[{"id":309275,"date":"2026-08-11T14:45:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T18:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309275"},"modified":"2026-08-11T07:41:06","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T11:41:06","slug":"why-we-should-learn-to-embrace-the-middlebrow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/why-we-should-learn-to-embrace-the-middlebrow.html","title":{"rendered":"Why we should learn to embrace the middlebrow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aaron Meskin and Jonathan Weinberg at Psyche<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"\"\u2018If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm,\u2019 Virginia Woolf once wrote, \u2018dares call me \u201cmiddlebrow\u201d I will take my pen and stab him, dead.\u2019 With this, in an unsent letter to the\u00a0New Statesman<\/em>\u00a0in 1932, she set the high (and highbrow) standard of contempt for the category. While the decades since have seen titanic growth in middlebrow art across all media, there has been little change in this default impression of \u2018middlebrow\u2019 as a term somewhere between a literary expression of dismissal, and an outright slur. Although the \u2018lowbrow\u2019 has, in recent years, been reclaimed as a legitimate aesthetic domain, the middlebrow continues to be a denigrated and troublesome category. The highbrow has its defenders (snobs) and\u00a0the lowbrow<\/a>\u00a0its defenders (hipsters), but it is not easy to find defenders of the middlebrow. We thus come not to bury the middlebrow, but to\u00a0praise it.<\/span>\u00a0Middlebrow is a term of appraisal that admits not just of bad, but good, even brilliant, instances.<\/p>\n

To do so, however, we must first take up the question of what the middlebrow\u00a0is<\/em>.<\/p>\n

More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aaron Meskin and Jonathan Weinberg at Psyche: \u2018If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm,\u2019 Virginia Woolf once wrote, \u2018dares call me \u201cmiddlebrow\u201d I will take my pen and stab him, dead.\u2019 With this, in an unsent letter to the\u00a0New Statesman\u00a0in 1932, she set the high (and highbrow) standard of contempt for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309275"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309278,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309275\/revisions\/309278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309272,"date":"2026-08-11T13:45:04","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T17:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309272"},"modified":"2026-08-11T07:36:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T11:36:18","slug":"sean-carrolls-mindscape-podcast-chandra-sripada-on-how-llms-and-humans-are-cognitive-cousins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/sean-carrolls-mindscape-podcast-chandra-sripada-on-how-llms-and-humans-are-cognitive-cousins.html","title":{"rendered":"Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast: Chandra Sripada on How LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Large Language Models display an uncanny ability to construct human-sounding speech, and can synthesize concepts in novel ways. Is this because they are truly thinking like human beings in some way, or have they found a way to be human-like without reproducing the internal mechanisms of human thought? Chandra Sripada argues that LLM cognition is more human-like than we suppose, and offers evidence from the ways that cognitive scientists study actual humans.<\/p>\n