In this week's review of the New York Times Book Review, Intern Alexis comes to the defense of Everything Bad Is Good For You and, in the process, manages to reprint an IM conversation about The O.C. finale. We let her keep it in the final copy, purely out of respect for Trey and admiration for Marissa's solid gunplay. After the jump, Alexis explores NASCAR and pop culture in her review for the common man.

Essay: Nascar Nation

According to this week s Up Front column, Jonathan Miles, who wrote the cover essay on Nascar racing (yes, you read that right this week s cover was an essay on Nascar racing), has been a contributor to the Book Review since 1999, and this is the first time one of his reviews has made our cover. Well, congratulations Jonathan! After six years of pumping out insignificant inside-the-Review reviews, you ve finally made it! And it s certainly clear from the review that Miles was sick and tired of being relegated to the inner bowels of the Review and was set on writing a veritable Cover Story. He played all the right cards:

The elevating your topic to new trend in America -status and not just a trend, but perhaps a cultural movement? card: What s beyond debate, however, is Nascar s surging ascendancy in American sports, and thus, by extension, American culture.

The no one has written about it, but hey, look at me, I am, and that makes me a frickin pioneer card: With such visceral themes, outsize characters and giant national interest, you might expect Nascar to have attracted a glut of literary attention. You would be wrong.

The New York card: With Nascar s recent purchase of a swath of real estate on Staten-Island, where it intends to plop down an 80,000-seat racetrack and retail center for the untapped New York City market, the onslaught seems poised on the brink of full-out conquest.

Then, on Jeff MacGregor s Nascar book Sunday Money, Miles writes that MacGregor views Nascar through the semi-jaundiced, media savvy lens of a New York writer, though without undue snark. Now, we actually really enjoyed this review, but Miles better watch out, cause according to our Meta-meter, well, he s approaching, very, very meta. Semi-jaundiced? This review is fucking full-on yellow-eyed and yellow-skinned. And undue snark? Um, in the last paragraph, Miles compares Nascar racing to Elvis and refers to Nascar s Elvis-comes-out-of-the-army moment.

TBR: Inside the List

A little gem in the NYTBR is Dwight Garner s consistently amusing Inside the List, where perched from his high horse he mocks the shit that makes it onto the Best Seller list. This week, apparently, Garner did nothing but watch Oprah. In writing about Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet C. Oz s new book You: The Owner s Manual, he quotes Oprah, who had the authors on her show. Health is it, baby, Oprah said, Health is everything. Health beats shoes. Then Garner goes on to tackle memoirs by Brooke Shields and Goldie Hawn, which are at number three and six, respectively. Of Shields post-partem depression tome, Oprah said, I know exactly how your uterus is. And Oprah, we know exactly how yours isn't.

Everything Bad is Good for You
By Steven Johnson
Reviewed by Walter Kirn

After pulverizing JS4 s "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Mr. Kill-Joy himself, Walter Kirn, is back to gently poo-poo the hyped-up Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson. He admits that it is an elegant polemic, but argues that there is little worth in compulsively watching shows like the Apprentice: "I m not sure why such a regimen is good for people except in the sense that it isn t actually harmful. As elsewhere in the book, Johnson s contrarian contempt for the knee-jerk vilification of pop culture seems to push him further than may be warranted in defending and elevating artifacts that are neither here nor there. Hm. Fair. However, here is an IM conversation we had earlier this afternoon:

InternaLexus69: Dude, did you see Trey s face after Marissa shoots him?
Lexi's_roommate_1: Yeah, it s like he respects her for having the guts to pull the trigger.
InternaLexus69: She s getting all Lacanian expressing her unconscious desire to destroy Trey after he assaults her, subjugating her self to her unconscious, to a violent urge that is backed by no culturally set meaning.
Lexi's_roommate_1: Totally. Notice that Marissa only has the determination to kill Trey after leaving her mother and father (who are about to get back together) and subtly reconciling with Juju. Marissa s finally separated herself from her mother s identity, forged her own identity and entered into civilized adulthood, which is in itself a violent, unstructured place. Her first act is to kill her sexual oppressor and save her sexual desire, Trey and Ryan respectively. Not only is she exerting her power as an individual, but she s also allowing that unconscious will to enter into play, thereby expressing her deep sexual drives and desires.
InternaLexus69: Fo' realz.

Now, if that is not the IM conversation of two people getting smarter, well, then I don t know what is.