As every visitor to London knows, Time Out is a weekly publication featuring a comprehensive listing of goings-on about town. Its orientation is very youth-trendy, but the listings are extensive enough that all kinds of people purchase it—it’s as good for finding out about what’s on at Wigmore Hall as it is for news on the latest fifteen-minute pop sensation. Every year Time Out supplements its weekly publication with a “London Visitor’s Guide.” Now, for many people, the editorial content of Time Out is negligible stuff. Nonetheless, from a sociological perspective, this editorial content, with its invocations of what’s hot and what’s not, has, I think, a real value. The principal editorial feature in the 2000–2001 “Vistor’s Guide” is a piece by Rhonda Carrier entitled “All Change?” One inevitably is first drawn to the call-out quotes in the loudly d ...

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