The death of the French intellectual Edgar Morin at the end of May was inevitable—death waits for us all, of course—yet also somehow impossible. Having reached the astonishingly lucid and active age of 104, Morin seemed immortal. This made the news of his passing so striking, as did its larger significance: Morin’s death marks the end of that exotic and exclusively French species known as l’intello (French shorthand for intellectual), an extinction event that should be marked, though perhaps