Long-time USIH reader Varad Mehta posted this piece from Slate—“Is ‘Middlebrow’ Still an Insult?” by David Haglund—on our Facebook page. He added this short article from Maria Popova as a supplemental read. Both intelligently discuss now well-known problems of the high, middle, and low cultural distinction tropes (i.e. these categories are historically shifting matters of perception, made problematic by the advent of mass culture and the ongoing development of democratic cultural forms in the twentieth century). Read more