Katrina vanden Heuvel

Some questions are really not worth asking, even as they nag. What relationship should American intellectuals have toward mass culture: television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet may be one of them. Before answering it, let me first attack any effort to do so.

I don’t think we have a recognizable group of American intellectuals of real political weight, at least not intellectuals of the sort celebrated by and occasionally inhabiting the old Partisan Review. That is, we don’t have an identified bunch of very smart and socially interconnected people—of course, often neurotic, passionate, and sometimes delusional—who judge their life by its contribution to human science or art and who see themselves as the guardians of its standards...