The mind as passion: her job, Susan Sontag wrote, was to defend a higher "standard of mental life." Maddeningly, but above all bravely, that's what she did.(Culture)(Biography)

ONCE UPON A TIME, AMERICAN intellectual life featured a ritual known as the Partisan Review symposium. It was a solemn event, combining elements of high Mass and a boxing match. Here is how it worked: Every year or so, the tribal elders, gathering in the journal's offices in New York, would prepare a list of questions about some grand topic in contemporary politics or culture. The questionnaires were sent out to a select group of thinkers, and their answers printed, in batches, across two or three issues of the journal.

It was a ceremony of ideological boundary testing, of ...

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