Strangely, the same students who excoriated Michel de Certeau have just lapped up Baudrillard like cream. Either that stern talk I gave them about approaching complex texts with humility was more effective than I suspected, or Baudrillard just makes more intuitive sense to them. Maybe they're already used to living in hyperreality. I do think, as a matter of style, Baudrillard's use of extended examples distinguishes his writing from de Certeau's or Debord's. Those long sections on Disneyland and the Loud family give them something to hold on to through the desert of Baudrillad's more abstruse sections. I am looking forward to teaching Baudrillard as the Salahi and Heene stories unfold. In both cases, people wanted to be on reality TV and then suddenly, they were. Only the reality TV wasn't "Big Brother" or "American Idol," but reality itself. These stories seem to me the best examples I've encountered of what Baudrillard calls the "dissolution of TV in life, the dissolution of life in TV." "There is no longer a medium in the literal sense," Baudrillard writes, "it is now intangible, diffused, and diffracted in the real." Little wonder, then, that my students can't be exercised by the desert of the real.