Being Interested: Amateur Reports on Books and Ideas

As far as I am aware, this video of the critic and activist Dwight Macdonald debating William F. Buckley on an episode of  Firing Line is the only video of Macdonald on YouTube.  This is not so remarkable a fact that it demands an intense analysis, but a few observations do I think follow from it (I won’t go too deeply into the video itself). Firstly, the fact that this forty-eight-minute clip from a television episode first broadcast in May 1967 is available to view for free in its entirety on a website known mainly for cat and prank videos, is remarkable. It speaks to the surprising element of YouTube that among its line-up of flashy-but-meaningless material, a great amount of serious intellectual content can be found.   Speaking for myself, I’ve benefited enormously from the hundreds of lectures, debates, conversations, interviews and documentaries featuring scholars and academics uploaded to YouTube. These videos have constituted an education in their own righ