IS POP CULTURE IN PARALYSIS? That’s the question that the Hoover Institute’s Emily Esfahani Smith asks on her blog, with an assist from Kurt Anderson of Vanity Fair.

The downside: It’s much harder to have a unified sense of culture now that the mass media of the 1920s through the 1980s is no more, thus leading both to the existence of “present-tense culture,” and the desire to hang onto the beloved older forms of the past. (See also: endless Hollywood sequels and the ubiquity of forty year old rock songs.) The upside: it’s much easier to create your own.