Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?

By MARK OPPENHEIMER

One might say there are two kinds of people: those who were deeply saddened by Barbara Epstein's death in June and those who had never heard of her. A co-founder of The New York Review of Books, Epstein was an obscure American, relatively speaking, an editor first of books and then of the long essays that have filled The New York Review since 1963. She was famous in literary circles, but in the wider world, she was hardly known — not compared with, say, Eminem or Paul Auster. The