newyorker:

Jennifer Szalai explains why she despises the term “guilty pleasure”: http://nyr.kr/1gWx5o5

“The guilty pleasure seems to me the distillation of all the worst qualities of the middlebrow—the condescension of the highbrow without the expenditure of effort, along with mass culture’s pleasure-seeking without the unequivocal enjoyment. If you want to listen to Rihanna while reading the latest from Dean Koontz, just go ahead and do it. Don’t try to suggest you know better.”

Illustration by Hannah K. Lee.