Also, just because they weren’t on the list in 2005 doesn’t mean they didn’t exit or were not ‘intellectualising’ It might prove those at Prospect had their head in the sand not to realise things are happening outside of their own socio-political worlds!

Perhaps weighting votes by their country of origin’s population, where origins can be determined, would help.

I guess if you accept the “Long March [of the left] through the institutions” phenomenon, it isn’t surprising that this kind of TV Week vote of the intelligentsia pulls up number 1 for old Noam (adjusted for the Turkish stack).

The nice surprise is that the magazine itself is pretty good (as AN said); the other nice surprise is that Bernard Lewis can get recognised. So things are not 100 per cent dark.

BTW Prospect ran a good article on the whole stacking exercise.

Says it all about the literati really.

A century from now our post-human descendants may remember Venter. They sure aren’t going to remember anyone up to perhaps no 19.

Re “the Muslim world does not have a single university in the world’s top 500″, this does not necessarily mean Muslims are less likely to appear in intellectuals’ lists: they could be working at prestigious Western universities, or not even working at a university (for example Naguib Mahfouz was certainly a contender for intellectual honours).