Forget everything I've said defending public intellectuals. I've just seen Foreign Policy/Prospect magazine's latest list of the top 100 public intellectuals.

Rather than quibble with the definition/ranking methodology, let's take the list as gospel. This is the graphic that scares me:

If political scientists -- perhaps, God forbid, American political scientists -- are the modal group in the category of powerful public intellectuals, then we are all officially f#$&ed.