Edward Said, who passed away in 2003, is often hailed as one of the last public intellectuals, a literary scholar whose advocacy for Palestine took him beyond the narrow confines of academia and into the media spotlight. With the humanities in perpetual crisis and a culture of anti-intellectualism taking hold, it has been suggested that it is no longer possible for an academic to attain the same level of recognition and cultural influence that Said did. While this may explain the waning influence of critical theory, Viet Thanh Nguyen has demonstrated that intellectuals still have an important role to play in the public sphere. Like Said, Nguyen is a well-respected and prominent literary scholar. Nguyen’s cultural status, however, has arisen through his creative work; his début novel, The Sympathiser (2015), won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for a high-profile HBO limited series that screened in 2024. Nguyen has been the recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Foundation grant, starred in photo shoots with the actress Sandra Oh, and been profiled in the pages of Vanity Fair. Suave, eloquent, and willing to embrace Hollywood, Nguyen is a media savvy intellectual ready-made for today’s fast paced digital climate. In recent years, he has become an important voice of the Vietnamese diaspora.