There is a long history of “public intellectuals” in America. Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton all the way down to Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag. When I was a younger man, I became fascinated with the idea of a public intelligentsia. Not any specific person, but the idea of knowledgeable, erudite experts who wrote and spoke for public, rather than academic, consumption. When YouTube became a thing and old clips that had previously been difficult to find became readily available to anyone with an interest, […]