I’m not typically one for categories of intellectual or aesthetic distinction—i.e., “lowbrow,” “highbrow,” etc. Lawrence Levine, among others, has shown how such distinction making is ineluctably embedded in class and other hierarchies of power. But, during a long road trip last week, I listened to an episode of Terry Gross’s NPR staple Fresh Air that confirmed my Illinois State University colleague Curtis White’s critique of it as quintessentially of the “Middle Mind.” This is how White defines the Middle Mind: The Middle Mind attempts to find a middle way between the ideological hacks of the Right and the theorized Left. Read more