“Why is American culture, and the American intelligentsia in particular, so closed off from what’s happening in the rest of the world? Why do we still need Paris to tell us what’s going on (if we still even listen to it)? If anything, the situation is more dire than it used to be, when instability or repression in Europe supplied us with a steady stream of émigrés who acted as a bridge back to their former world. Susan Sontag used to play a similar role, but she no longer does, and no one’s taken her place. The more we impose our image on the world, it seems, the more foreign the world becomes.”