Several months ago I happened upon a web site called Arts & Letter Daily, www.aldaily.com for short. It isn’t so much a web site in its own right as it is a portal to other sites that offer provocative criticism and review of contemporary philosophy, literature, culture, history, music, and almost any other topic you can imagine.
ALDaily provides the reader a sentence or two that reflect the topic and tone one finds if one clicks the link to the entire article in question. But it’s those first sentences that hook me. Usually, they’re not taken word for word from the article, but rather condense what it’s about. And since most of these articles are quite lengthy, that’s a challenge.
“Show me a woman with a good three inches of cleavage on display, and I’ll show you a woman with little faith in her powers of conversation” is the bait to visit www.thesmartset.com and read about the fashion industry’s passion for telling women how to dress.
“Do professors indoctrinate students by expressing a political ideology in the classroom?” takes us to an article by Robin Wilson that examines the liberal/conservative pendulum on our nation’s campuses. And “If this is to be a ‘change election,’ how about changing America’s destructive drift into anti-rationalism and pig ignorance” leads us to an article titled “The Dumbing of America” by Susan Jacoby.
Once I get to the actual articles, I don’t always agree with the authors’ premises but ALDaily does make me think. It makes me think far more than any local newspaper or Sunday edition or flashy newsstand magazine. And I don’t have to subscribe to a myriad of publications to read it either.
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