In "The New Republic" essay "The Browbeater" on 23 November 2011, Franklin Foer accused Macdonald of being a hatchet-man for high culture, going on to say that in his "Masscult and Midcult: Against The American Grain" (2011) a new edition of "Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture" (1962), Macdonald's cultural criticism "culminated in a plea for highbrows to escape from the mass culture" that dominates the mainstream of American society. Macdonald, Foer suggests, would welcome a time when "highbrows would flee to their own hermetic little world, where they could produce art for one another, while resolutely ignoring the masses".