Genius/Critic

I'm sure everyone's sick of my Unger obsession by now, but: I was stunned, in the course of rereading his neat little piece "A Program for Late Twentieth-Century Psychiatry," to find him pretty much following the Currier House party line in the formulation of a key concept:

To gain freedom of insight and action in a more remote context, often at the price of ineptitude in an immediate one, is a definition of genius.

Emphasis mine. To gain expertise in the immediate context at the price of vision for the future would be the corresponding definition of "critic." Of all the nonsense bandied about in "my" intellectual circle, the genius/critic quasi-distinction stands as one of the most promising and fruitful bits, I (perhaps surprisingly) think. "Factoid," on the other hand, remains controversial.

In café-culture news, the last few times I've gone to the local Starbucks, I've heard men with indeterminate European accents arguing heatedly — to the point of raising their voices, even — about particle physics. Simon's, Peet's: get your cake up. Your concentration of hand-waving humanists isn't going to cut it anymore.