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Let's face it: We Americans work too much. Well, at least I do. And being one of those progressive-minded workaholics who gaze jealously across the Atlantic at Europe -- with their five weeks of vacation and 35 hour work-weeks -- I always enjoy seeing a compatriot who rises above the American workplace pressure to produce non-stop and takes a break from it all.

Allow me to introduce you to Josh Glenn, a former Utne Reader editor who now the edits and publishes the Boston cultural magazine Hermenaut. Josh preferred to sit idly by this month and enjoy the summer weather rather than slave over new material. In that idling spirit, last week he revived (read 're-published') a wonderful article he wrote in June of last year, in which he ruminates on the cultural implications of a planned Chinese Disney theme park. 'What's most significant about the prospect of a Chinese Disneyland is the triumph of the modern American notion of 'leisure' over the ancient Chinese ideal of 'idleness.''

Glenn continues: 'Shaking his head at the American go-getter, who strives for perfect efficiency even in his so-called 'leisure,' [Chinese scholar Lin Yutang suggested in 1937] that Americans would enjoy living more if they could only learn to be 'idle' -- to drink, smoke, and loll in easy-chairs, like the Chinese do. East would meet West soon enough, he predicted, because the rapidly developing 'machine culture' would bring with it increased amounts of free time for all -- at which point the ancient Chinese 'cult of the idle life' would 'invade' the Occidental world.'