Dumbing Down: Essays on the Strip Mining of American Culture

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Katharine Washburn, John F. Thornton
W. W. Norton & Company, 1996 - 329 pages
With vigor, wit, learning, common sense, and urgency, twenty-three essayist--including John Simon, Cynthia Ozick, Phillip Lopate, George F. Kennan, Sven Birkerts, Joseph Epstein, and Brad Leithauser--examine aspects of our pan-cultural "dumbing down" and offer both diagnoses of and possible cures for this wasting disease.
 

Contents

Foreword by the Editors
11
Some Leading Indicators
23
Introduction by John Simon
43
Gilbert T Sewall The Postmodern Schoolhouse
57
The Return
68
Heather MacDonald Writing Down Together
88
Steven Goldberg The Erosion of the Social Sciences
97
Brad Leithauser The Saving Minutes
114
Joseph Epstein What to Do about the Arts
179
PART THREE The Media
197
Sven Birkerts Homo Virtualis
209
Kent Carroll The Facts of Fiction and the Fiction of Facts
224
PART FOUR Public Life
237
David Klinghoffer Kitsch Religion
250
The Waxing
261
Jonathan Rosen The Trivialization of Tragedy
270

David R Slavitt Circling the Squires
126
Ken Kalfus Last Night at the Planetarium
139
Park Voodoo Science
149
A Defense of Popular
157
Phillip Lopate The Last Taboo
164
Armstrong Williams I Feel Good to Be a Black Male
281
PART FIVE Private Life
297
Paul R McHugh Whats the Story?
308
Michael Vincent Miller Does Sex Still Exist?
321
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About the author (1996)

Katharine Washburn is an editor and translator. She lives in New York. John Thornton was a book editor for many years and now works as a literary agent. He lives in New York.

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