Beastly Genius

Well my respect for MacArthur genius award winners just took a big hit. Tina Brown's Daily Beast claims to have gotten some people they thought were smart - who seemed to be mostly academic politicians and media celebrities - to nominate 100 plus people for the category of smartest of the decade. Next they found 40 MacA awardees who had nothing better to do than read their resumes and rank them, resulting in a list of the 25 supposedly smartest people of the decade. I think you can get an idea of the flavor of the result from the first five names you encounter on the list: Roger Ailes, David Chase, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Michael Bloomberg, and Karl Rove. Four terrorists and a rich guy.

The list is bottom up, Letterman style, but it doesn't get much better. There are a few people on the list I consider fairly smart, like Jobs and Chu, and others who have had at least one really good idea, like Brin, Page, and Bezos - all of whom had their good idea in the previous decade, btw. Mostly smart means rich on this list, but rich because they had a good idea. I guess Arianna Huffington's good idea was marrying a rich gay guy and getting him to go into politics.

Maybe the twenty-oughts weren't a good decade for doing anything important, but if anything important was done, it probably wasn't done by any of these people. A decade isn't really long enough to see the importance of a thought, of course, which is why all the people on the list for their smart ideas had them more than ten years ago, with the possible exception of one or two like Steve Jobs who have, or at least recognize, lots of good ideas.

But Karl f****ng Rove? Being on a list with him can't be much of an honor. Even for al-Zawahiri.