Edmund Wilson, the noted critic and public intellectual, was born on this day in 1895. (He died in 1972.) Wilson had the kind of come-to-New-York-and-pal-around-with-writer-celebrities life that quite a lot of people still dream of. He was also a notorious gossip.
The "towering figures" of American public intellectualism are "all white men," the Politico's Dylan Byers explains, in an attempt to dig out of the mess he made by dismissing the notion of Melissa Harris-Perry as a top public intellectual. And writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, who diagnosed racism in the episode, are…
The New York Public Library held a day-long event called "Orwell Comes to America" yesterday, a series of discussions to"diagnose the symptoms of propaganda and misinformation" in media—especially when it comes to politics and the shaping of public thought. I visited the one about the science of manipulation,…
As the audience put down their glasses of complimentary wine and prepared to shuffle into the New York Public Library's subterranean auditorium to hear preternaturally youthful Harper's editor Roger Hodge lob softballs at revered public intellectual Naomi Klein about her new book The Shock Doctrine, we overheard a…
