Why NPR Listeners Think They Are Aristocrats

“For more than a century, the elite in the United States has distinguished themselves from consumers of commercial culture, or mass culture. Highbrow/lowbrow was the language by which culture was translated into status—the pivot on which distinctions of taste became distinctions of caste. The words highbrow and lowbrow are American inventions, devised for a specifically American purpose: to render culture into class” [John Seabrook, Nobrow (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 26].