Linda Holmes

There are three phrases that are almost always bad news for a piece of cultural writing.

They are:

1. "The masses."

2. "Middle America."

3. "The lowest common denominator."

All three are ways to separate the writer and her sensibility — which are presumed to be congruent with the reader and her sensibility — from invisible and undefined others, for whom bad cultural content is produced and by whom it is unquestioningly gobbled up.

We were all struck last week by Noel Murray's A.V. Club piece "The changing face of 'nerds' (and autism) in popular culture," so we spent this week's first segment talking about the separate but related matters it raises of how popular culture deals with nerds and how it deals with autism, not to mention how it deals with the messy and imprecise crossover between the two.

There's no shortage of food shows on television, from serene instructional content to tourist eye candy to kooky competitions where chefs cook in the desert. There's also The Great Food Truck Race, which is mostly about the finer points of where you should park a food truck.

But while my favorite was once Bravo's Top Chef, with its clearly skilled chefs and terrific judging panels, my new favorite is the Food Network competition Chopped.

On today's Morning Edition, Shereen Marisol Meraji had a great piece about the memorial of Southern California public-television staple Huell Howser, who died of cancer earlier this month.

On Tuesday, hundreds of people turned out to remember him. As Meraji says, for these fans, Howser was "a man who took them to places they never knew they wanted to go and introduced them to people they never knew they wanted to meet."

On October 24, 2011, I had a bad day.

I honestly forget why. It was a Monday; that should be enough.

The Golden Globes have a well-deserved reputation for being both goofy and pretty much meaningless. They've made it into the news the last few years largely by convincing people that Ricky Gervais' Hugh Hefner jokes were dangerous and daring. (They weren't.)

This year, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has actually done something very promising by lining up Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to host together. Now that — that -- seems like it might be good.