First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

With the recent news of Google’s travails against censorship in China (its site was blocked for several hours amid accusations that it was helping to “spread pornography” and break China’s strict, if opaque, laws on what is and isn’t legitimate online), it seems a good time to be talking about the future of search. Not [...]

As one of only two western journalists present at Ayatollah Khamenei’s sermon earlier today, Prospect contributing editor Christopher de Bellaigue reports in a web-exclusive dispatch from Iran on the startling absence of Iran’s former president Ayatollah Rafsanjani from the supreme leader’s side. He describes watching the massed ranks of Iran’s elite gathered around Khamenei as [...]

Can the reputation of one of the 20th century’s greatest liberal thinkers survive the publication of his letters? To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Isaiah Berlin, this week we’re featuring a special online review of the second volume of his letters by writer and television producer David Herman, who teases out some [...]

This is now the second year that Prospect has collaborated with the Franco-British Council on its annual prize for short fiction about France, and it was my pleasure this year to sit on the panel of judges choosing a winner in the two categories: secondary schools and undergraduates. Also on the panel were Baroness Joyce [...]

This month’s arts and books section features two lead articles on, first, the changing nature of global religion and, second, some more local shifts in the minor faith that is British reality television. In the first piece, Eric Kaufmann, a fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Centre, looks at John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s much-discussed new [...]

This month, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the climax of the Tiananmen student protests, Prospect features three very different articles on their legacy and the nature of modern China. In our first piece, author Diane Wei Liang describes how she was herself a student protester in 1989—but how her subsequent experiences of returning to [...]

Novelist Maggie Gee, in her essay for this month’s Prospect, takes a long look at an especially knotty social question: just how cruel are the British people today? On the one hand, she explores the “tide of sympathy” that the media seems perpetually primed to unleash over particular kinds of public tragedy—Jade Goody’s untimely death, [...]

In this week’s web-exclusive article for Prospect, Brussels-based arts writer Brigid Grauman tells the story of how a dedicated international team of professional and amateur volunteers have made literary history, creating for the first time a full online archive of every single draft of Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary. One of history’s most meticulous and [...]

Falling sales and profits throughout the mainstream media seem to be sounding a death knoll for an entire medium and set of attitudes. It seems clear that serious news reporting as the 20th century knew it—expert, measured, investigative and able to hold figures in the public eye to account—is in a profound crisis, with every [...]

By any measure, the global statistics on spam email are staggering: with some 200 billion junk emails sent every day, they now constitute more than 90 per cent of all global email traffic. Isn’t this, though, just an irritating but inevitable fact of digital life? Not necessarily, argues Edward Gottesman in his lead Opinion piece [...]