Same olds

I read the spoilers for Sugar because I'm never going to watch it and felt let down anyway (you just know it was pitched as the detective who fell to Earth). Are there any new ideas out there? Stuff all seems the same. TV is terrible; bookstores are slurries of genre; movies are a recursive loop; music is a soap bubble. I worry I'm ageing out of culture. But I might not be the only one.

Alex Murrell on The Age of Average:

In every corner of pop culture, a smaller number of "blockbusters" is claiming a larger share of the market. What were once creative powerhouses have become factories of the familiar.

Murrell quotes Adam Mastroianni on books, among other things:

It used to be pretty rare for one author to have multiple books in the top 10 in the same year. Since 1990, it's happened almost every year. No author ever had three top 10 books in one year until Danielle Steel did it 1998. In 2011, John Grisham, Kathryn Stockett, and Stieg Larsson all had two chart-topping books each. We can also look at the percentage of authors in the top 10 were already famous -- say, they had a top 10 book within the past 10 years. That has increased over time, too. In the 1950s, a little over half of the authors in the top 10 had been there before. These days, it's closer to 75%.