So as wealth is chronicling these changes that are happening to American life as a consequence of post-war prosperity, he's definitely giving us a perspective of everything that's gone wrong with wealth and consumerism and sort of narcissism that he thinks peaks, especially in the 1970s and the 1980s.

But he's also truly and genuinely dazzled by what young people and especially are coming up with.

He's really, really impressed by the Hot Rod culture.

He's impressed by rock and roll.

He does this wonderful, wonderful profile of Phil Specter. He is genuinely excited about a lot of these

changes too. He's actually really really into the formal properties of these

cultural changes. The essay he does on Las Vegas is another one where he sort of in the same

essay basically describes Las Vegas as a deeply spiritually deadening place

where old people go to lose themselves. But he also has this real admiration for literally like the signs that he would see.

You know, these beautiful shapes and nobody had ever come up with. People call it like Gucci style.

And that style sort of emanates from Las Vegas and sort of dots the American landscape

over the course of the 1950s and 1960s.

He thinks that that's a real aesthetic development, something new that America is brought into the world.

And I think that that's one of the reasons why he's not, I think, interpreted as being as

conservative as I think he fundamentally was, because at a time when this was not as common as it is today, there is this kind of real admiration for and willing to take seriously pop culture as, if not higher, than something worthy of the kind of investigation and serious analysis that the higher art is routinely

subjective.

I'm glad you put a pin in that explicitly, Osita, that someone's so inventive in terms of style, and as you're getting that

non-crochity when discussing some of these phenomenon he's writing about, that doesn't put you in

mind of a stodgy right-wing conservative.

The phenomenon is interested in is being a translator for...

Subcultures.

Subcult, all of these different outgrowths of prosperity that people are putting to use all kinds of weird

...