Remember when you had to get news about celebrity bad behavior from magazines at the checkout counter?

Scrolling through Twitter this morning, I saw this post from Roxane Gay, the mega-star writer:

In what has become a routine, I read something on Twitter that made me go Google what the hell they were talking about. Turns out actor/comedian Kevin Hart tweeted a few years ago about not wanting his son to do "gay" stuff like play with dolls. He also called someone a "fat fag face" or something like that.

As I was figuring out what my opinion on this was, it occurred to me that people I look to for intellectual sustenance spend a lot of time these days on what used to be written off as celebrity gossip, brain candy. Just today, in addition to the Hart story line, there was something about Lena Dunham--whose name I've heard hundreds of times but whom I'm still not sure I've actually seen in anything--doing...I don't know...bad stuff about rape or something? I didn't look into that one.

A lot of the last two years has required me to do some fairly in-depth research into what bad thing a celebrity did, including exactly what way both the victim and the accused claim a certain touch went down. I know a lot about a date Aziz Ansari went on.

All of this involves a pretty significant shift in intellectual discourse. It's not necessarily wrong to talk about pop culture or sports or other light-hearted fare in a serious forum. I've offered serious analyses of a Star Wars movie and an Avengers movie. Just because something isn't aimed at intellectuals doesn't mean the intelligentsia can't treat it seriously. Pop culture may not be an intellectual product, but it does reflect the culture it was made by and for, and it's completely legitimate to study the artifacts of that culture in a serious way.

But I can't help thinking we're kind of taking that liberty a little far, and we're using it to indulge ourselves in stories that don't really concern us. I remember when I first realized I wanted to be smart, that I wanted to take learning seriously. I was a teenager, and one of the first things I did--perhaps needlessly--was to try very hard to avoid pop songs or celebrity news. I really thought just knowing the words to pop lyrics or knowing facts about celebrity lives would make me dumber. It was probably overly zealous of me, but I think we could do with a little of that zeal now.

It's hard to believe there are no consequences to intellectual life in America of a shift that now has intellectual figures talking about celebrity news on a routine basis as if that news were important. When key figures start to talk about a subject and others, under that influence, also rush to become informed about it so we can join in the discussion, that sets the intellectual agenda. Today, smart people who help shape what other smart people are talking about are in a deep conversation about Kevin Hart. He's a funny guy, but I don't know if he's as important to be talking about as, say, all the research on the coming climate disaster that's just emerged. There is almost no difference in subject matter between some "intellectual" discourse and what is probably being talked about today on The View.