The New York intellectuals (the part-journalist/part-academic coterie that emerged in the 1930s around the little magazine Partisan Review ) can fairly be said to have been the chief American champions of literary modernism and anti-Stalinist leftism in the 1930s, of political pragmatism in general and liberal anti-communism in the 1950s, and of neoconservatism in the 1970s-people like Daniel Bell, Saul Bellow, Irving Kristol, William Phillips, and Lionel Trilling. I have ever since been in the thrall of the mystique of the New York intellectuals and the possibilities of journals of opinion for the nurture of public intellectual life. In 19 we lived in Cape Town, where I discovered in the library of the University of Cape Town bound back copies of two more journals of opinion: Commentary and The Public Interest. I was as excited to discover that such magazines existed as I had been as a child to discover libraries, and before that, as I had been when I learned to read. I was an undergraduate student in the evening program (working in the day) of a provincial Third World university when I first discovered a journal of opinion in its library, Melvin Lasky’s Encounter. One simply needed to click on the three new pieces linked on Arts & Letters Daily to have a fairly reliable sense of the significant public intellectual debates going on in English around the world.īut why am I so excited about a blog like Arts & Letters Daily? The judgment of the editors was impeccable. If I were a cat, Arts & Letters Daily would have made me purr. They have a new site, Philosophy & Literature, doing pretty much the same job. Tran Huu Dung and Denis Dutton, the editors, are not giving up, though. The much loved Arts & Letters Daily is dead and gone.