Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?

A rather sad commentary from Mark Oppenheimer.

One might say there are two kinds of people: those who were deeply saddened by Barbara Epstein's death in June and those who had never heard of her. A co-founder of The New York Review of Books, Epstein was an obscure American, relatively speaking, an editor first of books and then of the long essays that have filled The New York Review since 1963. She was famous in literary circles, but in the wider world, she was hardly known — not compared with, say, Eminem or Paul Auster. The reminiscences I read about her were myopic in this respect: Written by her admirers, they tended to take for granted that she was widely known, because among the writers' friends she was. As for me, I knew scarcely anybody who knew her name.

The Chronicle: 9/22/2006: Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?