Thanks to Manan Ahmed for calling attention to these two items:

William Deresiewicz,"The Literary World System," a review for The Nation of Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters. In his closing paragraph, Deresiewicz writes:

But the most important question [Casanova's] book raises, for me at least, is simply this: Why are we so lame? Why is American culture, and the American intelligentsia in particular, so closed off from what's happening in the rest of the world? Why do we still need Paris to tell us what's going on (if we still even listen to it)? If anything, the situation is more dire than it used to be, when instability or repression in Europe supplied us with a steady stream of émigrés who acted as a bridge back to their former world. Susan Sontag used to play a similar role, but she no longer does, and no one's taken her place. The more we impose our image on the world, it seems, the more foreign the world becomes.

Sadly, we note the death of Susan Sontag.