Some of the best social commentary around: Celebrity Book Club with Steven & Lily reviewed

When I was ten years old I had a babysitter who was a beautiful graduate student at an Ivy League university who loved to read celebrity gossip tabloids to ‘turn her brain off’. After I’d finished my homework, she and I would watch the only reality TV show I’ve ever loved, The Hills, and read magazines about Brangelina. This all ended when I was with my mom at the grocery store and I tried to buy a tabloid, and my mother, a Woman of Taste, asked what on earth I was doing. I said, copying my babysitter, ‘it’s to turn my brain off’, and my mom flipped out and made me to go to my room and read something like Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm.

What my mother didn’t understand is that we live in an era in which smart people are able to consume stupid media and extrapolate brilliant insights about the world from what they see.