How am I only now learning of Jurgen #Habermas’s passing? I can’t properly account for his importance to my own intellectual development. I can trace his impact on my PhD supervisor’s scholarship more clearly than anyone’s save for maybe Adorno, Gramsci, and Raymond Williams. His account of how the culture industry grew out of “a culture-debating public” (or its self-image) was prescient and, taken together with the work of his many creative interlocutors, offers crucial hints toward a way back.