Is Pop Culture Making Us Smarter?

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From: Steven Johnson
To: Dana Stevens
Subject: Pop Culture Is Good for Us
Thursday, May 12, 2005, at 6:14 AM ET

Dana Stevens, Slate's TV critic, and Steven Johnson discuss whether pop culture makes you smarter. In a recent New York Times Magazine excerpt from his book Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, Johnson suggested that increasingly complex narratives are making primetime television more and more challenging. Stevens, responding in Slate, argued that challenging programming is still hard to come by. Sensing the beginning of a promising debate, we asked Stevens to read Johnson's book—which claims, more broadly, that video games and TV are far better for us than we think they are. Here, Johnson and Stevens continue their debate.