I wouldn't say that the efforts of academics to critique the media's messages are "half-hearted." As far as I am aware, the efforts scarcely exist: very few even pay attention to the question.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

An effective regulatory system today would be one guided by a few basic premises that can be applied flexibly but also universally.

A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S.

Whether the person should then be called "an intellectual" seems to reduce the issue to a question of terminology.

I happened to go to a school when I was a kid and that's all we did, pursue our own interests. It was kind of structured so you ended up knowing everything you were supposed to know, arithmetic, Latin, whatever it was. But almost always it was under your own initiative.

How many educated Americans can even remember the names of the assassinated Jesuit intellectuals of El Salvador, or would know where to find a word they wrote? The answers are revealing, particularly when we draw the striking - and historically typical - contrast to the attitudes towards their counterparts in enemy domains.