Embora tenha se arrastado por anos, o fim da Encyclopedia Britannica começou quando o computador pessoal tomou seu lugar como mobília aspiracional.

Na nossa era de especializações, os polimatas são criaturas cada vez mais raras. E isso é grave: embora não avancem o conhecimento da mesma forma, existem coisas que só eles conseguem enxergar.

THROUGH extending the idea of complexity to the domain of personal and informal relationship, the authority of expertise has sought to colonise the private sphere. One of the characteristic features of modern times is that the decline of taken for granted ways of doing things has encouraged the perception that individuals are not able to manage important aspects of their life without professional guidance. Frequently the conduct of routine forms of social interaction are represented as difficult and complicated, which is why child-rearing can be treated as a science and why we often talk about parenting skills, social skills, communication skills and relationship skills. The belief that the conduct of everyday encounters requires special skills has created an opportunity for the expert to colonise the realm of personal relations.

Falando em intelectuais públicos, um perfil de Malcolm Gladwell e um exemplo do seu trabalho.

Alguns comentários sobre o intelectual público, essa figura misteriosa.

Sobre a necessidade dos intelectuais aprenderem matemática.

No momento da lista dos mais importantes, Christopher Hitchens explica como ser um intelectual.

There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The shift from modernism to postmodernism did not stem from any profound reformulation in the conditions of cultural production and reception; all that happened, to rhetorically exaggerate, was that the kind of people who had once written Ulysses and To the Lighthouse wrote Pale Fire and The Bloody Chamber instead. But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.

Excertos de um livro sobre os artistas, intelectuais e pensadores que moldaram o século passado.