Katrina vanden Heuvel

In: Dissent: a quarterly of politics and culture, Band 57, Heft 1, S. 37-39

Abstract

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...