Your send us nominations for Great Moments in Journalism, we put 'em up here. Everybody wins.

A propos of Barbara Epstein's recent passing, the Chronicle of Higher Education suggested that familiarity with the New York Review of Books co-founder might be considered a litmus test to determine one's membership in the intelligentsia. Well, James Atlas is clearly a member; In his interminable "Whither The NYRB" piece, he goes this far to prove it:

The audience that grew up reading the Review is now in its fifties or older. Will the Review find a new audience with a younger demographic, or will it wither away like the state in Friedrich Engels's prophecy, to be supplanted by new vessels of intellectual content? For its overwhelmingly liberal, hypereducated urban readership, it's hard to imagine a Reviewless world.

Maybe we're just dumbasses, but we sort of can imagine it. We have nothing to lose but our brains.

The Ma and Pa of the Intelligentsia [NYM]

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