At the very minimum, they are people who are – in Susan Sontag’s definition of a writer – “interested in everything”.

Today’s pop culture offers few examples of such people. What we get instead is a superficial and unsatisfying churn of short-term celebs and trends. The space vacated by challenging novels, experimental cinema, and difficult... See more

Trashy gossip magazines and classics or sophisticated works; never middlebrow stuff.

So there's a possibility that this world becomes an isolated bubble of its own, with a few people rising to the top in the bubble and the others reading them. I'm going on a limb here, but I'm saying the artistic world is becoming less democratic, and with the rewards not being proportional to the risk, fewer people have the safety net or fanatical... See more