*A first-rate profile of an artist in a serious magazine like the New Yorker will tell you plenty about his life and loves, and you may finish the piece delighted to have made his acquaintance. However, it might occur to you later that you understand what this important thinker is thinking no better more than you did before.
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Jon Baskin, Jonny Thakkar, and Etay Zwick are students in the Committee on Social Thought, an interdisciplinary doctoral program at the University of Chicago. They are all very bright and intellectually restless, and school alone doesn’t do it for them. “I don’t want this to come out as a tirade against graduate school,” says Baskin, ‘but we felt frustration that there really weren’t forums for us to write about the ideas we were learning about as active forces in our lives and cultures. In graduate school you wind up writing about what Heidegger thought about what Hegel thought about Plato, and you never get to the point – which is how does this idea speak to us today? How does it help explain our lives?”
It didn’t say, in short, what Baskin needed to say about Wallace, and has now said.
I’ve reminded Baskin (but didn’t need to) that back in 1988 The Baffler came out of the University of Chicago in much the same way, made a national name for itself for its political and cultural criticism, and before its run was up saw cofounder Thomas Frank catch the befuddled left zeigeist in a book title with his What’s the Matter With Kansas? Whenever you see U. of C. grad students put their heads together, there’s always a possibility of being Present at the Creation.
