Susan Sontag, Dead at 71

Can you believe this didn't even make the Yahoo front page? I guess 50,000 or so Asians die and suddenly the American intellectuals cease to matter.

I don't know a ton about the work of Ms. Sontag. Only that she wrote "On Photography," which I was forced to read during my graduate film studies, and that she was an outspoken lefty of the Noam Chomsky variety, prone to perfectly true yet inflammatory statements like "the white race is the cancer of human history."

I was intrigued to discover, upon reading the Yahoo obit, that Sontag wrote an essay, "Notes on Camp," that helped to create the modern notion of art being "so bad, it's good." I'm not sure if this is a step forward or backward for human history, but it's certainly an achievement, I'll give her that.