As someone who, much to the despair of the online editor, has difficulty finding the time to write a blog post, I’m always (perhaps overly) impressed by people who manage to write books without giving up their day jobs. Many of Prospect’s writers seem particularly fecund—longtime contributor AC Grayling may hold the record for published books, although I can’t tell from his website how many he’s written (perhaps even he has lost count). Enigmas and puzzles columnist Ian Stewart claims a total of around 80, including a couple of novels. Contributor Raymond Tallis, according to a recent Times interview, is working on five different books at the moment. Which is the number that our Lab report columnist Philip Ball has coming out this year—if you count his trilogy on pattern formation as separate books. (The others are a novel and a book on Chartres cathedral.) I’d love to know what their secret is, but I suspect there isn’t one. Writing books is probably just habit-forming for some.
Author Archive for Susha
The American journalist and writer William F Buckley died yesterday at the age of 82. Buckley founded the influential conservative magazine National Review in 1955. He published over 50 books (including one about his interactions with National Review readers called Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription) and hosted the political TV talk show Firing Line for over 30 years. Buckley famously supported segregation, opposed women’s liberation and advocated the compulsory tattooing of HIV-positive people (but favoured legalising marijuana). In Prospect’s January 2006 issue, James P Pinkerton assessed Buckley’s legacy on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
What was I thinking? Humans! So damn irrational. Elizabeth Kolbert explains.
Life in Mono. In one of life’s cruel ironies, music critic Nick Coleman has lost the hearing in one ear—and with it his ability to listen.
Valentine’s day is over for another year, but just as single women were breathing easily again, I’m going to have to bring up Lori Gottlieb’s article, Marry Him!, from the March 2008 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Since Gottlieb’s article appeared on the magazine’s website last week, it has triggered the type of howls of wild rage from female bloggers usually reserved for mommy-wars combatant and fellow Atlantic contributor Caitlin Flanagan.
Gottlieb’s thesis is that single thirtysomething women shouldn’t hold out for Mr Right. “My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection,” she writes. “What I and many women who hold out for true love forget is that we won’t always have the same appeal that we may have had in our 20s and early 30s.” And “ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and… most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).” In other words, don’t leave it too late girls!
The rise of brand McSweeney’s. Has it replaced Granta as chief talent-spotter of American fiction writers?
After George Steiner, ten writers on their unwritten books.
Books that make you dumb. (These should really be “books that dumb people read.”)
Inside the mind of John McCain; don’t be fooled by the myth says Johann Hari. Cindy McCain’s grudges.
Everybody hates Romney. Or isn’t he Mormon enough?
Why Rudy lost. Ron Paul’s dark side. Did Fred Thompson ever take it seriously? If Mike Huckabee was a dog, he’d be a beagle.
Why do people hate Hillary? How do women feel about her?
Barack Obama supports West Ham, went to a stag night in Wokingham, and had a fifth-grade teacher called Mrs Hefty.
On the ex-candidates, John Edwards exited with honour; Joe Biden had Richard Schiff (Toby Ziegler in The West Wing) campaigning for him. Looking back, this was probably Dennis Kucinich’s finest moment—and hang on, who’s this?
As Prospect’s cartoon editor, I have the task of sifting through the many cartoons that we receive each month, before the editor makes a final choice of the ten or so we publish in the magazine. (And we always welcome cartoon submissions—email cartoons at prospect-magazine.co.uk). It is, as you’d expect, a fun job, involving a lot of laughing, something which cannot be said about the chore of sorting through the articles that we are sent. I often find that the cartoons en masse capture the Zeitgeist, highlighting the subjects that people are thinking about the most—at the moment, it seems to be carbon emissions, obesity and Facebook.
At the same time, there are the perennial topics for cartoons—or clichés, if you prefer. But, while clichés and good writing do not mix, a hackneyed setting is no bar to a funny cartoon. In fact, the cliché often adds to the humour, with the joke lying in the updating of the familiar setting to recent events. Mostly for my own amusement, I’ve compiled a list of the top cartoon clichés, illustrated by some of the best clichéd cartoons Prospect has published over the years. (Thanks to all the cartoonists involved for letting me use their work.)
The runners-up are: 20. Confessionals. 19. Medieval sieges. 18. “Back in 5 minutes” signs. 17. Adam and Eve. 16. Cavemen. 15. Fairy tales (especially the three bears, the three little pigs and Rapunzel). 14. Business meetings. 13. Ordering in a restaurant. 12. Witch hunts. 11. Hell.
And so, without further ado, here are Prospect’s top 10 cartoon clichés.
10. The Grim Reaper
by Benita Epstein
As noted earlier today on First Drafts, it’s 60 years to the day that Mahatma Gandhi was killed. In Prospect’s April 2004 issue, Bhikhu Parekh, the author of several books on the Indian hero, imagined what a debate between Gandhi and Osama Bin Laden might look like. How would the greatest advocate for non-violence challenge Bin Laden’s world view? More recently, Prospect published a web exclusive by the late Horace Alexander, who spent Indian independence day with Gandhi in Calcutta, and saw him broker peace between Muslims and Hindus.
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