The Road to Dumb: The Long March from Faulkner to Fifty Shades & Walter Cronkite to Tucker Carlson

If you, like Theseus, got trapped in a maze with a Minotaur, how would you escape? Except in this case, the maze is made of video games, nonstop TV, and the 3.5 million books published on Amazon KDP in 2025. And you don’t have a ball of string to retrace your steps.Last week on Unedited, we began a discussion of stupid. Where have all the smart books gone, and, maybe more importantly, where has the appetite for smart gone? This week, Adam diagnoses our entertainment culture sickness by examining a string of symptoms: the fall of boredom, the saturation of stimuli, and the erosion of institutional guardrails. But guard rails against what? Is stupid something with an actual lineage, or just a matter of changing tastes? To answer that, we explore the “thought-terminating cliches” of our time and contrast what the authors of today are trying to do when compared with those of yore. Join us, if you dare.