Everything Bad Is Good For You - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

The book has received mixed critical reviews. In one The New York Times review, Janet Maslin was primarily negative, dismissing the book's "facile argument" and sparsity of hard evidence and claiming that "The reader rattles around within the book's narrow universe and repeatedly bumps into the same thing: reiterations of Mr. Johnson's one big idea." In another, Walter Kirn, while acknowledging a lack of science and questioning some of the book's premises with regards to the benefits of reality t.v., praised Johnson's "elegant polemic", concluding that "onsidered purely on its own terms, Johnson's thesis holds up despite these quibbles." Wired gave the book an overall positive review, describing it as "chock-full of interesting insights that are clearly the reflection of an agile and catholic intellect", but also suggested that the book is largely built around a straw man argument and thus "largely misses the point of the more valid critique of today's pop culture". The Guardian found part of Johnson's thesis — that some elements of pop culture have grown more complex — persuasive, but not the second claim that this greater complexity offers any tangible benefits for the public aside from preparing them to handle more complex pop culture; it criticized the shortage of hard science and the conclusions drawn from what science exists and also the application of literary theory to visual arts media. The Associated Press review praised the book overall as "an engaging read", although it noted that the book was uneven, with TV and video game discussions better than those on film and the internet, and repetitive in presenting its theme. Salon.com described it simply as "a fine contrarian defense of pop culture".