September 1998 was a good month. That month, Google first went live. Already by the end of the year it had been praised by PC magazine as having “an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results”. Also in September 1998, the Arts & Letters Daily website went live. ALDaily, too, was a near-instant hit.
Google quickly became as commonplace as furniture. ALDaily, however, I fell in love with. ALDaily was a “found” engine, and it had an uncanny knack for returning extremely satisfying finds. Today Google processes a billion searches a day, and ALDaily gets 3 million page views a month from 20,000 visitors a day.
ALDaily is an aggregator. In three vertical columns it offers three new links a day, to a notable article, book review, and essay or opinion piece. Its focus encompasses the humanities, arts and politics. It picks from the best. Today, for example, it links to an article in the London Review of Books about the resurgence of bedbugs, in the Washington Post on the history of ballet, and in the Economist on our “abominable” habit of verbing nouns (friending, trending, texting...).
Google has an algorithm to do its searching; ALDaily had, until last month, Denis Dutton. Dutton was a philosophy professor with very wide interests. Born in California in 1944 to parents who built a local chain of bookstores (Dutton’s Books), as a young man he spent two years in India in the Peace Corps. He learnt the sitar, and then played for his meals at Indian restaurants in LA. In the 1990s he ran an annual Bad Writing Contest to “honour” the writer of the most obscurantist academic prose of the year — it was very popular. Long before the ebooks craze he started an e-publishing company, Cybereditions. In 1984 he moved to New Zealand, where he taught at the University of Canterbury until a few days before his death of prostate cancer on December 28.
In recent years Dutton outsourced the searching to a colleague. But he continued to write the succulent little teasers for the articles ALDaily linked to. On the day of his death the New York Review of Books tweeted that “Denis Dutton was a master of the tweet long before Twitter existed.” It linked to ALDaily’s 1998 archive, where one finds terrific teasers like “Television is indifferent to approval or love. It pursues its only goal with unblinking zeal: to be watched” and “Was Spinoza the most lovable of men, or an emotional cripple, arrogant, consumed with sexual jealousy, and fiercely misogynistic?”
Dutton gave readers more than links. By putting quality, non-specialist writing in one place, he helped create connections and inspire ideas. He helped generate and support a modern, Anglo-centric global intellectual conversation. Now there are many aggregators, though none as brilliantly minimalist; Dutton said he based the design on an 18th-century broadsheet — meaning, all the news on one sheet of paper.
Well, what can we learn? (1) An annual bad corporate/marketing prose contest might be fun (think of the horrors of PowerPoint).
(2) Able writers might be more economically valuable than they think. (3) How can we let the kind of global conversation that ALDaily represents take place without us? India needs a platform like ALDaily to help bring the stream of our writing and thinking out of its many deep ruts and into a more productive encounter. It boils down, however, to the person. We don’t have a Dutton.
