If I had to make a list of people we could not afford to lose, the late Professor Denis Dutton, who died in New Zealand on December 20, aged 66, would have been high on it.
Denis was best known for his Arts & Letters Daily, the indispensable website and guide to the best being published in the world (TAS is there, of course), which he founded in 1998. It is said to have been modeled on an 18th century broadsheet. If so, so much the better for the 18th century! With ALD Denis proved the web could be the vehicle for the popular dissemination and exchange of intelligent ideas that its most idealistic founders may have once hoped for. Steven Pinker called him a visionary: "among the first to realize that a website could be a forum for cutting-edge ideas."
