Tyler CowenEconomist, Author, and Professor at George Mason University

Tyler Cowen Explains How Camille Paglia Changed His Life | CWT Shorts

29 Jan 2026 · 2 min

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2:05

In this short monologue, economist and writer Tyler Cowen explains how Camille Paglia profoundly influenced his career and intellectual outlook. He recounts first encountering Paglia’s book Sexual Personae in the early 1990s, which presented a model for scholars to write for a broad public audience. Cowen describes how that model reshaped his own work, emphasizing the blend of deep insight with popular appeal. He highlights Paglia’s wide‑ranging interests—literary criticism (e.g., her essay on Edmund Spencer), cinema, non‑Western cultures and religions, and her upcoming project on early American Indian history and its connections to paganism, modern culture, and Catholicism. Cowen admires Paglia’s ferocious curiosity, relentless fighting spirit, and the way she continually expands her intellectual horizons, noting that learning from her makes him happy. He also references her admiration for thinkers such as Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and Gloria Steinem.

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She has a wonderful sense for detail. She still has written the best critical piece on Edmund Spencer. And if you ask anyone about, you know, a new popular celebrity, who is the most likely person in the world to have something interesting to say? Well, that's probably Camille. Camille was a huge influence on me. In the early 1990s, I read her book Sexual Personae, and I saw here was a new model for how an academic can write for the general public. And that actually changed everything I was doing in my career. The notion of combining real insight with people actually caring about the book and really a desire to carry a message to people that I find highly infectious, and it certainly had an impact on me. That she's writing a book on the early history of American Indians and how this ties in with the views on paganism and modern culture and Catholicism and many other things, that that would be her next project was to me a surprise. But when I saw it surprised me, it made me realize there's something about her I don't understand, and now I'm starting to understand it. And since I'm learning something, that makes me happy. A lot of reviews on cinema, an area where she knows a great deal but actually hasn't written that much. A lot about non-Western cultures, non-Western religions. Her best Harold Bloom story. Who are the thinkers she admires? What does she now think of Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Gloria Steinem, and many other figures from when she is growing up? She is feisty, she's a fighter, she never gives up, and she has this ferociousness for learning and curiosity that's very hard to top.