Reflecting on the recent death of the great cultural critic Terry Teachout, Micah Mattix contemplates the present state of criticism:

Sometimes it’s hard to shake the impression that many of today’s critics, fed a gruel of Derrida and Kristeva in graduate school, have either gone all-in on an approach to literary texts that gives us books like Chaucer’s Losers, Nintendo’s Children, and Other Forays in Queer Ludonarratology (which traces the “intersection”—there’s always an intersection—of “narratology, ludology, and queer studies”) or rejected the whole business to make a buck in the growing literature-as-therapy genre. Readers and critics seem to lack judgment and taste. Our cultural battles are devoid of intellectual seriousness, and the sudden censoriousness of our social-media age has only made things worse.

But I am reminded that many excellent critics are still at work. Cynthia Ozick, Joseph Epstein, Gary Saul Morson, Paul Cantor, Helen Vendler, Marjorie Perloff, Eric Ormsby, Craig Raine, and Anthony Daniels are just a few that come to mind. Among the critics of my generation, we have Dominic Green, Adam Kirsch, Brian Dillon, Ben Downing, and Michael Robbins, among others.

The existence of such critics, argues Mattix, refutes the contention of the leftist writer Jeet Heer, who mourned Teachout as one of the last exemplars of a certain “strain of conservatism.”

Heer praises Teachout for his “expansiveness” and “natural inclination was toward equanimity and collegiality,” but he also wishes Teachout would have done more political writing (despite praising his restraint earlier in the piece). What kind? The kind that is critical of conservatives, of course: “Teachout eschewed a larger reckoning with the question of how Trump took over the GOP so quickly. It would have been a major contribution for a writer of Teachout’s caliber to make an inquiry into how the right had gone haywire, but he never made the effort.”

Heer, like some on the left, seems to believe one can easily be literary and progressive, but one can only be literary and conservative in a very limited sense and with great effort. It’s an odd belief lacking in imagination.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.