![]() I sent an e-mail to a literary agent picked at random, asking whether I could write a book about Wikipedia-style collaboration on the Internet. hot.” This was my chance to write a book of ideas-not that I had any good ideas to write about. Wikipedia was suddenly, as Tina Brown says, “v. ![]() Around the time my Wikipedia article appeared in the big magazine, another Wikipedia piece appeared in another big magazine. The editors at the big magazine liked it, and they published it in the summer of 2006. ![]() So I wrote a piece on spec about the founding of Wikipedia. I thought its history might be interesting. I cannot say, however, that I didn’t want to see my name in the big magazine. I wasn’t hired as a writer I was hired as a researcher. I didn’t think working at the big magazine would make me a public intellectual. In my mind, this magazine stood at the pinnacle of American intellectual life. So after about a decade of teaching at a big university you’ve probably heard of, I left to work in a staff position at a big magazine you’ve probably heard of. I knew I wouldn’t ever do so in academia. Yet I still hungered to write a book of ideas. My books were focused, well-documented demonstrations of some minor fact about the world. In the years that followed, I wrote books, but not deep books of ideas. Instead, I learned to do research and write clearly. So I did what most intellectually ambitious young Americans do. ![]() Unfortunately, I didn’t really have anything deep to say. Intellectuals talked seriously about them in magical places like New York and San Francisco, places I-being in Kansas-knew nothing about. I had in mind the kind of “deep” book that public intellectuals of the 1950s and ’60s wrote: The Lonely Crowd, The One-Dimensional Man, The End of Ideology. When I was young I wanted to write a challenging book of ideas. ![]()
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