susan: the next of the six profiles i'm going to highlight is camille paglia. who is she? lia is ale humble professor. she is a public intellectual of the kind that is rather old-fashioned today. there are not that many celebrity professors. she is one of the last ones. she burst onto the scene in the 1990's with a book called "sexual personae," which became a best-selling phenomenon. rather unusual for, you know, a doorstop book of , but that isicism a testament to her rhetorical power. she is really inventive, and when she ventured into punditry and started weighing in on day-to-day culture, in addition to her academic work, she made herself a celebrity commentator , quite deservedly, because she is a really brilliant writer. susan: so what is your critique of paglia? helen: if you were to look at the accomplishment of her, probably her greatest one is the idea that popular culture is just as legitimate a subject of academic inquiry as the great classics. that was really an uphill battle for her in the 1990's, when she was saying madonna is just as legitimate a subject fo