Got a bright idea for removing carbon dioxide from the world's atmosphere? Get it past a panel of judges, including James Lovelock, and you could find yourself $25m richer, courtesy of Richard Branson and Al Gore, who launched their Earth Challenge prize in London in early February.
But even if you're clueless on carbon, you're sure to find a mega-prize to suit you. Six of the Clay Mathematics Institute's seven "Millennium Prize Problems" remain unsolved, and there's $1m on offer for each. Netflix, the US online movie rental service, has $1m for anyone who can improve the algorithm the site uses to recommend movies. And the £100,000 that Ken Livingstone offered four years ago to anyone who could come up with a way to cool down the tube in the summer remains unclaimed. There are many more.
The rise of the mega-prize is a curious phenomenon, combining a 21st-century use of mass communication techniques and PR with a 19th-century belief in the genius inventor, toiling alone without institutional backing. In reality, of course, the only people with the expertise needed to solve these major problems are probably already working in a university or for a large company.
Competition
In 1928, Thomas Hardy's coffin was borne by perhaps the most formidable selection of notables ever to perform this duty: the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin; the leader of the opposition, Ramsay MacDonald; the heads of an Oxford and a Cambridge college; and six authors (Kipling, Housman, Barrie, Shaw, Galsworthy and Gosse). Has this stellar line-up of pall bearers ever been topped? Write in with your suggestions. The best will receive a mystery, Wessex-themed award.
Le Carré
Open Democracy, the left-of-centre political website, has a friend in thriller writer turned campaigner John Le Carré. He is matching any individual donation up to £1,000 in the website's latest appeal. Under editor Isabel Hilton, the site is now well established (but hardly full of its claimed "free thinking"). Hilton's linguistic abilities must help. She recently told the RSA Journal: "Between school and college I was bored and taught myself Chinese for fun. I already had Latin, Spanish, French and German." Wow.
Digital silence
John Cage's 4'33"—a piano piece consisting of 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence—is often seen as the radical outrider of 20th-century classical music. But after Jonathon Keats—a San Francisco-based conceptual artist and Prospect contributor—decided to turn the piece into a mobile phone ringtone, critics lined up to condemn what they saw as a sacrilegious attempt to defile Cage's canonical work. Alex Ross of the New Yorker even called upon Cage's estate to sue. But Keats remains unrepentant, telling Prospect that "silence has always been around us, and cannot be owned." He even suggests his work marks an improvement over Cage's "analogue" original. You can download the ringtone for free at www.startmobile.net/433.
The internet and high culture
The impact of the internet on high culture has been a theme of two recent Prospect essays—Jonathan Rée on Google Book Search in the February issue, and Norman Lebrecht on classical music recording in this issue (writes Jim Dallas). Rée is broadly positive about the effect that Google's massive book digitisation project will have on scholarship, while Lebrecht worries that the rise of the classical music download—and the related decline of the physical recording—is weakening the shared bonds that unite music lovers.
But draw the camera back and it is striking how poorly high culture is represented on the internet. While gambling, sex, gaming, news, pop music, shopping, travel and diary-keeping have all found unique modes of expression online, the same cannot be said for the serious arts.
Of course, looking at quantity rather than quality, there is lots of good stuff around. Arts and Letters Daily is an excellent digest of the world's media and journals (including Prospect); the BBC's web offerings are diverse and innovative; Project Gutenberg and Google Book Search have the full texts of millions of books; internet radio stations play specialist jazz.
But much of this is derivative, simply taking what was on a printed page or CD and putting it online. Where is the Shakespeare site where we can watch four great stagings of the same play? Where will a narrator tell us the story of a painting while we zoom in to fine detail, or select relevant works alongside? Or the thematic search site exploring an aspect of the human condition and its treatment in great art?
The chaotic nature of the internet means that there may well be unique online treatments of high culture that I have not spotted. If you know any, please tell Prospect at info@prospect-magazine.co.uk. Prospect will post the best examples on a soon-to-be-launched blog, which may itself prove a fine example of how to do high(ish) culture on the internet.
Banville is back
The Irish novelist John Banville became known as a bucker of critical opinion in May 2005 when he subjected Ian McEwan's widely praised Saturday to a long, vicious review in the New York Review of Books. The piece was so negative (Saturday was "dismayingly bad") that it got people talking. Did Banville have some personal gripe? Did the fact that both authors were up for the Booker that year (which Banville won) influence him? Banville, it seems, is up to his old tricks again. In the 1st March issue of the NYRB, he gives Martin Amis's latest, House of Meetings, a review so positive it practically glows. The book is "a remarkable achievement, a version of the great Russian novel done in miniature"; "It is as if in all of his books [Amis] has been preparing for this one." Admittedly, Amis's other reviews haven't been too terrible (mixed would be fair), but Banville's worshipful attitude not just to Amis's new novel but to his entire oeuvre seems a bit strange. As was noted at the time on the NYRB's letter page, Banville's demolition of McEwan was also notable for its shaky grasp of fact: he got the result of a squash match, which takes up 17 pages of Saturday, wrong. In his new review, he writes of Amis: "When he was born, in 1949, his father Kingsley was among England's most highly regarded novelists… whose comic novel Lucky Jim, published in 1953…" Well, not quite: Lucky Jim was actually published in 1954, and when Martin was born, Kingsley, far from being "highly regarded," was an unknown, job-seeking graduate living in a tiny cottage near Oxford.
Britain's newest political force
The cash for honours inquiry has introduced a big new player into British politics—the leakers and briefers of the Metropolitan police. Their serious abuse of authority has passed largely uncriticised partly because the media have benefited from the leaking and also because the object of the leaking has been Tony Blair and his aides—who are neither popular nor blameless in the leaking game. But now the Met has a taste for briefing, it won't give it up—the whole political class now has a powerful adversary in matters that affect Met interests. Most of the cash for honours inquiry has been a media and Met-driven farce, fuelling political distrust. (A prosecution under the 1925 Honours Act is almost impossible because—since the creation of the Lords appointments commission in 2000—honours are not even in the direct gift of the PM. The allegation of disguising political gifts as loans to avoid disclosure has more force, but all the big parties have done it, driven by a structural problem in political funding.) So why has the Met got so heavy not only with briefings but dawn raids, spinning out the inquiry, destroying the career of Des Smith, almost derailing the academies programme? It seems to be two things. One is the rise of graduate police officers who are more interested in the political game than their predecessors. Another is the police's loss of responsibility for bringing charges (now with the CPS). To make up that loss, some officers clearly think it's their job to whip up a clamour for prosecution.
Prospect-reading viewers of the Channel 4 drama series Shameless, set on a Manchester council estate, may have been surprised to see their favourite current affairs monthly make a cameo appearance at the end of the 6th February episode (see right). Debbie Gallagher was filmed engrossed in the September 2006 issue, featuring David Cameron on the cover. Could this herald the beginning of the Tories' long-awaited recovery in the north of England?
Pynchon the hammer
On page 503 of Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Against the Day, the following description of a football match occurs: "West Ham… the Park, and Upton Lane… lads all in claret and blue." This, Prospect can reveal, is no coincidence: Pynchon is a West Ham fan. Quite how long he has supported the Hammers, and what piqued his interest in the first place, remain a mystery—along with almost everything else about him. Still, the discovery opens up a new avenue of study for Pynchon nerds: scouring his back catalogue for previous references to West Ham United.
Is there a bias for war?
Why do policymakers choose to go to war when it is often such a blunt instrument? One answer was suggested in a controversial article in a recent issue of Foreign Policy. Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon drew upon experimental work in behavioural psychology to suggest that the human mind is riddled with biases that tilt it towards hawkish decision-making. For instance, research shows we have a tendency to exaggerate our strengths compared to others, making politicians overly receptive to favourable predictions of their chances of military success. Or there's the "cutting-your-losses" bias, which makes us prone to plump for possible losses over certain losses, even if we risk far more. The implication for policymakers in a position of military weakness seems clear—they may opt to "stay the course" even when the chances of success are vanishingly small.
Applying lessons from behavioural psychology and economics has become a popular game among policy thinkers—Richard Layard's Happiness (2005), the first real attempt to produce a "wellbeing" manifesto, has had an impact on Labour and Tory thinking. But can the lessons of the lab translate seamlessly to the world of the war room? It's one thing to note that, as Kahneman and Renshon argue, almost all the cognitive biases identified by psychologists tend to favour hawks over doves. But it's not at all clear that the fact that experimental subjects are prone to reckless risk explains the hawkish behaviour of politicians or generals. Executive institutions presumably have mechanisms in place designed to minimise, if not eliminate, such biases. There may be a case for political analysts to pay attention to the behavioural sciences—but it hasn't yet been made.
