Scott Alexander as a modern-day Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson was a mid-twentieth-century literary critic and all-around intellectual authority. He wrote for moderate-circulation magazines like the New Republic and the New Yorker, and he also wrote several influential books. I’m interested in him, and people like him, partly because they’re the sort of expert we don’t see so much of anymore. They were autodidacts who achieved intellectual and worldly success through their writing ability. Other examples of that ere are George Orwell, the so-called New York Intellectuals, and, a bit later, people like Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Clive James. What they had in common was an ability to write well, a willingness to write publicly on all sorts of topics not limited to whatever might have been their nominal expertise, and a cultural impact that reflected that they had interesting things to say and said these things well. The interesting things they had to say were not always so innovative (yeah, Tom Wolfe hated lots of…