Casual

...The center of America’s public life has changed, over the years...

...You go out to eat in Boston, runs an old joke, and there’s a good chance your waiter can name several characters from Dostoyevsky...

...The city has all the intellectual influence of Anchorage and the excitement of Sioux Falls...

...This all came clear to me last month on a trip to another city, where over five days I squeezed in visits with more than thirty authors and editors and thinkers—more than thirty people, in other words, concerned with public ideas: excited about their impact, interested in their interplay, determined to influence the nation’s discourse and actually able to...

...Anchorage, maybe, or Sioux Falls...

...But there are so many nice cities in this county: real places, with real people...

...But maybe the ideas differ as well, when the center of national discourse is also the center of national politics...

...Broadway, the galleries, the dance troupes—the arts continue in New York, more or less of their own impetus...

...You go out to eat in Washington, and there’s a good chance your waiter can’t name any characters from Dostoyevsky...

...Think of it this way: If you wanted to put new ideas into play, would you move to New York to do it...

...And as I walked back to my Washington hotel, I thought: I want more of that kind of conversation...

...I just want it somewhere else...

...While I was visiting in Washington, I went out to eat with a couple of poets...

...And it just isn’t anymore...

...It’s just dull...

...It was silly, and it was serious— important and utterly beside the point...

...You go out to eat in New York, and there’s a good chance your waiter is a character from Dostoyevsky...

...But that’s for historical reasons, and few of their writers actually live there...

...Home of the Capitol, where almost anything does wash up...

...Both of them people with enormous talent and energy, and both of them come to town to take senior federal positions not necessarily related to their writing...

...America has kept separate, up till recently, the seat of its government and the center of its culture, and, on the whole, that’s been a good thing...

...The dispersal of politics and public life has helped reinforce the national feeling that the political isn’t what ultimately matters...

...Why, O Lord, do the public intellectuals have to go to Washington...

...And it tended to circle back to politics, as though only the political validates an idea and only the political makes it real...

...Not even the current mayor has been able to put a stake through its smoking heart...

...Cities differ...

...But for more than a hundred years, the city was also the intellectual capital of the nation, home of the public intellectuals...

...Politics may be necessary, but it’s finally incidental to what people do with their lives—even, as far as that goes, what they do with their public lives...

...New York, for that matter...

...New York is loud and dirty, the business costs are absurd, and, truth be told, there hasn’t been a new idea, born of the city’s shared culture, in more than a decade...

...Still, they were great conversationalists, smart and funny, and at the end of the evening they began to insist that what we lack in America is a good translation of Terence...

...A Terence for our time...

...It made sense to be in the city around 1959...

...The city has died more times than you can count, and, like Nosferatu, it always manages to rise from its coffin...

...But Washington is getting more Romelike by the day, if only people would see it, and “what we really need,” one of them shouted out into the suddenly hushed restaurant, “is a new Terence...

...Poughkeepsie, for instance, or Albuquerque...

...Hardly anyone reads ancient Roman comedy anymore, and when they do, it’s usually Plautus...

...The New York Review of Books, Commentary, my own journal, First Things—they’re in Manhattan...

...Those ideas get politicized in new and disturbing ways...

...The day in 1881 when William Dean Howells left the Atlantic in Boston and moved to Harper’s in New York really did mark the end of one era and the beginning of another...

...Joseph Bottum...

...So maybe Washington’s rise, which many have noticed, is just the effect of a natural shift in culture...

...Unfortunately, that other city was Washington, D.C.—home of the Tidal Basin, where almost anything might wash up...

...Yet our conversation began with politics...

...No, New York isn’t dead, exactly...

...New York has nothing similar to offer...

...But why bother now...