Saved by Brandon Marcus and
The Death of the Public Intellectual
It’s possible that the idea of an “important” work of popular art, like the idea of movie stardom, simply can’t survive the transition to the digital era. The journalist and novelist Ross Barkan has done interesting writing on this theme, borrowing from Bret Easton Ellis’s concepts of “Empire” and “Post-Empire” to describe a shift from the... See more
Opinion | Can We Make Pop Culture Great Again?
as criticism has declined, debate has risen to take its place—debate being the verbal form of the hot take: reductive, shouty, uncaring of context or meaning or truth. Where conversation has ceded to talking points and yelling. I’m not writing about how the decline of magazines and the rise of “news” shows like Crossfire and Real Time and Hannity... See more
Debate me!
For one thing, as I have said, the printed word had a monopoly on both attention and intellect, there being no other means, besides the oral tradition, to have access to public knowledge. Public figures were known largely by their written words, for example, not by their looks or even their oratory.