Journalist John Seabrook's entertaining, anecdotal look at contemporary culture and the collapse of highbrow, low-brow distinctions articulates what has confused or enraged many educated people. What happens to culture when art galleries exhibit music videos? When supermarkets sell art? Beginning with Tina Brown's transformation of the New Yorker, from highbrow town-house culture to no brow megastore culture, Seabrook charts the effect marketing has on culture and the result: that anything can be labelled "hot"; "taste" has all but disappeared and everything is nobrow, or: "ground zero, the exact midpoint at which culture and marketing converge." The paperback edition ends with the writer's promo tour diary and the story of how, at one reading, in an Irish bar in Manhattan, one drunken man demanded: "Say something real."