Dining With Giants

Canterbury University Professor of Philosophy and Arts & Letters Daily founder, Denis Dutton, was invited to the White House Press Correspondents’ Annual Dinner, as a guest of The Washington Post. The black tie event – a celebrity roast of the current US President and celebration of the free press – is a who’s who of celebrities, power brokers and political juggernauts, and invitations are notoriously hard to secure. Dutton wrote a full report for the Sunday Star Times: “I never met the President, who left the event immediately. But I encountered one of his speech writers, a man who reads Arts & Letters Daily ‘every few days.’ Later on that night, a journalist introduced me to the director of a policy unit at the White House. He reads Arts & Letters Daily ‘regularly,’ but since he can’t every day, someone on his staff is assigned to check it for essays and articles relevant to government initiatives. A little like that old Steinlager ad, I guess: a picture of the White House overwritten, ‘They’re reading our webpage here.’ To what effect remains a mystery to me.”