46 PROSPECT / 50 THINKERS FOR A TURBULANT WORLD 2022

50
THINKERS
FOR A
TURBULENT
WORLD
Exclusive ebook edition—
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 1 PROSPECT / 50 THINKERS FOR A TURBULANT WORLD 2022

50
THINKERS
FOR A
TURBULENT
WORLD

We present a list of the intellectuals coming up with the most exciting and potentially
ILLUSTRATION BY MIGUEL PORLAN

game-changing ideas in their fields—from war analysts, climate scientists and tech
regulators to the philosophers rethinking sex and gender
2
Alaa Abdel Fattah
Democracy activist
Egypt was once
the hope of the
Arab Spring, but
now with General
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in charge
a distinct chill has set in.
Blogger and pro-democracy
activist Alaa Abdel Fattah took
part in the 2011 protests;
during the years since, he has
been imprisoned several
times. In 2021, a collection of
his writings, some of them
smuggled out of jail on scraps
of paper, was published as You
Have Not Been Defeated. This
April, he went on hunger
strike to draw attention to his
plight. Fattah is a joint
British-Egyptian citizen, and
his supporters are appealing to
the Foreign Office to push for
his case.
Raghib Ali
Epidemiologist
When Raghib Ali
began studying
the health
outcomes of
British ethnic minorities, he
discovered that, contrary to
what he had assumed,
non-white people had a higher
life expectancy than whites.
So for Ali, there is no such
thing as “white privilege” in
the UK—at least when it
comes to health. He found that
“deprivation, not race” was far
more significant. For example,
people in Blackpool have a
healthy life expectancy on
average 25 years less than those
in Westminster. Covid-19
muddied his findings
somewhat, since ethnic
minorities died at a higher
rate than the rest of the
population—though Ali
ascribes this to social factors
like patterns of shared
housing and risky
occupations.
Fawzia Amini
Judge
Until August
2021, Fawzia
Amini was a
senior judge
dealing with women’s cases in
Afghanistan. After the Taliban
takeover, female judges and
prosecutors who had presided
over cases of male violence
were threatened, jailed or
murdered. Helped by human
rights barrister Helena
Kennedy, Amini, a former head
of the Ministry of Women’s
Affairs, sought refuge in
London and continued to
advocate for her fellow female
judges and their families from
her hotel room. In May, Amini
won the prestigious interna-
tional human rights award the
Lantos Prize for her continuing
work to educate women and
girls on their rights in Afghani-
stan—work she now undertakes
through secret Zoom sessions.
Corina Amor
Immunologist
During her PhD,
Corina Amor
developed a
revolutionary
experimental therapy that
could help cure serious
illnesses. When we’re young,
our bodies destroy damaged
cells responsible for cancer and
ageing. As we age, these cells
begin to accumulate. Two
years ago, aged 27, the Spanish
scientist presented a plan to
transform a patient’s white
blood cells, known as
T-lymphocytes, so they can
destroy these so-called
senescent, ageing cells. The
breakthrough could help treat
chronic diseases, improve
quality of life and possibly even
extend human life by decades.
This year, Amor set up her own
research group in New York to
build on her findings.
PROSPECT / 50 THINKERS FOR A TURBULANT WORLD 2022
Emily Bazelon
Journalist & lecturer
Long an expert
commentator on
US law and
politics, Emily
Bazelon came to prominence
with her smart analysis on
Slate’s political podcast,
commenting on the
rollercoaster ride of the Trump
years and his tearing up of
norms and conventions. Now
that attention has turned to
the US Supreme Court’s
recent controversial
judgments on abortion, guns
and religion in schools,
Bazelon has been offering
expert and clear insight on
what can be an arcane and
polarising subject. A journalist
for the New York Times
magazine, she also recently
wrote a ground-breaking piece
on children changing gender—
one of the first of its kind in
the US. She lectures at Yale.
Catherine Belton
Journalist
Former Financial
Times Moscow
correspondent
Catherine Belton
published Putin’s People in
Corina Amor’s
breakthrough could
help treat chronic
diseases, improve quality
of life and possibly even
extend human life
by decades
2020. The book charts Putin’s
rise to power and the
Kremlin’s influence on
western societies—issues that
have come to the fore since the
Ukraine invasion. Last year,
Roman Abramovich sued
Belton and her publisher for
defamation over the book’s
allegation that Abramovich
bought Chelsea Football Club
on Putin’s instructions.
(Abramovich has since been
sanctioned by the UK and sold
the club.) That libel suit was
settled; but since then,
numerous other oligarchs have
brought lawsuits against her in
what the Observer called “a
pile-on from Russian
billionaires on a scale this
country has never witnessed.”
Still she fights on.
Joy Buolamwini
Computer scientist
When she was an
undergraduate at
the Georgia
Institute of
Technology, Joy Buolamwini
was trying to teach a robot to
play peek-a-boo when she
found it couldn’t recognise her
face. When another robot
failed to identify her face
unless she wore a white mask,
 3
Even if we were living
in something like the
Matrix, David Chalmers
argues, our experiences
would still be “real” and
even meaningful
she realised that there was
racial bias in the datasets both
robots had been trained on.
She launched the Algorithmic
Justice League in 2016 to
promote equitable artificial
intelligence and developed
something called “InCoding,”
a series of practical steps to
make AI models more
inclusive. In 2022, as the
possibility of sentient AI grabs
headlines, Buolamwini’s
theory of code will be more
vital than ever.
David Chalmers
Philosopher
& cognitive scientist
Are you living in a
simulation? It is a
familiar question
for philosophers
and science fiction fans.
Chalmers, in his new book
Reality+, brings his formidable
philosophical armoury to bear
on answering it. Even if we
were living in something like
the Matrix, he argues, our
experiences would still be
“real” and even meaningful. In
a world where worries about
tech are becoming more
© IBL/SHUTTERSTOCK
dominant—and Facebook,
now renamed Meta, is
building an all-encompassing
“metaverse” using virtual
reality—it’s an oddly
reassuring view from one of
our greatest living
philosophers, who has
followed up his definitive
work on consciousness with
another significant
contribution.
Raj Chetty
Economist
Raj Chetty and his
team at Harvard
built an
impressive
data-tracking tool at the start
of the pandemic.
Tracktherecovery.org took
masses of anonymised
information to work out the
impact the virus was having—
and continues to have—on
employment, business revenue
and consumer spending in the
US. They could even measure
which sorts of people were
spending their stimulus
cheques from the federal
government. The data, broken
down by income group,
industry and location, has
been invaluable in informing
the economic debate on
Covid-19 and the price of
lockdowns. Chetty has
previously won the John Bates
Clark medal for outstanding
economists under 40. But this
PROSPECT / 50 THINKERS FOR A TURBULANT WORLD 2022
may be one of his most
important pieces of work yet.
Don Mee Choi
Poet & translator
The Korean-
American poet
and translator
explores the
“conjoined” histories of her
nations using images, graphic
notation and verbatim
interviews. Her 2020
collection DMZ Colony,
named for the demilitarised
zone between North and
South Korea, literally decon-
structs words and letters into
their constituent lines in a way
that recalls her fragmented
homeland. She became a
MacArthur fellow
in 2021, with the committee
judging that she has borne
“witness to the effects of
military violence and US
imperialism on the civilians of
the Korean peninsula.”
Speaking of the young girl she
once was in South Korea, she
says: “I still converse with her
in my poetry.”
Caroline Criado Perez
Feminist thinker
Caroline Criado
Perez successfully
campaigned for a
woman to appear
on the £10 note in 2015, while
her campaign for a statue of a
suffragette to be erected in
Parliament Square led to one
of Millicent Fawcett being
unveiled in 2018. But her
biggest contribution has been
her game-changing 2019 book
Invisible Women, which
describes how gender bias in
big data collection negatively
affects women. For example,
during the pandemic many
women working in hospitals
found that their PPE was
designed for male rather than
female bodies. Her new
podcast, Visible Women,
explores how to fix the gender
data gap.
Jennifer Croft
Translator
Jennifer Croft has
changed how
people view the
art of translation.
The American, who works
from Polish, Ukrainian and
Argentine Spanish, was
shortlisted for the Internation-
al Booker Prize for her
translation of 2019 Nobel
laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s The
Books of Jacob. The book runs to
more than 1,100 pages and
took Croft seven years to
complete. The pair had won
the same award in 2018—split-
ting the prize money—for
Tokarczuk’s novel Flights.
Croft, whose autobiographical
novel Homesick will soon be
released in the UK, has called
for increased awareness of the
collaborative nature of
translated works and co-
launched the #TranslatorsOn-
TheCover campaign, which
argues the profession deserves
greater visibility.
Mark Elliott
Legal scholar
The past few years
have seen
constitutional
vandalism. Mark
Elliott, chair of the Cambridge
law faculty, former adviser to
parliament’s Constitution
Committee and author of the
blog Public Law for Everyone,
has offered indispensable
analysis of the Tories’ alarming
project to tear up the Human
Rights Act, undermine the
judicial review of illegal
government decisions and
violate international law by
reneging on the Brexit treaty.
4
For UK constitutional experts
Elliott’s work is a must read.
He has shown that you can
remain signed up to rights in
principle while making it far
harder to enforce them in
practice—and do immense
damage in the process.
Christine Emba
Writer & journalist
Five years into the
#MeToo move-
ment, feminists
are becoming
increasingly critical of the
sexual revolution. In her new
book Rethinking Sex, Christine
Emba, a columnist for the
Washington Post, quotes both
Andrea Dworkin on the left
and Roger Scruton on the
right to argue that the culture
of dating apps and easy
hook-ups damages women.
A more casual attitude to
relationships once seemed
liberating, she argues, but do
we need boundaries around
our desires to meaningfully
fulfil them? Emba’s thought-
provoking polemic has shifted
the debate, and even those
who disagree with her
solutions for re-sacralising sex
may recognise the loneliness
at the root of the problems
she identifies.
Lawrence Freedman
War studies expert
The UK’s leading
expert on military
strategy quickly
became the go-to
voice on Ukraine. His analysis
of the latest developments on
the ground and the relative
strength of both sides has
proven indispensable since
Putin chose to launch the most
dangerous European conflict
since 1945. Having sat on the
inquiry into the Iraq War—
serving in more recent years as
an emeritus professor of war
studies at King’s College
London—his outlet of choice is
now the Substack newsletter
Comment is Freed, run jointly
with his son, Prospect
columnist Sam Freedman.
The elder Freedman’s
expertise on nuclear warfare
will, it is to be hoped, remain
purely theoretical.
Gita Gopinath
Economist
The International
Monetary Fund
has a crucial role
to play in
stabilising any crisis. So it is
reassuring to know that, as the
world economy suffers the
fallout from the war in Ukraine,
one of the IMF’s central figures,
Gita Gopinath, proved herself
so thoroughly during the
pandemic. Her statements
during the coronavirus crisis
showed a willingness to rethink
the Washington fiscal
orthodoxy that can handicap
multilateral institutions. Her
academic work on the role of
the US dollar has been hugely
important in understanding
the role of global trade and
finance. She is now the IMF’s
first deputy managing director
and will play a huge role in the
turbulent times ahead for the
global economy.
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Novelist
Across his deeply
researched and
imaginatively
bold novels,
Abdulrazak Gurnah has
charted the influence of
various kinds of imperialism—
Arab, German, British—on east
Africa. Always respected but
hardly a household name,
Gurnah was thrust into the
spotlight when he won the
PROSPECT / 50 THINKERS FOR A TURBULANT WORLD 2022
Across his deeply
researched and
imaginatively bold novels,
Abdulrazak Gurnah has
charted the influence
of imperialism on
east Africa
Nobel in autumn 2021. Cited
by the committee for his
“uncompromising and
compassionate penetration of
the effects of colonialism and
the fate of the refugee,” he is
also a master of evoking the
sights and smells of his home
island, Zanzibar. If you don’t
know his work, start with
Paradise, an account of a slave
boy called Yusuf, and then
Desertion, set during the 1964
Zanzibar revolution.
Demis Hassabis
AI researcher
Last July
DeepMind, the
AI research
company of
which Demis Hassabis is
co-founder and CEO, caused a
revolution in the life sciences.
It published the code behind
AlphaFold, software
developed using machine
learning that can accurately
predict how proteins fold. By
sharing rather than hoarding
this precious information,
Hassabis handed scientists the
tools to find new drug
treatments in record time,
supercharging research in
almost every area of biology
and making a bold case for the
democratisation of science.
One year on, AlphaFold has
provided researchers with
almost a million protein
structure predictions.
Frances Haugen
Facebook whistleblower
When Frances
Haugen quit as a
product manager
for Facebook in
May last year, she took tens of
thousands of internal
documents along with her.
The documents became the
main source of a Wall Street
Journal investigation into
Facebook last September,
which alleged that the social
media giant was aware that its
platform is being used to incite
violence and harm teenagers’
mental health. She also
claimed it has failed to curb
misinformation and allowed
high-profile figures to flout its
rules. Haugen disclosed her
identity in a 60 Minutes
interview last October, and has
testified before the US
Congress and UK parliament
advocating for greater
government regulation of
Facebook.
 5
Fiona Hill
Foreign affairs expert
Born to a miner
and a nurse in
County Durham,
Fiona Hill’s
testimony at Donald Trump’s
first impeachment hearing in
2019 briefly made her one of
the most famous faces in her
adopted America. The foreign
policy expert, who advised
presidents George W Bush and
Barack Obama before Trump,
accused the Trump administra-
tion of pursuing a shadow
foreign policy strategy
intended to benefit the
president rather than US
national interests. Hill, author
of Mr Putin: Operative in the
Kremlin, remains one of the
most compelling voices on
Russia, warning that Ukraine is
the frontline in a hot war on
western democracy. Putin, she
argues, will not stop until he
has won.
Patrick Radden Keefe
Journalist & writer
Few stories have
as much drama as
Empire of Pain,
Keefe’s 2021
exposé of how the Sackler
© REUTERS / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, MATT CROSSICK / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, SHUTTERSTOCK
Few stories have as
much drama as Patrick
Radden Keefe’s exposé
of the Sackler family
family made billions through
selling first Valium and then
damaging opioids. In this
prize-winning book, the
journalist revealed that the
Sacklers, known for their
philanthropy, raked in $13bn
through Purdue Pharma’s
aggressive marketing of
OxyContin, a drug which
contributed to the opioid
crisis that’s claimed 500,000
lives in the US. In March, the
British Museum was the latest
cultural institution to cut ties
with the Sacklers. Keefe’s new
collection, Rogues: True Stories
of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and
Crooks, was released in June.
Kendrick Lamar
Rapper
Lamar is the
outstanding
popular musician
of our time,
representing a bridge between
the hyper-masculine gangster
rap of his native Compton, Los
Angeles, and something more
reflective, as he reckons with
the social issues especially
affecting young men. His latest
album—his fourth consecutive
triumph—is an honest, if
abrasive, exploration of black
trauma, sexual abuse, his
PROSPECT / 50 THINKERS FOR A TURBULANT WORLD 2022
Christian faith and mental
ill-health, as well as
homophobia and transphobia
among African Americans. He
is the first rapper ever to win a
Pulitzer Prize—for 2017’s
album Damn. His headline slot
at Glastonbury this year, when
he wore a diamond crown of
thorns, confirmed his genius.
Patricia Lockwood
Novelist & essayist
If anyone can
claim to have
written the
definitive
fictional account of the
internet, then it is Patricia
Lockwood. Her 2021 novel No
One Is Talking About This
explores life and grief in the
online world and asks whether
there are some things that can
never be turned into social
media fodder. Lockwood first
became famous when her 2013
poem “Rape Joke” went viral.
She has since published two
poetry collections and has
written hilarious takedowns of
John Updike and Karl Ove
Knausgård. Her 2017 memoir,
Priestdaddy, describes her
Midwest childhood—her
father was a Lutheran pastor
who converted to become a
married Catholic priest.
William MacAskill
Philosopher
If you want to
make a differ-
ence, should you
spend your time
working for a charity, or
making a fortune in the City
and then donating half your
income—thus saving more
lives in the process? This is the
sort of question MacAskill has
been wrestling with for years,
using rational arguments to
uncover the optimum moral
course. MacAskill’s organisa-
tion 80,000 Hours, named for
the amount of time we work
over a lifetime, advises
individuals on which career
path will help them do the
most good. His new book,
What We Owe the Future,
advocates a philosophy of
long-termism, arguing we all
have a moral obligation to save
our dying planet.
Darren McGarvey
Writer & rapper
“If all the best
people are in all
the top jobs, then
why is Britain
such a fucking bin fire?”
Author Darren McGarvey is a
former rapper-in-residence at
the Scottish Violence
Reduction Unit, where he
performed under the stage
name Loki. He grew up in
poverty in Glasgow and his
mother suffered from
alcoholism. He won the Orwell
Prize in 2018 for his debut
book Poverty Safari and his
second book, The Social
Distance Between Us, was
published this June. McGarvey
argues that the vast distance—
geographic, economic and
cultural—between the people
making decisions and the
people affected by them is
destroying British politics.
Lisa McGee
Writer
The Northern
Irish playwright
and screenwriter
is the brain
behind Derry Girls, the hit
Channel 4 comedy series that
depicts teenagers growing up
in Derry during the 1990s,
amid the final years of the
Troubles. The show, which
ended in May this year on an
emotional note with the
signing of the Good Friday
6
agreement, has been praised
for its humour and honest
depiction of how people coped
with the conflict. It is the
most-watched series in
Northern Ireland since
modern records began—a
mural of the main characters is
now a popular tourist
attraction in Derry. In June,
McGee was awarded freedom
of the city.
Stefano Mancuso
Botanist
Should plants
have rights?
Stefano Mancuso,
an Italian
philosopher of plant intelli-
gence, is one of the most
persuasive advocates for “yes.”
His book The Nation of Plants,
published in English last year,
even contains a charter
including “the right to clean
water, soil and atmosphere.”
As leader of the International
Laboratory of Plant Neurobiol-
ogy, he argues that a more
expansive view of intelligence
can reveal to us the wonder of
the botanical world. Plants
may be less mobile than we
are, but they have been around
far longer and are essential if
we want to save the world from
climate catastrophe.
Mia Mottley
Politician
In the Barbados
general election
in January, the
prime minister
Mia Mottley—the first female
leader of the country—won
re-election by a landslide. The
previous November she made
history by removing Queen
Elizabeth as head of state.
Since first coming to power,
Mottley has made powerful
interventions on the world
stage about climate change
and its impact on small island
nations like her own. A lawyer
by trade, she has united
progressive movements in
Barbados. Having practised a
pragmatic politics to get into
power, she has been described
as “fearless” in using her
mandate—for example when
calling for reparations for the
slave trade from European
countries.
Samuel Moyn
Political theorist
Putin’s invasion
of Ukraine has
been met with
near-universal
censure in the west, and
rightly so. But is the invasion
also being used to rehabilitate
failed ideas about how the
world works? Samuel Moyn, a
professor of history and
jurisprudence at Yale and
author of last year’s Humane:
How the United States Aban-
doned Peace and Reinvented
War, argues that the worst
possible response to the crisis
would be to set Russia up as
the great adversary of our
time. Why not focus on
repairing our own democra-
cies, rather than lapsing into
Cold War-era certainties
which were questionable even
when they were coined?
Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili
Afghanistan expert
When the Taliban
retook Kabul last
summer,
everyone was
searching for answers about
why it happened. Murtaza-
shvili, an academic and
researcher with years of
on-the-ground experience in
Afghanistan, provided a
compelling thesis: in trying to
impose models of democratic
engagement from the outside,
PROSPECT / 50 THINKERS FOR A TURBULANT WORLD 2022
the US failed to take account
of local structures of
accountability. Corruption
and cynicism flourished—
Afghans quickly realised that
the flashier a new government
building was, the less authority
it had in reality—and the
rebellion was fuelled. Her
sobering analysis is found in
more detail in Order and the
State in Afghanistan (2016),
vital reading for any occupying
force contemplating nation-
building.
Elon Musk
Tech entrepreneur
He faced serious
opposition with
his aggressive bid
to buy Twitter
(see Ethan Zuckerman on
p80) and was mocked by Joe
Biden for his hubristic plans to
colonise Mars. But the help
Musk has given to Ukraine
with his Starlink system has
been genuinely impressive.
Starlink (part of his space
exploration company SpaceX)
uses private satellites—more
than 2,000 of them—to keep
the country’s internet
connected and out of reach of
Russian attacks. In addition,
his Tesla Model Y is now one
Samuel Moyn argues
that the worst possible
response to the war in
Ukraine would be to set
Russia up as the great
adversary of our time
of the bestselling cars in the
UK—paving the way for the
phasing out of petrol cars due
to start in 2030.
Pap Ndiaye
Historian and politician
After Emmanuel
Macron was
re-elected as
French president
in April, he surprised everyone
by appointing Ndiaye, the
French-Senegalese historian,
as education minister.
An expert on African-
American history and the
African diaspora in France,
he is one of the founders of
Black Studies à la française,
a subject he wrote about in
2008’s The Black Condition.
He was also head of France’s
Museum of Immigration.
Attacked by the far right
for his support of causes like
anti-racism, feminism and
climate action, Ndiaye is
in fact something of a
moderate in his tone,
claiming that he does not
“approve of moralising and
sectarian discourse.”
As France is torn apart by
political extremes, Ndiaye
shows the value of calm
erudition.
 7
Not everyone is
comfortable with what
Paul B Preciado has to say:
an invitation to speak at
one annual conference
led to heckling
Naomi Oreskes
Historian of science
Why trust
science? The
pandemic might
have laid all
doubts to rest for some, but as
Harvard historian of science
Oreskes argues in her new
book, which takes that
question as its title, scientists
sincerely believed in now
discredited theories like
phrenology and Limited
Energy Theory (the latter of
which claimed that women
didn’t have the physical ability
to both bear children and be
educated). As such, how can
we be sure that current
scientific approaches won’t be
considered as absurd in 100
years’ time? Oreskes’s answer is
to further diversify the
© DUILIO PIAGGESI/IPA/SHUTTERSTOCK, NEIL HALL/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
scientific community—and to
maintain a sceptical approach
to all claims of absolute
scientific truth.
Friederike Otto
Climatologist
The extent to
which a particular
flood, heatwave,
drought or storm
is linked to climate change has
never been well understood.
But Otto, one of the authors of
the most recent report from
the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, is
changing that. She is the
driving force behind World
Weather Attribution, an
international project working
to prove how far not only
patterns in weather but
specific events are influenced
by climate change. It’s an
innovative area of climate
science that will have very real
implications for insurance
companies—as well as for
countries arguing they deserve
compensation for the
climate-related devastation
they are experiencing.
David Pannick
Barrister
The UK’s
outstanding
public law
barrister repre-
sented Gina Miller in the
Supreme Court and beat the
government—twice—when it
tried to sideline parliament
during the Brexit process. He
presented the most recent set
of the prestigious Hamlyn law
lectures, formerly given by
such luminaries as lords
Denning and Bingham. His
subject was advocacy—its
PROSPECT / 50 THINKERS FOR A TURBULANT WORLD 2022
essence, its morality and its
future. Pannick is now being
briefed by the Home Office to
defend the Rwanda deporta-
tion plan in the courts—even
though he voted against
elements of the relevant
legislation in the Lords. As he
explains in his lectures, a
lawyer is just a taxi for hire.
Paul B Preciado
Philosopher
Women should go
on a “uterus
strike” and we
should stop
defining sex at birth—these are
just two of the radical ideas
proposed by Paul B Preciado,
one of continental Europe’s
most original thinkers on
gender. A self-proclaimed
“gender migrant,” Preciado
uses his own experience of
transitioning from female to
male to interrogate the power
relationships latent in gender
and sexuality. Not everyone is
comfortable with what
Preciado has to say: an
invitation to speak at the École
de la Cause Freudienne’s
annual conference in 2019 led
to him being heckled before he
could finish. With recent essay
collections translated into
English, Preciado may soon be
ruffling feathers in the
anglophone world too.
Jamie Raskin
Politician
A former
constitutional law
professor who has
represented
Maryland’s eighth congres-
sional district since 2017,
Raskin led the second House
impeachment trial of Donald
Trump in the wake of the
Capitol insurrection. He is
now on the select committee
investigating the siege, seeking
to hold the former president
accountable for his assault on
democracy. Raskin’s new book,
Unthinkable, focuses on the
traumatic 45 days when his
son, just 25 and suffering from
depression, committed suicide
shortly before 6th January
2021. He is chief sponsor of
legislation that would create a
commission capable of
removing a president under
the 25th amendment. Having
lost his son, Raskin refuses to
lose his country too.
Timothy Snyder
Historian
One of the
clearest voices on
Putin’s invasion
of Ukraine,
Timothy Snyder, author of 15
books including the ground-
breaking Bloodlands: Europe
Between Hitler and Stalin, has a
deep understanding of
Ukraine’s history. For
centuries, he says, it has been
bruised by the ambitions of
neighbouring empires. The
current war is an expression of
Putin’s imperial mindset. But
Snyder is not only a student of
history; he is a shrewd analyst
of how western leaders are
responding to the present war
too. Above all, he warns,
European and North
American leaders must not tell
Ukraine how and when to
make peace. Great powers
have decided its fate for too
long.
Oleksiy Sorokin
Journalist
After Ukraine’s
first English-lan-
guage online
newspaper the
Kyiv Post was interfered with
by its oligarch owners, in
November last year Sorokin
was one of several journalists
8
who left to establish the Kyiv
Independent. Led by editor
Olga Rudenko, the Independ-
ent was originally set up to
uncover the corruption at the
heart of the Ukrainian
government—including under
the watch of Volodymyr
Zelensky. It has since gained a
new purpose exposing the
horrors of Russia’s brutal
invasion. Reliant on crowd-
funding, Sorokin’s work
keeping the Independent afloat
is a testament to the bravery of
the journalists who have found
their home turned into the
frontline of a war.
Karen Steyn
Judge
What protection
should a
journalist have to
pursue a story in
the public interest? This
question has just been
answered in the High Court by
Justice Karen Steyn who, in
her libel judgment in favour of
Observer journalist Carole
Cadwalladr over Brexit-backer
Arron Banks, has struck a blow
for freedom of expression that
recalls the famous 1964
Sullivan judgment in the US.
As the court found then, the
press needs to be allowed to
make mistakes if it is acting in
good faith. That is especially
true of issues of public
importance like the financing
of political campaigns. All eyes
now turn to the next judgment
Steyn will write—in the case of
Vardy v Rooney.
Kathleen Stock
Philosopher
A feminist
philosophy
professor at the
University of
Sussex might seem an unlikely
target for student protests. But
such is the heat around the
trans debate that the author of
Material Girls, who believes in
the importance of biological
sex distinctions between men
and women, felt forced to
resign from her position. Stock
is now at the vanguard of a
movement supported by JK
Rowling and others. Often
accused of bigotry, Stock
stresses her target is not trans
people but a strain of trans
ideology. Whether she will be
proved right or not is an open
question. More certain is that
her case has become a test of
institutions’ willingness to
defend free speech.
Anna Della Subin
Writer
Why would
anyone want to
worship Prince
Philip? In her
subversive and often
entertaining book Accidental
Gods, Anna Della Subin traces
the tangled history of men
who end up being granted
divine status against their will.
Often the story involves
colonial conquest, with the
defeated people turning the
(usually) white male hero into
a god as a form of obeisance
but also covert resistance.
Oppressed people in Jamaica
read a 1931 National Geographic
article about the crowning of
Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia and
took him for a “black divine.”
Subin’s book has many lessons
we can learn about the
hero-worship of leaders in our
current strongman age. Putin
the Eternal, anyone?
Olúfémi O Táíwò
˙
Philosopher
The word
“decolonisation”
is very of the
moment. ­
PROSPECT / 50 THINKERS FOR A TURBULANT WORLD 2022
By challenging green
orthodoxy about the
simplicity of the energy
transition, Helen Thompson
presents an alarming
account of the
climate crisis
It means purging former
colonies of all vestiges of
cultural imperialism, and has
been applied to institutions in
the west like museums and
whole areas of study like
philosophy. But in his bristling
new takedown, Against
Decolonisation, Táíwò, a
Nigerian professor of African
thought at Cornell, argues that
it is not possible to create a
“pure” African philosophy or
artistic tradition, given how
entwined both are with
western ideas. After rightfully
rejecting political imperial-
ism, he says, Africa should
embrace the benefits of
modernity—including
democracy, a free market and
the rule of law—which Táíwò
considers universal values
rather than parochial imposi-
tions from the west.
Anand Teltumbde
Dalit rights activist
In 2020, the
Indian scholar
and civil rights
campaigner
Anand Teltumbde was
arrested for allegedly inciting
caste-based violence and
associating with Maoist
groups. According to the US
and human rights groups,
though, the charges are
trumped up—and Teltumbde
was targeted by Narendra
Modi’s government for his
advocacy of Dalit rights and
criticism of the Hindutva
ideology sweeping the
country. A sophisticated
thinker, Teltumbde is the
author of 2018’s Republic of
Caste, which argues that his
country’s free-market reforms
are not, as some argue, the
solution to inequality between
castes, and that positive
discrimination for Dalits in
fact only reinforces unfairness
and thus should be abolished.
Helen Thompson
Political scientist
Thompson is one
of the most
fascinating
guides to the
challenges currently afflicting
the world economy. The
Cambridge professor deploys
her vast range of specialisms—
geopolitics, energy, monetary
policy—to document the
failures that led to the
financial crash and, through
the course of Brexit, Trump
and Ukraine, have presented
the west with fundamental
questions. The next immense
issue is the climate crisis.
 9
Thompson, by challenging
green orthodoxy about the
simplicity of the energy
transition, presents a more
alarming account than we
have become accustomed to.
Best known for the (recently
wound down) Talking Politics
podcast, her new book
Disorder is a must read.
Joachim Trier
Film director
A lot of people
have written
about the
millennial
experience in the 21st century:
fewer have shown us how it
looks. Norwegian director
Joachim Trier was depicting
the lives of aimless
20-somethings feeling their
fraught way through
adulthood long before the
idea of “the millennial
experience” was a thing.
Completing his loose trilogy
of films set in Oslo with this
year’s award-winning The
Worst Person in the World, Trier
has brought his own aesthetic
sensibility to a life of boxy
apartments and multiple
dead-end jobs—and given
visual form to the commonly
held millennial worry that we
© TT NEWS AGENCY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Wordle creator
Josh Wardle reminded
us that the internet
can still be fun
might all be living in the
background of other people’s
lives.
Josh Wardle
Software engineer
Sometimes it’s
the simplest ideas
that prove to be
the most effec-
tive. That’s certainly true for
the online game Wordle,
created by US-based Welsh
developer Josh Wardle.
Originally published in
January 2021 to entertain
family and friends, it was
made public in October and
soon the one-a-day, five-letter,
six-guesses word puzzle had
captured the imaginations of
millions, before being scooped
up by the New York Times for
over $1m. Despite furious
arguments over whether
certain offensive words had
been banned by the newspa-
per, at a time when many have
become jaded by the demands
of social media and sceptical
of the web as a platform that
still offers meaningful
connection, Wordle and its
creator reminded us that the
internet can still be fun.
Just don’t tell anyone your
starting word.
PROSPECT / 50 THINKERS FOR A TURBULANT WORLD 2022
Bari Weiss
Journalist
In 2020, the New
York Times
opinion writer
Bari Weiss
resigned, saying her colleagues
had bullied her for
“wrongthink” and that
“intellectual curiosity—let
alone risk-taking—is now a
liability” at the paper. Weiss
set up her own forum called
Common Sense, which has
since become a lively home for
“cancelled” writers. It has
platformed interesting
alternative views: its podcast
with Amy Cooper, the Central
Park dog walker whose life was
ruined by accusations of
racism, was a coup. But
perhaps Weiss’s greatest
success has been the
noticeable change at the NYT,
where more voices sceptical of
current progressive thinking
are now published.
Molly White
Software engineer
When
cryptocurrency
went mainstream,
Molly White got
worried. The software
engineer and prolific
Wikipedia editor had observed
the hype around blockchain,
the technology underpinning
cryptocurrencies, with some
detachment. But when
ordinary people began to lose
money to dodgy schemes, she
felt compelled to challenge the
received wisdom of the
cryptobros. White set up Web3
Is Going Just Great at the end
of 2021 to document the
misinformation,
mismanagement and full-
blown scams proliferating in
the world of Web3—the
decentralised next stage of the
internet, based on blockchain.
The endeavour has showcased
White’s sharp wit and, in the
face of harassment and abuse,
her courage in highlighting a
new form of online power.
Lea Ypi
Political theorist
The Kant scholar
and LSE professor
of political theory
Lea Ypi grew up
in 1980s and 1990s Albania,
during the country’s transition
out of communism. In her
2021 memoir, Free: Coming of
Age at the End of History, she
describes her childhood
hero-worship of Albania’s
communist leader Enver
Hoxha and Joseph Stalin. Her
family hid their Muslim
heritage and also concealed
from Ypi that her great-
grandfather was Xhafer Ypi,
the former prime minister she
had been taught at school to
despise. Her memoir critiques
both the repression of
communism and the
inequalities and violence that
she witnessed as a teenager
after Albania became
capitalist.
Profiles written by David
McAllister, Sarah Collins, Alex
Dean, Ellen Halliday, Emily
Lawford and Sameer Rahim
Continue reading for
the readers’ choice
for top thinker 2022
 10
TOP THINKERS
THE WORLD’S TOP
THINKERS RESULT
From philosophers on gender to anti-poverty campaigners, here’s who readers voted
for in our annual list of top thinkers
T
he votes are in and the people
have spoken. From a list of 50 top
thinkers we presented in the sum-
mer issue, our readers chose the philos-
opher Kathleen Stock as the winner—
and by a significant margin. Stock’s 2021
book Material Girls argues that feminists
should be worried that the biological dif-
ferences between men and women, and
thus the sex-based rights of women, are
being eroded by “trans activist think-
ing.” Last year she resigned from the Uni-
versity of Sussex after protests by activ-
ists about her gender-critical position,
turning her into an emblem for open in-
quiry and free speech. You can read more
about her argument, and the opposite
point of view, in the debate she conduct-
ed with trans lawyer Robin White for our
winter double issue, which can be found
on the Prospect website.
Further down the list is Caroline Cri-
ado Perez, a feminist who has analysed
with incontrovertible detail how we live
in a world built for men. From crash test
dummies to doctors’ PPE during the
pandemic, the default for manufactur-
ers is male. Already her work has had re-
al-world impact in pressuring companies
to do better.
Just above her is anti-poverty cam-
paigner Darren McGarvey, who beat
fellow nominee Kendrick Lamar to be-
come the first rapper to appear in our
top 10. McGarvey’s new book, The Social
Distance Between Us, lambasts the peo-
ILLUSTRATION BY MIGUEL PORLAN
ple who run the country for having lit-
tle awareness of the desperation at the
bottom end of the social scale. For Mc-
Garvey, brought up on the south side of
Glasgow, everything in Britain comes
down to class. (Look up his appearance
PROSPECT / 50 THINKERS FOR A TURBULANT WORLD 2022
on the Prospect podcast for some choice O Táíwò, author of Reconsidering Repara-
arguments—and language.) tions, both published this year. For the re-
Alaa Abdel Fattah and Anand Tel- cord, we meant to nominate the former,
tumbde are both prisoners of conscience. though the latter was suggested to us as
Abdel Fattah is a British-Egyptian who well. Kudos to the eagle-eyed voter who
was involved in the 2011 uprisings in Cai- nominated Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò and then in
ro, and has since been highly critical of the “who we missed” section suggested
Sisi’s autocratic regime. He was impris- Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò. In any case, apologies
oned in December on charges of “broad- to both Olúfẹ́mis. Maybe they’ll both be
casting false news.” Currently on hun- on the list next year. ♦
ger strike, Abdel Fattah has been writing
from prison on scraps of smuggled paper.
Teltumbde, meanwhile, is a respected
Dalit rights activist and thinker from In-
dia, who has criticised his government’s
Hindu nationalist ideology.
Two different historical political con-
flicts have gained new resonance with
current events. Lisa McGee wrote the
comedy gem Derry Girls, about teenag-
ers growing up during the Troubles in
Northern Ireland. The show ended its
run on Channel 4 this year in an era when
the Irish border has become a flashpoint
once more. Lea Ypi’s moving memoir
Free told of her childhood in a commu-
nist Albania dominated by Russia.
Looking to the future, philosopher
William MacAskill argues in an upcom-
ing work that we have a moral obligation
to look to the future if we are to save our-
selves from environmental disaster. (A
review is upcoming in these pages.) The
solution of another top thinker, Elon
Musk, is simple: colonise Mars and use
its resources to power our lifestyle—pre-
sumably until we leave it uninhabitable
and move onto another planet.
Lastly, a mea culpa: an editorial mis-
hap in last issue’s thinkers’ list saw us mix
up philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, author
of Against Decolonisation, with Olúfẹ́mi