Who am I and what does it mean for me to talk about "the new public intellectual"? As someone who writes books about Latin poetry, Greek philosophy, and high poststructuralist theory, is there not something just a bit absurd about me pretending either to address the larger public or to have something meaningful to say about that public? No one will confuse me with Edmund Wilson, Camille Paglia, Francis Fukuyama, or Dinesh Disouza, let alone Martha Nussbaum, Bernard Henri Lévi, or Slavoj Žižek. I am clearly out of my depth.