[Television is] demanding more cognitive engagement with each passing year, ... Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter.

The most debased forms of mass diversion - video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms - turn out to be nutritional after all,

The impact of television on our culture is. . . indescribable. There's a certain sense in which it is nearly as important as the invention of printing.

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.

All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching?

cademics and intellectuals are culture vultures. In a gathering of today’s elite, it is perfectly acceptable to laugh that you barely passed Physics for Poets and Rocks for Jocks and have remained ignorant of science ever since, despite the obvious importance of scientific literacy to informed choices about personal health and public policy. But saying that you have never heard of James Joyce or that you tried listening to Mozart once but prefer Andrew Lloyd Webber is as shocking as blowing your nose on your sleeve or announcing that you employ children in your sweatshop, despite the obvious unimportance of your tastes in leisure-time activity to just about anything.