Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Denis Dutton, Arts & Letters Daily founder, RIP

Denis Dutton in 1998 created the well-read Arts & Letters Daily, which the New Yorker's Blake Eskin today calls "the first and foremost aggregator of well-written and well-argued book reviews, essays, and other articles in the realm of ideas. Denis was the intellectual’s Matt Drudge." Dutton, a philosophy professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, has died after having cancer. He was the brother of the former Los Angeles booksellers Doug and Davis Dutton. The Chronicle of Higher Education, which bought Arts & Letters Daily in 2002, announced that the site will attempt to continue.

I've not much to add, except that Dutton's website was one of those places that made a guy from Kansas feel liberated by the Internet -- regular exposure to the world of ideas made my world bigger. I'm grateful to Dutton for his work. Rest in peace.

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