God help us all

The apex of contemporary elite culture is not occupied by writers, poets and artists, but by a chimerical combination of Jack Welch, Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Friedman, and the anonymous scribes of the Economist magazine. Large circulation publications either fail even to pretend to pay attention to high culture (Time and Newsweek) or commoditize it (Vanity Fair, which is less a magazine than a locus of exchange between celebrities who wish they were intellectuals, and intellectuals who wish they were celebrities).