![]() ![]() The book about which the reporter wanted to solicit my expert opinion was Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy by Judith Brown, a social historian at Stanford University. (The exception proves the rule: when the New York Times Sunday Magazine decided recently to run an article on deconstruction, the reporter wrote as if he couldn’t believe not only the outlandishness of the intellectual movement he was purporting to chronicle but the peculiarity of writing about it at all.) ![]() Even papers that take themselves very seriously indeed regard cultural and intellectual life as generally beyond the pale of the ‘news’. Such a question from the press is highly unusual in the United States: American newspapers rarely interest themselves in scholarship, and our reporters, like our politicians, have failed to develop a public discourse that can accommodate ideas of a complexity greater than that conveyed in advertising jingles. ![]() I conjured up a half-dozen possible reasons for the call, all of them unabashedly narcissistic, only to find, when I finally reached her, that the reporter wanted to know what I thought of a scholarly book that had just been published. A few months ago, in California, I had a message that a New York Times reporter had telephoned. ![]()
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