A very good interview with the writer George Saunders. I thought this idea was particularly thought-provoking:→[More:]

Sometimes when I read new fiction, I feel that the writers of it, myself included, have a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with our own culture. I don’t mean we disapprove of it. I mean that we have absorbed so much habitual disapproval of it that we are no longer able to see it, and therefore are unable to disapprove of it properly. How can you disapprove (or approve) of something you no longer see?

...and I think this may apply to a lot of our "ironic" creative types in 2011.

I loved Saunders' first two short-story collections, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia, but he'd kind of slipped out my mind after that- I need to go now and see what he's been up to lately.