Arts & Letters Daily

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Arts & Letters Daily is a web portal owned by The Chronicle of Higher Education. It features links to a diverse array of high-quality news stories, features and reviews from throughout the online Anglosphere. In this, it has some of the characteristics of a weblog. Access is free, and it receives more than 2.5 million page views per month. A&L Daily's motto is “Veritas odit moras,” Latin for "Truth hates delay." This phrase is from line 850 of Seneca the Younger’s version of Oedipus.

Contents

[edit] Content

According to founder Denis Dutton, Arts & Letters Daily is a web portal for "the kinds of people who subscribe to the New York Review of Books, who read Salon and Slate and The New Republic — people interested in ideas." While the site aggregates links from a variety of perspectives and political dispositions, over time many regular visitors to A&L Daily have observed that it carries a fair number of articles from a libertarian perspective. Many readers also discern a decided "neocon" leaning in its selection of articles relating to international affairs; however in early 2005, Jonah Goldberg, a conservative columnist at National Review, wrote that Arts & Letters daily had "sort of been sliding to the left...becoming more of a mirror of academic liberal-left haughty sensibilities." Dutton has been described as the more conservative of the site's pair of editors, and managing editor Tran Huu Dung as the more liberal.

[edit] Design

A&L Daily's layout evokes the 18th century broadsheet format associated with The Enlightenment. Three columns of links dominate the site: Articles of Note, Book Reviews, and Essays/Opinions.

Each link is introduced with a 25-word teaser. The teasers are often witty and provocative and are particularly popular with A&L Daily's readers. Examples of teasers include:

  • "'A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.'” Josef Stalin was callous, but maybe somehow right..."
  • "Anti-poverty advocates point to drug abuse and depression as prime “barriers to work” for welfare moms. And drunken, abusive men?"
  • "Science does not follow a clear road to truth; better is the idea of a meandering river in flood and drought..."
  • "Oprah Winfrey? Compared to the whining, spoiled, conceited snots of the high-art literary world, she's an exquisite, classy lady..."

To the left of the main columns is a series of links to other online content providers, as well as a section titled "Nota Bene" (the Latin for "mark well"), which is the site's fourth and final collection of daily links to articles deemed to be of particular interest.

[edit] History

A&L Daily was preceded by an electronic mailing list discussion group, "Phil-Lit", that served as a continuous internet symposium on articles and reviews found on the web. The list was initiated by Denis Dutton, a native of Los Angeles, California, and a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand. When the list reached eight hundred subscribers, Dutton suggested putting the articles together on a single webpage. Phil-Lit subscribers and Dutton's friends came up with the name "Arts & Letters Daily."

After several months of planning and design, Arts & Letters Daily went online on September 28, 1998. Dutton was assisted in operating the site by three former Phil-Lit subscribers: Sharon Killgrove of the Mojave Desert; Harrison Solow of Malibu, California; and Kenneth Chen, then a student at University of California, Berkeley. The site quickly acquired a large following and a great deal of positive press, and in January 1999, the British Sunday broadsheet The Observer named A&L Daily the "Best Website in the World."

By this time it had already spawned a "sister site," SciTechDaily, run by Dutton's friend Vicki Hyde, a science editor and author whose web company hosted both sites. The two also collaborated at this time to launch Dutton's Cybereditions publishing operation, subsequently taken over in 2005 by Hyde's company.

In late 1999, A&L Daily was purchased by the academic magazine Lingua Franca.

In 2000, Dutton, by this time working alone, asked Tran Huu Dung, a professor of economics at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, to serve as managing editor of the website. Though Dutton and Dung had never met, the two had corresponded via e-mail, and Dung's classical liberal weltanschauung was similar to Dutton's. In April, 2002, A&L Daily was awarded a "People's Voice Award" for Best News Website by The Webby Awards, while SciTechDaily gave NASA's website a very close run in the Science category.

In August 2002, Lingua Franca declared bankruptcy, and A&L Daily lost its only source of funding. Dutton and Dung financed the site themselves until October 7, 2002, when A&L Daily went offline. The site was scheduled to be auctioned in New York on October 24 along with the rest of Lingua Franca's assets.

Immediately after the auction Dutton issued a press release announcing that the site had been purchased by The Chronicle of Higher Education and would shortly resume operations.

Today Dutton and Dung continue as the editors of A&L Daily, which remains a service of The Chronicle of Higher Education. As of March, 2006 it received over 3.4 million page views per month.

[edit] Quotes about A&L Daily

  • "Required reading for the global intelligentsia." - The New York Times
  • "[T]he online equivalent of what Henry James would have called a "Great, Good Place" - an informal gathering place for public discourse" -- Journalist Charles Wright
  • "Yes, it is essentially a lemonade stand. But it is intended to be the most intellectually attractive lemonade stand in the universe." -- Founder and Editor Denis Dutton
  • "A lusciously fat, slobbering intellectual's site" -- Wired
  • "Arts & Letters Daily satisfies your intellectual cravings like an expert sommelier at the swankiest restaurant in town." -- The Times
  • "The Arts & Letters Daily worldview seems to perceive all truly contrarian opinions and practices, whether in politics or art and literature, as the collective expressions of radical leftists and dippy postmodernists." -- The Reading Experience

[edit] External links

[edit] Media coverage of Arts & Letters Daily

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