" Britney, the former Mouseketeer, literally straddled the divide between Times Square’s old and new identities. It was a further elaboration of the “winner take all system” that still obtained in the world of 1998, whereby all the money that might once have supported an ecosystem of joke-tellers in the Catskills was sitting in Jay Leno’s pocket. Instead of an army of diseased whores, there would be one perfectly airbrushed youth whom the whole world would watch together. "

― Wesley Yang , The Souls of Yellow Folk: Essays