Mass entertainment in America has been dominated for a long time by the mode of documentary realism.

The modern suburb is the product of the car, the five-day week, and the "bankers' hours" of the masses.

The situation of the factory worker today is reminiscent in certain respects of that of the nineteenth-century capitalist whose wife dragged him reluctantly toward "culture" and away from his "materialistic" preoccupations.

Nowadays, truth is the greatest news. The mass media are the wholesalers, the peer groups, the retailers of the communications industry.

It is among the less privileged groups relatively new to leisure and consumption that the zest for possessions retains something of its pristine energy.

America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese.

Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us.