New Consensus for Old: Cultural Studies from Left to Right

Thomas Frank has been sending wake-up calls to just about everyone within reach over the past decade, in venues from The Village Voice to Harper's . His takes on labor politics, advertising, the virtues of the Midwest, and how un-cool you really are have won him a wide audience, and in this piece, Frank gives us a reading of cultural studies—viewed by some as an important new perspective in the academy, but by others as an unwieldy theoretical fad.