In a piece for The American Conservative, titled “In Defense of Difficulty” (and appearing the March-April paper issue), Steve Wasserman argues that something of an Arcadia of middlebrow thought existed from roughly the 1940s until around 2000. But the “New Information Age,” brought into being by the world wide web, deflated the positive intellectual climate of that period. As with the aftermath of the Dot.com bubble, the world wide web has brought only a kind of longer-term intellectual recession rather than the promised “radiant future.” Here’s how Wasserman characterized the dream: Read more