New York Intellectual State of Mind

Historian George Cotkin has a piece worth reading about today's "democratized" cultural criticism in The Chronicle of Higher Education. And it's worth reading for more than this glowing gloss (?) of Reason:

Today The Saturday Review and Partisan Review are dead, Commentary a narrowly conservative shell of its old self.

But many new and thriving venues for criticism and debate exist today, and they are not limited solely to the discussion of literary works. Reason, a libertarian periodical edited by a Ph.D. in English, has a circulation of 60,000 and interrogates cultural issues with a fervor for debate equal to that of the New York intellectuals.

Whole thing here. And at the risk of logrolling like a Upper East Side lumberjack (??), let me point you to my review of Cotkin's excellent Existential America, which appeared in our pages a few months back.