Soon after Condé Nast's Si Newhouse bought The New Yorker in 1985, the once-successful magazine began hemorrhaging money, in part because of competition with other niche publications, but mostly because advertisers were no longer responding to its conspicuously inconspicuous editorial standards. Seven years later, still expecting a return on his investment, Newhouse brought on Vanity Fair's Tina Brown as editor-in-chief, a move that violently wrenched the venerable institution into a new era. As a young staff writer at the magazine, John Seabrook witnessed the gruesome spectacle firsthand, as the last bastion of anti-commercialism toppled under splashy design, celebrity profiles, and of-the-moment news stories. For Seabrook, the changes at The New Yorker stand as an especially potent example of "Nobrow," his term for the convergence of culture and marketing into one massive consumer "megastore." The pleasant surprise of Nobrow is that the author has little affection for the arbiters of elite taste; though a self-confessed aristocrat, he's more interested in Biggie Smalls and The Chemical Brothers than the classical sounds spilling from the Ivory Tower. His nimble, witty, insightful book occupies the sensible middle ground between privileged complacency and vacuous buzz—the worst tendencies of the William Shawn era and the Tina Brown era, respectively. Each chapter profiles various commercial tastemakers, including MTV president Judy McGrath, whose empire all but indoctrinates youths into corporate culture; music and film baron David Geffen; and director George Lucas, a perfect Nobrow model of "great artist and billionaire businessman." Seabrook also collects one sad piece of pop-culture detritus in Ben Kweller, a 16-year-old guitarist and songwriter whose grunge band Radish sparked a major-label bidding war, but wound up losing the precocious-teen market to Hanson. Kweller's failure is seen as arbitrary, the victim of a buzz-driven universe where money and timing have more to do with success than what people actually like. Though Seabrook gets a rush from immersing himself in this ever-changing air, he comes to regret the sickly sweet aftertaste: In Nobrow's vivid and exciting universe, nothing has a cultural shelf life.