Until Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) began linking to Walter Russell Mead at Via Meadia, I hadn’t been aware of Mead’s work. He is a superb blogger on many subjects. Today, for example, he offers an impressive assessment of the Chen Guangcheng case, the best I’ve read so far. Though his expertise is foreign policy–please don’t stop reading–he is good on almost any subject.
His recent piece, “Wonks and Blogs,” covers a lot of ground–from the argument that bloggers of both left and right “represent a populist upsurge against the old elites” to reflections on the predicament of the professoriat at a time of rapid change. “One of the frustrations of social science,” he writes, “is that the world is changing faster than academics can parse events…Social science may need to spend less time debating the blogosphere in its tedious and old-fashioned way… The information revolution is a much bigger deal than many in the academy yet understand. That will change; the ground under their feet has already begun to shift.”
