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