First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Prospect online this week

In his editorial marking the triumph of Fethullah Gülen in our global intellectuals poll a month ago, David Goodhart described the attempt by Turkey’s chief prosecutor to get the country’s ruling AK party banned as “the most important conflict in Europe.” Well, the conflict is over and AK has survived. Yet the party’s—and Turkey’s—troubles are far [...]

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The International Conference in UK Political Ideologies

Prospect gave further substance to its reputation as a sponsor of contemporary political debate by supporting a two-day conference of academics and politicians from Britain and abroad in July. The International Conference in UK Political Ideologies at Liverpool University’s school of politics and communication saw MPs and researchers thrash out the theory behind the direction [...]

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After Olmert

Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, under the weight of multiple police investigations, announced last week that he would not be competing in the upcoming September 17 primary of his Kadima party and would yield the premiership to the next party leader—as I suggested he would in my Prospect article on Marwan Barghouti. Who will replace [...]

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Nudging Gordon Out

An article in this weekend’s Guardian contains intriguing hints of what gets David Miliband’s goat. Explaining his decision to pen last week’s mini-manifesto, it claims: “Miliband himself was furious about an article in the Guardian by the shadow chancellor George Osborne earlier this month that he regarded as vacuous, adding to his sense that the [...]

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The Harvey files 5: changing the poverty level

For years we have been told that a billion or so people in the world have to live on “less than a dollar a day.” That originally meant that poverty was defined as a money income of $1.08 a day in terms of the US dollar at its 1993 level. The value of the dollar was [...]

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Power’s world: measuring American development

The cream of America’s black population has never done so well as in the last ten years—two secretaries of state, a national security adviser, chief of the armed forces, heads of major companies from American Express to Time Warner, congressmen and women, rectors of major universities, bishops, newspaper editorial writers. The list goes on and [...]

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Prospect’s new issue - was Bush right after all?

Edward Luttwak’s last cover story for us, a provocative essay arguing that the middle east was of small and declining strategic significance, proved so irritating to so many that it remains one of the most popular pieces we’ve ever published, to judge by our website traffic. (It’s also being turned into a book. The film [...]

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All hail Arianna

Andrew Keen told me that the one glaring omission from our list of public intellectuals was Arianna Huffington, the Greek-born socialite who is turning the US political media upside-down with her blog-cum-aggregator-cum-celebrity-gabfest the Huffington Post. I didn’t get it. After all, while the HuffPost may have a readership extending into the millions, and while it may [...]

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Migration fiction moves on

The migrations of the 20th century have long provided rich pickings for literature—including around half of the winners of the Booker prize since its inception. Yet, argues Kamran Nazeer in our lead review this month, social and technological change are ushering in a new era that art has only tentatively begun to explore: a world [...]

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Summer books to love and hate

It’s that warm, apathetic time of year again. There’s nothing in the papers, and precious little going on elsewhere—so we troop onto boats, planes, cars and trains headed for relaxation and pleasure; and we search for a book or four to see us through the workless days and balmy nights. But what to pack? Aside [...]

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