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As the ABC billboard emphasizes that watching TV exudes hipness and honour in spite of the negative connotations that it is attributed with, this is made possible only because this advertising was released during the age of the Internet. Although there may be people who stay up all night while surfing the net or tinkering nonstop with the computer, television viewing could also be associated with the lack of education, unemployment, and may even be seen as an ‘addiction’. While the case studies presented in this book exhibit opinions of those from the middle class in terms of how television viewing can be associated with vulgarity, laziness, and passivity, the book has also observed how television viewing causes its most severe media effects on those from this social class.

The conclusion of Spoon River America argues that postmodern portrayals of small towns in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries broadly fell into two categories: the exotic and the surreal. The book concludes with brief analyses of popular media portrayals of small towns in films like Heathers (1988), Fargo (1996), Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017); television series like Twin Peaks (1990), Stranger Things (2016-2019), and Ozark (2017); and the radio program A Prairie Home Companion (1974-2016), all of which display variations of Masters’s character tropes. The book ends with a consideration of why Spoon River Anthology’s popularity continues despite changes in perceptions of the small town as representative of the nation.

Building from the rhymed prose register, chapter four analyzes the ways laments about Arabic writing have shaped practices of phatic connection in Fez. I look at the ways Fassis engaged darīja writing as a blending of multisensory channels tied to specific media platforms: folklore books, WhatsApp, advertising billboards, and newsprint. Instead of foregrounding the aural/spoken soundscape or the visual/graphic linguascape, I examine the intertwining of these sensorial channels in the sounding of darīja script and scripting of darīja sounds by reading subjects, everyday Moroccans who authorized themselves to weigh in on the politics of writing. Scholars have written about Arabic soundscapes, the acoustic environments, listening practices, and ritual sounding in which Arabic shapes public discourse and Muslim subjects. Others have focused on the emergence of Arabic dialect writing movements as expressions of political movements, local advertising campaigns, and youth-driven social change movements. Both the soundscape and darīja writing literatures hint at the multisensory channel practices and ideologies mobilized to make Moroccan persons, and they include laments about modality failures that motivated writing changes in the last decade. In the face of debates about the role of language in Moroccan national identity, Fassi everyday scriptic heterogeneity pointed to a practice of ambivalence toward written darīja in specific media platforms (billboards, websites, and mobile apps), but not others (books and newsprint). The platforms of writing mattered to the phatic work of making Moroccans in Fez.

Expositions in St. Louis and San Francisco and the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration were brilliantly coordinated electric landscapes. Urban planners such Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Mulford Robinson successfully promoted new parks, restrictions on electric advertising, and tasteful lighting along boulevards. But commercial energies retained their focal points in the downtown and amusement parks, where spectacular lighting effects had free play. The controversy over how to light American cities resulted in a compromise between the City Beautiful Movement and the individualistic forces of commerce. The resulting hybrid landscape was neither the harmonious, horizontal city of the great expositions nor the visual cacophony of Times Square but a lively compromise. It lacked an intentional unifying style, but when viewed from a skyscraper or an airplane, it was impressive and unexpectedly attractive. It expressed tensions between Beaux Arts tradition and American iconoclasm, between the horizontal city and the vertical thrust of commerce, between an exuberant popular culture and a reverence toward patriotic symbols.

This chapter delves further into the idea that popular culture provides materials, resources, opportunities, and strategies for poets trying to conceptualize and write “modern” poetry by bringing together two discussions. One focuses on the relationships between popular literacy, technology, and the commercial landscape of twentieth-century America; the other seeks to understand poet William Carlos Williams' literary goal of capturing the commercial language of U.S. culture in his poetry. Williams' work leans towards the so-called “restless viewing;” he was pushed toward such viewpoint by the hours he spent driving, reading, and writing in his car while making house calls as a doctor. Engrossed in a landscape of competing billboards and other forms of outdoor advertising, Williams recognized the potential for linguistic interference at the heart of that “billboard discourse,” providing more evidence that modernism was rooted in popular culture.

One of the most striking occurrences in the history of Billboard’s popularity charts was the disappearance of the R&B chart from November 1963 to January 1965. This chapter analyzes this event in depth in order to examine the relationship of R&B to the mainstream. R&B continued to have an active existence (illustrated by a discussion of radio formats) despite the disappearance of Billboard’s chart; the temporary cessation of the chart was due to conflictual understandings of genre based in part on different weightings of musical style versus the importance of audience. The “British Invasion” and the emergence of folk-rock during 1964-65 created greater racial division of the mainstream than had existed since the arrival of early rock ‘n’ roll. In the period immediately following, greater emphasis on black identity, musically and politically during the late 1960s led to the re-naming of the R&B category to Soul in 1969.

Chapter 2 examines the transformative effect of the opening of Highway 1 in 1937. This chapter argues that planning foresight positioned Big Sur to become one of the state’s best-preserved coastlines, while popular representations of its dramatic natural elements provided the justification for such preservation. Before the highway opened, Monterey County established some of the first ordinances in the nation to prohibit billboards and require well-designed construction along the highway. Tourists responded with enthusiasm, drawn by Jeffers’s powerful verse and countless national newspaper stories extoling Big Sur’s beauty. In 1944 the avant-garde writer Henry Miller settled in Big Sur. Like Jeffers’s work, Miller’s representation of Big Sur left the impression that people belonged in and to this landscape. The highway set Big Sur on an irrevocable course toward participation in contemporary society, but aesthetic zoning, praise from the national media, and accounts from residents like Miller, all worked to blur the modern aspects of this coastal destination. Visitors to Big Sur sought a glimpse of the frontier that had supposedly closed four decades earlier, but ironically, the frontier they encountered derived at least in part from government regulations that responded to California’s phenomenal growth.

The ways in which music from Broadway reached listeners were different than most of popular music: show tunes had content, but full scores from Broadway had context as well as content. The act and the art of recovering the musical experience of a Broadway show for home listeners were both complex and challenging; how producers and composers met the technical and aesthetic challenges of capturing a narrative stage experience is the journey of this book. The songs from Broadway were and are an intensely personal and popular aspect of American popular culture; likewise, the cast albums themselves—and the songs from them—were among the most commercially successful recordings of the twentieth century.

Let's be honest. Editors, as any writer will tell you, aren't all that bright. They may say they're looking for stories that will teach something important about the way the world works, but mostly they want to be entertained. They can't follow leaps of logic. They get distracted by elaborate prose, and they have no patience for boring factual details. They get confused by too many characters in a narrative, or they're easily irritated by extraneous quotes. And they don't like big words very much, either. In other words, we editors are a lot like the readers that we—and you—are trying to reach. In fact, we're a special kind of reader, in that our livelihood depends on our ability to think like the audience of our publications. This is the case for any kind of editing, not just science editing. Writers may shift tone or approach for different markets, but editors live and breathe our readers' way of life. We must internalize their interests, who they are, and what they expect from our magazines, newspapers, or Web Sites. Editors know what level of scientific language our readers will understand and what they won't. Each one of us also deeply understands our publication's unique mission. Many people say that to be a good editor you first have to be a good writer and reporter. We editors like to think so, too. Having had experience as a writer helps inform good editing, and gives the editor a firmer appreciation of the reporter's point of view. And it's certainly true that, if necessary, an editor must be able to step in and complete the reporting and revisions on an article. But more than being good writers, editors must be good critical thinkers who can recognize and evaluate good writing—or can figure out how to make the most of not-so-good writing. Especially when the subject is science, which can be complicated and convoluted, a good editor needs a sharp eye for detail. We need to be organized, able to envision a structure for an article when one does not yet exist, or to identify the missing pieces or gaps in logic that are needed to make everything hang together.

The weather is unusually warm for a Saturday morning in mid-October, and the clear horizon of the sky stretches blue and wide above this distant patch of Brooklyn. To the southeast, high above the elevated subway tracks, a jet plane climbs on the first part of its journey, away from Kennedy Airport in Queens, its real point of departure, but also far away from the two-story, redbrick houses and vacant lots of East New York, long known as one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. When you get out of the subway train at Van Siclen Avenue and walk down the stairs from the elevated tracks, you feel a bit lost in the shadows and the absence of shops, except for a small corner bodega, on the quiet street. But a short, smiling woman in her sixties, who gets off the train with you, sees that you don’t look black or Hispanic and senses that you don’t live in the neighborhood; she invites you to walk with her. Improbably, on the next block, almost directly under the tracks, three lush, green gardens, carefully tended and fenced, come into view. Inside, planted in neat rows, green beans and mint wait to be picked. Small onions peek through the earth, ready to be dug before the first frost. A few peppers fl ash slivers of bright red through the leaves of tomato and squash plants that have already seen the last harvest of the year. These oases represent the time and effort of a small number of community gardeners who live in the neighborhood. Since the 1990s they have been created and maintained by the gardeners’ hard work and earnest planning, both subsidized and jeopardized by the city and state governments; like the Red Hook food vendors, they are a tangible symbol of the constant struggle to put down roots in the city, especially if you don’t have much money. The helpful woman whom you have just met invites you to visit one of the gardens, a small lot of about one-third of an acre.

The last of three chapters examining animal characters within the life-story of the Buddha, this chapter focuses on the fierce elephant Nāḷāgiri, sent forth on a rampage in order to kill the Buddha (by the Buddha’s evil cousin Devadatta), yet instantaneously tamed and made docile by the enormous power of his presence. The chapter argues that Nāḷāgiri serves as a billboard for the Buddha’s power and charisma, yet the relationship between them is complex. On the one hand, the encounter between the Buddha and Nāḷāgiri is a direct confrontation between Man and Beast, but on the other hand, it is also depicted as a contest between two “elephants.” The episode is further illuminated by comparison to Garry Marvin’s classic analysis of the Spanish bullfight. In addition, the Buddhist imagery surrounding elephants, lions, and jackals is also addressed.