Russell Brand and Cody Wilson are in, the pope and Mary Beard are out – the criteria for making it on to the annual list of cerebral superstars is hard to fathomRussell Brand has come from nowhere to join the world’s top public intellectuals, while the pope (voted the fifth best in 2014) has been banished from the elite group. Ruthlessly purged too are Amartya Sen, the reigning world champion of thought, and five other members of last year’s top 10: like Sen and Pope Francis, Raghuram Rajan, Kaushik Basu, Mary Beard, Peter Higgs and Ha-Joon Chang all fail even to make the top 50, transformed in 12 months from titans to has-beens.Such is the topsy-turvy world of Prospect magazine’s world thinkers rankings, a now-annual poll in which voters pick their favourites from 50 “leaders in their fields, engaging in original and profound ways with the central questions of the world today”, selected by a shadowy “staff team”. In compiling their list they give credit for their influence” (“whether or not we agree with them”) over the previous year; a criterion that explains new entries in 2015 such as Brand, novelist Michel Houellebecq, surgeon and author Atul Gawande and Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. Continue reading...
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