Mary Fitzgerald
Petraeus (and Prospect) get top marks
Things may have been relatively quiet here at First Drafts over the Christmas break, but elsewhere Prospect has continued to lead the news. Not only was there a maelstrom of gossip generated from the Paul McCartney interview, but we elbowed in on weightier matters too. Taking their cue from our Top Public Intellectuals of 2008, this weekend’s Sunday Times News Review led with a portrait of Prospect’s man of the hour: General David Petraeus. The poll was picked up in the Indy the following day as well. Meanwhile, the Economist chased the tail of the government’s apparent volte-face on transport policy, as outlined by Andrew Adonis in this month’s opinion piece, “All Change.” And Prospect-generated wisdom has even spread as far as Antipodean shores: the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday quoted at length from Robert Skidelsky’s cover story, with a ringing endorsement: “This [article] is too elegant to cut and paraphrase.” Naturally, we think so too.
James Crabtree
Generally intellectual
Noam Chomsky. Francis Fukuyama. Anthony Giddens. Christopher Hitchens. Slavoj Zizek. All names that didn’t even make the top 10 in Prospect’s contest to crown 2008’s public intellectual of the year. So who did? Moving on from previous attempts to list the world’s 100 greatest living public intellectuals, this year we decided to name those who had the most impact in 2008 alone. We took soundings—from friends, here on First Drafts and on our Facebook group—to bring up a shortlist. From there it was down to our panel of judges. A three-way contest emerged, between economist Nouriel Roubini, social scientists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and General David Petraeus. Our judges voted according to type: the wonks liked the Nudge duo, the more economically minded wanted a thinker linked to the credit crunch, while foreign policy watchers thought the soldier-philosopher deserving of the nod. On our website we provide details of all our judges’ votes, and their reasons, along with short bios of all those we considered. Ultimately, though, there could only be one winner. As in Iraq, so in Prospect: Petraeus surged to victory.
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