John R. Hall is Professor of Sociology at the University of California - Davis. His published works include Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity (Polity, 2009), Visual Worlds (Routledge, 2005, with co-editors), Sociology on Culture (Routledge, 2003, with co-authors), and Cultures of Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 1999).Laura Grindstaff is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California – Davis. She is the author of the award-winning Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and has published articles on various aspects of popular culture from reality programming to cheerleading. Ming-Cheng Lo is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California – Davis. She is the author of Doctors within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (University of California Press, 2002). She has published various articles on the cultural processes of political and medical institutions.