'Mad Men' is advertising genius

BY VERNE GAY | verne.gay@newsday.com Back at the dawn of Camelot, a famous historian had this to say about the year 1960. "The American citizen," Daniel Boorstin wrote in "The Image," "lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent. ... We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves." At the time, Boorstin was writing about the world of Eisenhower's America as it lurched into the 1960s. He was describing a consumer culture dominated by TV, advertising and spin, but he also could be describing a modern show that just earned 16 Emmy nominations and may well be the best program on American television, although... [read full story]