A few months ago, in California, I had a message that a New York Times reporter had telephoned. I conjured up a half-dozen possible reasons for the call, all of them unabashedly narcissistic, only to find, when I finally reached her, that the reporter wanted to know what I thought of a scholarly book that had just been published. Such a question from the press is highly unusual in the United States: American newspapers rarely interest themselves in scholarship, and our reporters, like our politicians, have failed to develop a public discourse that can accommodate ideas of a complexity greater than that conveyed in advertising jingles. Even papers that take themselves very seriously indeed regard cultural and intellectual life as generally beyond the pale of the 'news'. (The exception proves the rule: when the New York Times Sunday Magazine decided recently to run an article on deconstruction, the reporter wrote as if he couldn't believe not only the outlandishness of the intellectual movement he was purporting to chronicle but the peculiarity of writing about it at all.)

LRB 19 June 1986 | PDF Download