I read these guys—mostly guys, often grouped together as structuralists and post-structuralists—in college, and they baffled and entranced me. Trudging doggedly through these difficult, abstruse ideas—roughly 67 percent of which I felt sure I didn’t understand—made the world feel sharper, different. No book better captures this paradox than The Frenchmen, Emily Eakin’s new book about her encounters with post-structuralist ideas. In Eakin’s account, you begin to see the alchemy through which these notions caught fire and spread. The post The Academics Who Caught Fire appeared first on The Atlantic.