“The coffee-houses that sprang up across Europe, starting around 1650, functioned as information exchanges for writers, politicians, businessmen and scientists. Like today’s websites, weblogs and discussion boards, coffee-houses were lively and often unreliable sources of information that typically specialised in a particular topic or political viewpoint.” —The Economist. Has anyone else noticed an explosion of attention to late-17th and early-18th century European intellectual life recently? I have, but I am not sure whether it is just because I have been engrossed in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver in recent weeks, in which, for example, Leibniz and Newton play major roles and the rise of the coffee house phenomenon receives more than passing attention.