Pankaj Mishra

“It is also excruciatingly awkward for me, a nonresident alien (in IRS parlance), to say this: that the liberal American intelligentsia seems to have relaxed too cozily into imperial cultures of exaggerated self-esteem and self-satisfaction. A professionalized, even bureaucratized, and politically neutered literary-intellectual elite long ago shredded whatever countercultural aura the vocation had acquired over centuries; its compromised and enfeebled state is more vividly revealed today by the demons of sadism and stupidity rampaging across the United States.”⁠
⁠Pankaj Mishra’s column