What the New York Times thinks “culture” is

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Hello friends, my name is JJ. So the other day the New York Times put out a quiz that promised to test how cultured you are. And I was very excited because culture is something that I care a lot about, especially cultural literacy, which is the goal of meeting some basic level of competence in terms of being able to identify a lot of different cultural stuff. But unfortunately, it seems like I'm better at pushing the idea of cultural literacy than actually being culturally literate myself because I did pretty badly on the quiz, only getting a nine out of 30. I'll start by telling you a couple of the ones I got right. Which of these terms was not popularized by George Orwell's novel 1984, Big Brother, Deep State, Double Think, or thought police? And the answer is deep state. In a modern version of the ancient Chinese fairy tale, The Cow Herd and the Weaver Girl, two young lovers are punished for crossing class lines with their romance. What is their fate? The correct answer is they are turned into stars on the opposite end of the galaxy. In what year was the first fulllength hiphop album released? The correct answer is 1980, and it was the self-titled debut album by the Sugar Hill Gang. Which of the following artists was shot in the arm as part of a 1970s performance? The answer is the American artist Chris Burton. And where are the performances of Vietnam's Mua Roy no puppetry traditionally held? And the answer is in flooded rice patties. I did pretty good on questions like these because these ones tested basic familiarity with cultural facts on a pretty surface level. I know the cliches of 1984. I know that Chris Burton is an artist famous for getting his friend to shoot him. I know that traditional Vietnamese puppet shows take place in the water. I would say this is basic cultural literacy, knowing a broad range of background information to help you navigate the world in terms of the cultural references you might come across in works of media or in your interactions with others. So like that Chinese story about the two lovers and the stars is referenced constantly in Asian media and the Chris Burden shooting tends to come up a lot whenever people discuss post-modern performance art. But on some of the other questions I did much worse because while I would say that I might have decent levels of cultural literacy, I have low levels of cultural sophistication. If cultural literacy tests your ability to recognize specific facts and ideas that form the general outlines of our broad human culture, which is to say art and literature and music and movies and fashion and food and such, then cultural sophistication reflects your ability to go deeper and recognize more specific facts and ideas that allow you to engage in a more thorough appreciation of the precise characteristics of things in some particular realm of culture. This appreciation entails knowing a lot of details relating to something's significance, origin or history, as well as an ability to identify nuanced distinctions between similar cultural things. So for example, here is a question that I got wrong. The bow house in Desau Germany is associated with which modernist movement? brutalism, functionalism, the international style, or rationalism. I knew that Germany's bow house school was associated with early 20th century modernist architecture, which all of these terms are specific styles of, but I don't know enough about the distinctions between these styles or the specifics of bow house modernism to know specifically which architectural style is synonymous with the bow house in particular. I guessed the international style, but it's actually functionalism. Here are some other questions from the quiz that I think test cultural sophistication more than basic cultural literacy. This film, for which Giorgio Armani designed costumes, was largely credited with launching the Italian fashion designer's international career. The answer is American Jigalo. So this question requires not just knowledge of who Armani is but also his fashion backstory and the influence of specific Hollywood movies on fashion trends. Raola is an oftlooked novel by which British writer?

[00:04:42]The answer is George Elliot. By definition, this question asks us to be familiar enough with the writing of Elliot that we would even know some of her more obscure works. In what country did Basso continueo, a harmonic structure that defined western classical music in the Baroque period, likely originate? The answer is Italy. I personally think this is the most complicated question in the entire quiz just because it requires a pretty deep knowledge of both classical music at a technical level as well as its precise historical and geographic roots. Now the boundaries between cultural literacy and cultural sophistication are not always precise and can be a bit subjective.

[00:05:24]Cultural literacy is generally defined in terms of knowing the basic gist of things which includes recognizing names and terms and appearances and being able to briefly summarize something's broadly understood significance. And by definition, anyone with a lot of cultural sophistication in a particular realm will also have a lot of cultural literacy in that realm. For example, someone who has watched a lot of plays will by definition know the names and plots of a lot of famous plays and be able to understand references to them made by other people or in books or movies or whatever. In that sense, they are very culturally literate when it comes to plays. And just by virtue of having consumed so many plays, this same person will also likely have a fairly deep understanding of the history of theater as well and the specific legacies and reputations of different directors and actors and all sorts of theater jargon and the nuances of different theater genres and traditions.

[00:06:28]So in that sense they are also quite culturally sophisticated. However, if we presume that cultural literacy requires a certain topical breadth to be significant, then a person whose cultural sophistication is very narrow is not necessarily very culturally literate overall. If our great lover of plays has no knowledge of, say, hiphop music or architecture, then he lacks the capacity to understand or talk about culture in a way that goes outside of his one particular realm of personal interest. When one gets too arrogant about their own interests in this way, we tend to say that they are engaging in cultural snobbery, which is ranking the importance of cultural knowledge based entirely around one's personal subjective tastes. Traditionally, when we think of cultural snobbery, we tend to think of it as something that privileged people do to distance themselves from the common rabble in the west. This usually takes the form of wealthy white people exaggerating the importance of cultural things that only appeal to other wealthy white people both past and present. Here are some questions from the New York Times quiz that could be seen as somewhat snobbish in this sense. Identify this ash ripened cheese. Correct answer. Humbled fog.

[00:07:50]Paris tweed. The only fabric in the world governed and protected by its own act of parliament comes from this place.

[00:07:57]Answer the outer heed islands off the northwest tip of Britain. The gardening term parter refers to answer symmetrical patterns made from manicured hedges separated by pathways and designed to be viewed from above. True or false? The German white wine rel is always sweet.

[00:08:16]The answer is false and I may as well just read you the full answer that they post. Though Reeseling is often assumed to be on the sweeter side, the Somalier and restaurant tour Anishi says it's actually prized for its versatility. For instance, a crisp sparkling style called sect is produced with raceling grapes in Mosul, Germany. Fine wine and cheese, designer tweed, and carefully sculpted topiaries are all fairly stereotypically upper class European things. So making them part of a test of cultural literacy or sophistication could be seen as a bunch of rich white people defining culture in themselves in a way that is designed to exclude and judge. But this is hardly the only form of cultural knowledge that the New York Times quiz values. So let's not be too mean. Now all that being said, snobbishness can work in the other direction, too. If someone's cultural knowledge was entirely limited to video games, Netflix shows, and food court chains. I don't think most people would call them particularly literate or sophisticated just because their tastes were more popular or middle class. They might not be snobs per se, but they'd still be culturally sheltered. Similar to snobbishness, but still meaningfully distinct, is the practice of overvaluing cultural obscurity. To value obscurity is to directly run counter to the goals of literacy. After all, to be truly culturally literate is to be aware of things that matter in some broad sense.

[00:09:45]I think most of us can generally tell if something matters or not to a point.

[00:09:50]Some types of different wine and cheese matter. The films of Francis Ford Copala matter. Picassos Garnica matters. The FIFA World Cup matters. the short stories of Alice Monroe matter. These are things that I think pretty clearly meet some objective standard of both popularity and critical acclaim to be self-evidently important to anyone seeking to possess some base level of understanding of modern western culture.

[00:10:16]Obscurity, by contrast, is when something is not particularly well-known or appreciated, which makes it difficult to claim that you gain much in the way of an ability to communicate or connect with others by virtue of knowing about it. Obscurity in this sense can be snobbish or not. For example, if I say, "Oh, you simply cannot consider yourself cultured if you know nothing about interwar Norwegian neo-anist postexpressionist soapstone sculptures."

[00:10:44]then that would be a somewhat snobbish appeal to obscurity. But it would be an equal appeal to obscurity if I judged you as a cultural ignoramist for not having seen Jujoku Garden Treehouse Writer Academy part 34. Now obviously culture is not something that exists purely to learn about for the sake of learning. Works of culture can bring us pleasure and joy and inspire creativity and imagination and appeal to whatever individual sense of taste we've developed. But culture does also play an important role in building up community and civilization. Which means that participating in community and civilization does require some degree of willingness to defer at least a bit to the collective judgment of others in terms of what sort of culture is worth knowing about. even if you don't personally care about it all that much.

[00:11:36]We can aspire to be cultural pioneers and trendsetters and even make peace with being lonely fanboys. But the more common cultural experience in life and I think the generally proper experience is to use culture as something to bring people together even if just at the level of a simple conversation. Now, I know some of you are thinking, JJ, what you are talking about is basically just cultural trivia. Who cares? Cultural trivia, I would say, are cultural facts presented in some context that doesn't intend to deepen shared cultural understanding in any meaningful way. So, for example, if I was to ask a crowd at pub night to name the first red-haired woman to ever be nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar, I would say that that's cultural trivia because the information isn't really that relevant for anything beyond the trivia question itself. Trivia as well is often motivated by a kind of indifference to the topic at hand. The priority is usually just to provide entertainment through facts that are interesting or weird or funny or difficult. Again, none of this is an exact science where exactly boundaries lie when it comes to distinguishing cultural knowledge that's worth learning for reasons of basic literacy versus reasons of deepening sophistication versus when things get so obscure or trivial they can be safely ignored by everyone except for the most obsessive super fans is never easy. And these questions rightfully provoke debate. Culture can bring people joy and it should bring people together. But questions of judgment around cultural worth and what culture matters and assumptions of familiarity are the sort of things that divide and irritate. But I do believe that one of the worthy challenges of life is the struggle to make yourself care about things that you might not intuitively have that much interest in. No one has an obligation to care about things they don't want to.

[00:13:35]And it's perfectly possible to go through life being happily ignorant about any great realm of human knowledge, whether that's culture or science or politics or whatever. But if we believe, as I do, that one of the most important ambitions in this life is to deepen your relationships with your fellow man and broaden our understanding of this big complicated world we inhabit, then it does behoove all of us to constantly seek to improve our capacity to talk intelligently and confidently about things that other people are likely to know and care about. But the good news is it's not a chore. Broadening your cultural knowledge can be a ton of fun because it so often entails doing fun things like traveling or consuming new forms of entertainment or going to restaurants or watching YouTube videos. If you think about people in your own life who seem particularly well cultured, you probably envy them. Not just because they seem smart, but because they're always doing a bunch of different things and enjoying themselves while doing them. And you can be that sort of person, too, if you choose to make cultural growth one of your life's priorities in the same way that you hopefully already prioritize things like staying healthy, looking good for yourself and others, being financially secure, being a good member of your family, and being a good citizen of where you live. It is easy to dismiss facts about things you don't personally care about as being obscure or trivial.

[00:15:00]But if we start to get too liberal in how we use these terms, then we start to undermine the idea that cultural knowledge exists at all. So it's important to be humble about these sorts of things and accept that a lack of knowledge about something might actually represent a personal flaw in need of attention as opposed to just something you can smuggly handwave away as unimportant. Which is why I liked the New York Times quiz. I found it to be a humbling experience to see how badly I did. This will surely shock you to hear, but I can be a bit of a know-it-all at times, and I sometimes condescend to my friends when I think they don't know enough about something that I consider important. But there are so many ways in which I am much less culturally literate and sophisticated than I want to admit.

[00:15:47]And being reminded of this fact forces me to think critically about my own cultural consumption habits. How many times a week do I seek out a cultural experience? Whether that's a movie or a podcast or a trip or a meal or a book that genuinely exposes me to something new versus how often do I just watch yet another YouTube video about retro video games from the early '90s? Because that's a realm of culture I know so much about already, it envelops me with the comfort and security of a warm bath. So, the New York Times culture quiz was part of a larger feature that the New York Times culture supplement was running on the topic of culture more broadly. And I highly recommend checking it out just because it offers a bunch of very interesting lists and guides to various cultural things that various experts had been asked to assemble. These include articles on the eight most important animated films, six famously controversial works of art, the fabrics that shaped fashion, and what you need to know about the evolution of classical music. There's also a fun little list at the start by the editor of the Times Culture Supplement, Ha Yani Gearhara, who offers her own non-exhaustive list of eight fairly random but important cultural things that she thinks everyone should know about. And inspired by her list, I thought I would just close this video by offering eight things of my own. In coming up with my list, I tried to follow the lead of HA, whose list I think really captures a very good spirit of both cultural literacy and cultural sophistication with maybe just the slightest whiff of snobbishness. So, here is my non-exhaustive list of a few eclectic cultural things that I nevertheless think everyone should know.

[00:17:38]Number one, the caricature art of Miguel Kovarubius. Miguel Kovarubius was a Mexican-born magazine illustrator who is best known for doing celebrity caricatures in Vanity Fair during the 1920s and 30s. His work is striking in the way that it combines traditional Mexican aesthetics with early 20th century artistic trends like cubism and art deco. He had a tremendous influence on caricature as an evolving American art form. Number two, Philip Roth. One of the great American novelists of the postwar era and probably my favorite writer. His novels tend to center around themes of the Jewish American experience, but are also famous for the ways he explores themes of masculinity and male purpose. His two best novels, in my opinion, are The Human Stain and American Pastoral. Number three, Stamp Pot. This is a very traditional meal in the Netherlands that Dutch people tend to regard with a lot of sentimentality and affection. It's a kind of mash made from potatoes combined with other vegetables, often carrots, broccoli, and kale. Traditionally served with a big sausage. Number four, The Monkey Island Trilogy. A series of PC point-and-click adventure games released between 1990 and 1997 that are often considered masterpieces of the genre. They are very funny and clever in large part because they contain an enormous amount of fourth wall breaking meta humor. There are more games in the series, but they are not as beloved. Number five, Bill Reed. One of Canada's most famous and acclaimed indigenous artists. He came from here in British Columbia and is known for being a master of the distinctive Pacific Northwest style of native art. Probably most famous for his large, elaborately carved sculptures.

[00:19:28]Number six, Shanghai jazz. Between the World Wars, Shanghai was briefly a thriving hub of cosmopolitan culture in Asia. Many young women were able to become very successful singers. They called it Shanghai jazz and it was heavily influenced by American musical trends of the time along with American cultural sensibilities more generally.

[00:19:49]In modern Chinese culture and particularly Hong Kong culture, music from this era is seen as deeply sentimental and nostalgic.

[00:20:00]Number seven, Brian Lamb interviews.

[00:20:03]Brian Lamb is the longtime CEO of C-SPAN, America's leading nonprofit public affairs channel for decades. He's also been doing interview shows of various names with his guests usually being non-fiction writers. He's known for asking very simple, direct questions that make him come off as an unusually unpretentious interviewer.

[00:20:26]>> What do you want somebody wandering in a bookstore seeing your book to know about this book? Why you would pick it up and read it if you don't know anything about Romania? What's the point?

[00:20:37]>> And lastly, Blundstones. This is a popular brand of leather boot from Tasmania that was initially developed for farmers in the late 19th century, but over the years has slowly become popular with people of all walks of life all over the world. They're always slip-ons, and they're known for having these little distinctive front and back loops that have been widely emulated.

[00:20:59]All right, now it is your turn. In the comments below, can you make a list of some cultural things that you think are worth knowing about? Try to use the same criteria as me and HA where your list contains things that meet some standard of mattering while also reflecting the diversity of your own particular cultural knowledge. I look forward to reading and I will see you next week.