If you belong to the academy, it is all you can do to “keep up” with your ever-narrower specialty. An obsession with method, mirroring the culture’s obsession with “information,” buries ideas. If you resist specialization, you are drawn toward the hall of mirrors called “theory” – it becomes a full-time occupation to find your way down the shimmering corridors. Odds are that you do not take pleasure from what you read, for social criticism today is professionalized, self-enclosed, and segregated, like the rest of our intellectual discourse. To write accessibly, on the other hand, is to take seriously the democratic faith.