Pop culture is making us dumber, crasser, more immoral, and, especially, less adult. Such, at least, has been the claim of a number of articles over the last year or so. At Slate, Ruth Graham skewered YA fiction as catering to “escapism, instant gratification and nostalgia,” and the non-children who read it: “Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better than this.” A.O. Scott, more ambivalently and convolutedly, echoed that sentiment at the New York Times, where he sees the rise of Y.A. literature and a host of other factors as leading to the “death of adulthood.” William Giraldi at the New Republic declared the success of 50 Shades of Grey a sign that “We’re an infirm, ineffectual tribe still stuck in some sort of larval stage.” Fredrik DeBoer, in a similar tone of sorrow
Article source: http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-and-culture/william-shakespeare-culture-war-highbrow-lowbrow-94733/