"This is what God put me on earth to do, to bring Benjamin to America"

At the Chronicle, Eric Banks on the life and afterlife of Walter Benjamin. A great piece to read (Lindsay Waters is an intellectual hero!) - a reminder of how contingent the survival and dissemination of someone's work may be.

Have been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be an academic insider/gatekeeper (this has been much on my mind over the past week - also reported here). And from another standpoint, the lack of clear correlation between brilliance and success in a fairly remorseless pipeline....

Say it ain't so!

File it under "Things in the Times that made me laugh" (and also make me glad I am an academic rather than a magazine editor!), from this piece on the interns at Teen Vogue:

Ms. Astley recalled a recent job applicant who was clearly unqualified to work at her magazine.

“I interviewed someone who hadn’t seen ‘Twilight,’ ” she said. “You can’t work at Teen Vogue if you haven’t seen ‘Twilight.’ ”