William Logan's Elitist Brow System

This week in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, William Logan says that The New Yorker is “a middlebrow journal for people who would like to be highbrows” (“Deal With the Devil,” February 18, 2011). I’ve never agreed with the lowbrow-middlebrow-highbrow form of analysis. It smacks of snobbery. John Seabrook, in his book Nobrow (2000), says, “The words highbrow and lowbrow are American inventions, devised for a specifically American purpose: to render culture into class.” I’m not interested in making cultural or class distinctions. I don’t read The New Yorker because I want to improve my social status. I read it because I enjoy it. Reading The New Yorker is bliss. William Logan can take his elitist brow system, fold it for ways, and put it where the moon doesn’t shine.

Credit: The above artwork is by Laurie Rosenwald; it appears in The New Yorker (January 24, 2011) as an “On The Horizon” illustration in “Goings On About Town.”