In case you wondered …

… Whatever Happened to Culture? - Joseph Epstein, Commentary Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Where once it was the glory of the novelist—of Tolstoy, of Melville, of Willa Cather—to have all the world for his or her subject, now No Trespassing signs have been placed upon nearly all subjects outside the writer’s own ethnic, racial, and sexual identity. The loser here, of course, is literature and the culture generally.