Malcolm Gladwell on Everything Bad is Good for You

Malcolm Gladwell Everything Bad is Good for You, which posits that the steady rise in IQs is because of our comsumption of pop culture. Take TV, for example:

As Johnson points out, television is very different now from what it was thirty years ago. It’s harder. A typical episode of “Starsky and Hutch,” in the nineteen-seventies, followed an essentially linear path: two characters, engaged in a single story line, moving toward a decisive conclusion. To watch an episode of “Dallas” today is to be stunned by its glacial pace—by the arduous attempts to establish social relationships, by the excruciating simplicity of the plotline, by how obvious it was. A single episode of “The Sopranos,” by contrast, might follow five narrative threads, involving a dozen characters who weave in and out of the plot.

Curious? Here's the rest of Gladwell's review.