but who is 2008's biggest public brain?

We just put the Christmas edition of the magazine to bed, at 3am on Wednesday morning. If you join up for our Facebook group you can see the new cover, and get an overview of the contents. If you aren’t on Facebook, like David Goodhart, our hold-out editor, I’ll put it up here in a day or two. The magazine, meanwhile, arrives at a train station near you in the middle of next week.

Personally, I’m most excited about the results of our public intellectual of 2008 poll. This is different from our previous public vote poll, run with Foreign Policy, to find the greatest living public intellectual. This one is just about the figure who did best in 2008 – and is picked by us, and a team of all-star judges. Thanks to any of you who threw names into the