I occasionally read these small culture publications like the LA Review of Books and have a couple friends from college who write for them.

It's great this article made it to Hacker News too. The "renaissance in cultural journalism" this article talks about has similarities to what's been happening in the tech world over the past few years - with a "renaissance" in entrepreneurship (or a bubble depending on who you talk to).

I think both these communities, the young writers aspiring to become intellectuals that further the public discourse and the entrepreneurs aspiring to build the next "Googbookazon", have a ton of important potential within them. Who knows what big ideas and innovations might emerge.

But...I can't help feel both communities suffer from a level of bullshit right now that's gotten out of control and is hurting their potential.

I don't need to go into details on the downsides to the tech world when it festered a pervasive talk of a tech bubble. It doesn't even matter if a bubble is true. The positive feedback loop of bullshit that attracted anyone and their grandma to start a startup and call themselves an entrepreneur has made things messy and noisy and more difficult for everyone.

How much time and energy of VCs, talented developers and early-adopting customers has been wasted in recent years by all the Uber of Vomit startups and founders claiming they are disrupting solar-powered diapers who were able to raise money, get real press and fawningly invited to talk on panels only to then never be heard about again...

I think the best founders, ideas and companies eventually stand out and do fine. Most of them hopefully. But it's been harder, more expensive and taken longer than it could have. And what even greater things might have been built if these best startups who do eventually succeed had been able to recruit more of the best developers as they grew.

As for the linked article on intellectuals, what this article should really have said is: technology today has made it really easy to start a niche-topic blog and make it look nice and call it an online journal.

One group of people creating such blogs/online journals come from the community of recent literary arts PhDs and graduate students whose numbers now exceed the supply of tenure-track positions in academia they had originally trained for.

Their blogs resemble the style, design and content of the small run, left-leaning culture journals that were popular among the public intellectual writers of the last century (and whose writing is now taught to these literary arts grad students today).

Of course, like most blogs/niche writing sites like these, there's been a few creative and talented bloggers who have have been able to find ways to get paid a bit of money to do it. Most have not and they are funding their websites themselves until they find a real job.

Those who are really talented enough to really stand out and who have ideas good enough for the writers to become public intellectuals will be discovered and invited to write books and articles for the larger newspapers/magazines more well-known to the general public.

These best writers whose writing gets read by the public and who develop some fame for it may likely end up invited to and on the payroll of a university anyway later in their career. Until then there is no news here. The time to write an article is when someone has an accomplishment or idea from these blogs worth reporting on. Too much hype and noise is not helping find the better writers.

TL;DR literary arts grad students and Phds who have not been able to go into tenured academia have started several fancy looking blogs that resemble the left-leaning culture studies journals of last century. While this doesn't make them enough money to live on a few are hoping they have ideas good enough to be discovered and lead to more opportunities.