I recently finished two books by pop science writer Steven Johnson -- Mind Wide Open and Everything Bad is Good for You. He's a good writer to the point where I start suspecting his arguments -- something so glibly and smoothly articulated can't possibly be fully accurate, can it? -- but overall, I found the books interesting and informative. Mind Wide Open is essentially a survey of some neuroscientific research as it applies to regular everyday feelings, like the way we're wired to remember scary things more precisely or the way our moods depend more on the mood immediately preceding them than on actual events.

Everything Bad is Good for You, though, is the one with its own substantive argument -- and the one that stuck with me. Johnson argues, quite convincingly, that modern "pop culture" -- video games, TV, the internet -- is more intellectually challenging than equivalent entertainment of a few decades ago, and stimulates our brains to interesting kinds of problem-solving, thus raising the intellectual capability (in some realms) of the average person. I breezed through the first half of the book, mostly because it was essentially preaching to the choir -- I was born in 1985, I've played Mario Kart and Grand Theft Auto and seen The Brady Bunch and Arrested Development, and I can tell which are more sophisticated and challenging! I perked up when he mentioned reality TV, which I don't watch; he echoed some of the "emotional intelligence" themes brought up in his earlier book, and suggested that reality TV is interesting and challenging because it requires you to read emotions and social situations. Similarly, he describes the ways in which popular TV of today requires you to discover and follow much more complex social networks than popular TV of thirty years ago; this echoed the argument I've seen (I don't recall the source) that social tools like Facebook are a positive extension of human evolution, since one of the major things that distinguished us from our less successful ancestors was our ability to process and remember a large number and kind of social relationships. This idea stuck with me as I started watching Weeds ("Showtime: the slightly more ridiculous network"?) -- I don't think the show is very good, but I feel compelled to continue watching in order to continue to build up a model of the bizarre social network it depicts.