Circa 1970, sociologist Charles Kadushin, surveyed the uppermost reaches of the public intellectal elite in the USA to come up w/ a list of the top 100, "The American Intellectual Elite. Boston: Little Brown, 1974. It mirrored the frequent contributors to the NYRB. http://home.earthlink.net/~ckadushin/_wsn/page4.html 1982 Intellectuals and cultural power. Media Culture & Society, 4 (July/August), 255-263 -- Michael Pugliese