Not to get lured into Janan G*nesh discourse, but a balanced cultural diet should imo include a mixture of lowbrow, middlebow, and highbrow. It's obviously important not to confuse middlebrow for highbrow, but the idea that it is uniquely valueless is stupid - the mid has its place!

(also while we are at it, I'm not sure anything could better embody middlebrow content than Janan's own journalistic output, which, as per Dwight MacDonald's characterisation of "Midcult", "pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them")

The opening statistic is also just a bad misread? 75% of Hunger Games readers are over 18? Yes, that's because it came out in 2008, when I read it, and I am now 29.

the location of the brow also does not correlate with quality!