Dutton, 56, grew up in Los Angeles, got his Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara, spent time in India with the Peace Corps (he still twangs away at his sitar on occasion) and eventually accepted an appointment to the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. A gleeful contrarian, he edits the academic journal Philosophy and Literature, and in 1996 founded the Bad Writing Award. A thinker who prefers to measure his thoughts against what actually exists, he once took time out to live with the wood carvers of the Sepik River region of New Guinea to learn what art, craft and beauty mean to them.

Arts & Letters Daily has been one of the Web's surprise hits, a text-heavy site that consists of little but one long scrolling page -- technologically, it's about as un-cutting-edge as can be. On it are found no animations or applets, just links to articles and essays published elsewhere, with teaser paragraphs describing the highlighted articles. The site caught on quickly as a kind of unofficial "best of the Web." (Full disclosure: A few of my Salon pieces have been highlighted by ALD.) For readers interested in ideas and the arts, the site, which was purchased by the journal Lingua Franca in November 1999, is like a daily digest assembled by brainy, freewheeling grad students.

Now Dutton -- the scholar as Internet impresario -- has struck again, founding the online publishing house Cybereditions, dedicated to making available worthwhile scholarly books that had fallen out of print. Cybereditions offers them up as e-books, HTML downloads and print-on-demand paperbacks. Salon caught up with Dutton by phone, as he took a break between a meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics and an e-book conference in New York. As always, the conversation hit the ground running.

You just attended a conference of estheticians. How is the concept of beauty doing these days?

I think the idea of the social construction of beauty -- this idea that beauty is simply whatever culture or society says it is -- is on the run. Of course, beauty does arise in a cultural context. No one ever denies that. But there's also a natural response people have to it.

But wouldn't it be fair to say that an enjoyment of haute cuisine and Bach generally comes only with an education?

Sure. It's clear on the one hand that an education enriches and informs a response to beauty, even makes it possible in esoteric cases. On the other hand, there's no question that someone with no musical education whatsoever might wander into a concert hall and be overwhelmed by the Beethoven Pastoral Symphony. Any theory of esthetics that ignores these two sides of the appreciation of beauty is missing something important. I feel that as a young person in the Peace Corps I was too impressed by cultural differences and didn't look closely enough at similarities. Evolutionary psychology is a terrific corrective to the idea that we're all purely products of culture.

When did you start Arts & Letters Daily?

I designed it in July of 1998. It first went live on Sept. 28 of that year. The design of the page is based on an 18th century broadsheet.

Why?

The 18th century broadsheet tries to pack the maximum content on the minimum amount of paper. So I took that classically simple idea and turned it into a Web page.

I imagined it had something to do with your enjoyment of clashing points of view.

I do like the idea that there's a range of views on the page, and all sorts of competing voices.

How quickly did people discover the page?

It took off very fast. These days, we're often above 20,000 visitors per day. As with most Internet sites, weekends have smaller numbers, and Friday isn't as big as Monday.

What do you know about your readers?

They're the kinds of people who subscribe to the New York Review of Books, who read Salon and Slate and the New Republic -- people interested in ideas. One of the things that pleases me about the Internet is that people have for a long time idealized the '50s and 1960s as some kind of golden age of journalism. With three networks and every city having a monopoly morning daily -- as if that were a golden age! For diverse points of view and open, robust criticism, things have never been better than they are today.

What has been the most controversial piece you've linked to?

A couple of times when we had some pieces that were excellent, sober, scholarly articles from the magazine Christianity Today, these seemed to get up some readers' noses. People who wouldn't think twice about something out of Commentary were objecting that we were publishing out of Christianity Today. They seemed to think we were somehow forcing religion down people's throats.

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