in? Blame the new culture of speaking.

Andrew Sullivan has written a strong response to Niall Ferguson's response to the blogosphere's response to Ferguson's response to Obama's response to the mess Bush made.

It's all been a cruel and pathetic spectacle. The most pathetic moment of all was when Ferguson quoted Macaulay in the second paragraph of his response — a sad attempt to remind his American audience that he's British and therefore entitled to be overrated, as is traditional in American intellectual life. His defense basically amounts to him saying he doesn't like being criticized. He managed to resurrect his intellectual credibility not one iota by responding.

The real issue isn't the substance of Ferguson's argument, though, which is shallow and basically exploded by this point in time. It isn't even the question of how such garbage managed to be written and published. It is, rather, why did Ferguson write it? The answer is simple but has profound implications for American intellectual life generally: public speaking.

Ferguson's critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of academia or the media. Neither is right. Look at his speaking agent's Web site. The fee: 50 to 75 grand per appearance. That number means that the entire economics of Ferguson's writing career, and many other writing careers, has been permanently altered. Nonfiction writers can and do make vastly more, and more easily, than they could ever make any other way, including by writing bestselling books or being a Harvard professor. Articles and ideas are only as good as the fees you can get for talking about them. They are merely billboards for the messengers.

That number means that Ferguson doesn't have to please his publishers; he doesn't have to please his editors; he sure as hell doesn't have to please scholars. He has to please corporations and high-net-worth individuals, the people who can pay 50 to 75K to hear him talk. That incredibly sloppy article was a way of communicating to them: I am one of you. I can give a great rousing talk about Obama's failures at any event you want to have me at.

What's so worrying about this trend is that Niall Ferguson, once upon a time, was the best. I'm one of the few people who has actually read his history of the Rothschilds, , all 1,040 pages of the thing, and it is brilliant, a model of archival research. I find it fantastically depressing that the man who could write that book could end up writing a book like or an article with just as much naked silliness as the Newsweek < target="_blank">cover.

Civilization actually contained a section called "The Six Killer Apps of Western Power," which may be the purest expression of pandering to the speaker's agencies I've ever read. You could just cut and paste it from the book into the promotional material. He may never again be taken seriously anywhere else, but then again he doesn't need to be.

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Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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