I was honored to be a contributor to Dissent‘s Winter 2010 issue. The venerable journal’s editors asked a group of writers and thinkers, including the Nation‘s valued columnist Katha Pollitt, to participate in a forum about the culture and politics of our country, The symposium, loosely modeled on Partisan Review’s 1952 symposium entitled "Our Country and Our Culture", is here billed as "Intellectuals and Their America.

The purpose in 1952, and now in 2010, was/is "to examine the apparent fact that American intellectuals now regard America and its institutions in a new way." In my small contribution, I chose to grapple with the the question: "What relationship should American intellectuals have toward mass culture: television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet?"

Read my answer, and read the full Dissent forum here.