Susan Jacoby on the New Anti-Intellectualismbr Booksmith - Booksmithbr Writer and scholar Susan Jacoby is sure to raise some hackles with The Age of American Unreason - an unsparing jeremiad that attacks the dumbing-down of the American public. Jacoby's area of study is US intellectual history, though she worries that the field is becoming a moot point in the face of our country's pervasive "infotainment" complex.As politics get folded into entertainment, she argues, so too does morality become indistinguishable from consumerism.