In the 1990s and the 2000s there was this trend, the poster child of which was probably David Foster Wallace, or Malcolm Gladwell, of writers and essayists bridging the gap between highly academic analyses and the Barnes & Noble center aisle. And if you just so happened to have read a lot of highly academic work as of late, these "mid-intellectual" works, focused on entertainment as much as education, feel glaringly inexact. So, in the case of this book, a look at the aesthetics of advertising and pop culture, what may seem, at first, like an informative, objective study very quickly takes on the flavor of a tedious, lightweight, book-length complaint. Remember when Chuck Klosterman was considered one of our leading intellectual lights? Which one of you was responsible for that one? Two stars.