I was just thinking to myself the other day that the danger of actually taking the time to write something thoughtful and cogent the days is that once you have convinced the intelligent, open-minded readers, that leaves everyone else to write comments. Which means when people come to look at the article in the future, and skip to the comments to get a sense of what kind of reaction people had, they get precisely the wrong impression.

This is an interesting article. It's not a "think piece" about writing "these days". It's a serious attempt to understand just what "public intellectuals" were in the first place, what conditions made them possible, and what part of that, if any, can be revived, or is worth reviving.

He might be completely wrong. But he deserves a little better than TL;DR because he dared to write above the eighth grade level.