A buffet sure to leave you hungry

Arts & Letters Daily delivers best ideas at high speeds


Robert Fulford
National Post

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Among the most unlikely residents of Christchurch, a New Zealand city of 414,000, is a philosophy professor whose work reaches every corner of the planet, a man Time magazine described as one of the most influential media personalities anywhere. Denis Dutton, born in Los Angeles 63 years ago, sits down at his computer every day and carefully begins explaining the world to itself through Arts & Letters Daily, a great intellectual magazine that could have existed at no previous moment in history.

In online jargon, Arts & Letters Daily is an aggregator, meaning it pulls together material from many sources. But its fans know it's much more than that. It's both a daily reminder of the riches available in the publications of the world and a map to finding those riches.

Since 1998, A & LD has been searching tirelessly for online articles that should be known everywhere, providing the links that make it possible for us to put them on our screens with a single mouse-click. The editors show a god-like way to find, in the most obscure places, material that pleases, surprises and stimulates their readers. Apparently not a sparrow falls, intellectually speaking, without their knowledge....

In the way the editors defy space and time, it's a uniquely 21st-century enterprise. Dutton's managing editor, Tran Huu Dung, is an economist at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, 13,846 km from Christchurch as the crow flies. When it's 8 p.m. on Wednesday night in Dayton, it's noon on Thursday in Christchurch. (The editorial meetings must be murder.) Even their relationship began digitally: Dutton hired Dung when he knew him only through e-mail.....

A writer in The Times once remarked, "Arts & Letters Daily satisfies your intellectual cravings like an expert sommelier at the swankest restaurant in town." That's dead wrong. The idea of satisfaction misses the point. Daniel Bell said that a book is not a meal; it should not satisfy us but make us hungry for more books. The best article works in the same way.

Intellectuals like to believe they exist on a plane of serene detachment, where issues of fashion are ignored, no one worries about keeping up with the cultural news, and certainly no one cares which ideas are hot and which are limping sadly off the stage, spent or discredited.

A & LD embodies another view. Its elegant design resembles the little papers that were passed around in 18th-century London coffee houses, sometimes called "the penny university" because you could read all the news if you paid a penny for coffee. (A & LD is cheaper.)
Dutton treats even the most serious thinking as news and proudly displays a motto borrowed from Seneca: Veritas odit moras, meaning "Truth hates delay." Born out of a depressingly slow university world where books sometimes take four years to go through the press, A & LD delivers the best thinking at the highest speed.

Dutton loves the intellectually eccentric -- he gleefully tells us about a Marxist critique of basketball, for instance. But as he says, he hopes mainly to focus on subjects that count. He sees the encounter between Islam and the West as one essential theme. "We need deeper, better thinking and better analysis, to understand this great cultural moment," he remarked a couple of years ago. On that topic, he chooses material so well that he can enrich even those who think they know it well.

A & LD does for ideas what the Bloomberg service does for commerce. It watches developments, sorts things out, tells you what you need to know. It doesn't produce the profits Bloomberg brings in, but over time its ability to make connections may turn out to be even more important than the stock market.

© National Post 2007