Slightly less snark than usual in this episode on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966). Capote’s “non-fiction novel” (sure) is about the investigation of a 1959 murder of a family in Kansas and the trial and execution that followed. We discuss midcentury magazine culture and why The New Yorker sucks, how awful it must be to be a prodigy like Capote, and the fact that true crime is both the most fun and the most reactionary genre of them all.

We read the Vintage International edition. We mention it in the show, but it’s always a delight to read left culture critic and general middlebrow hater Dwight MacDonald’s Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, rereleased in 2011 and edited by John Summers.

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