The term middlebrow describes middlebrow art, which is easily accessible art, usually popular literature, and middlebrow people who use the arts to acquire the social capital of “culture and class” and thus a good reputation. First used in the British satire magazine Punch in 1925, the term middlebrow is the intellectual, intermediary brow between the highbrow and the lowbrow forms of culture; the terms highbrow and lowbrow are borrowed from the pseudoscience of phrenology. Modernism In the mid 20th century, the term middlebrow became a pejorative usage in the modernist cultural criticism written by Dwight Macdonald, Virginia Woolf, and Russell Lynes, which pejorative usage placed popular culture at the margin of mainstream culture in favour of high culture. Culturally, the middlebrow sensibility appears as a forced and ineffective attempt at cultural and intellectual achievement by way of popular literature that emphasises emotional and sentimental connections, rather than intellectualism and an appreciation of literary innovation. In contrast, the philosophy of postmodernism readily perceives the cultural advantages of the perspective of the middlebrow person who is aware of and likes high culture, but effectively balances the aesthetic demands of high art with the cultural demands daily life in the world.<ref>Cardiff, David. Mass Middlebrow Laughter' Media, Culture and Society 10 (1988), 41-60</ref> Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf derided the middlebrow in an un-posted letter to the editor of the New Statesman & Nation, concerning a radio broadcast that attacked the Highbrows. That letter was posthumously published in the essay collection The Death of the Moth (1942). Woolf criticizes middlebrows as petty purveyors of highbrow cultures for their own shallow benefit. Rather than selecting books for their intrinsic cultural value, middlebrow people select and read what they are told is best. Middlebrows are concerned with how what they do makes them appear, unlike highbrows, the avant-garde men and women who act according to their indelible commitment to beauty, value, art, form, and integrity. Woolf said that, "We highbrows read what we like and do what we like and praise what we like". Likewise, a lowbrow is devoted to a singular interest, a person "of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life"; and, therefore, the lowbrow are equally worthy of reverence, as they, too, are living for what they intrinsically know as valuable. Instead of such freedom, the middlebrows are "betwixt and between", which Woolf classifies as