I just took up the FP Passport challenge & wrote in Stephen Colbert for its list of the top 20 “Public Intellectuals.” My other votes were for: Fareed Zakaria, Ian Buruma, Amartya Sen, Vaclav Havel, and Robert Kagan.
PS: Kagan has a new book coming out any week now; there’s a preview essay (“The End of the End of History”) in the last New Republic.
Fareed Zakaria was actually on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart tonight. It started out pretty funny with Stewart naming Zakaria's new book, "The Post-American World", then joking, "Sir, I didn't know you wrote fiction." Anyway, they discussed the rise of the rest of the world and America's reluctance towards the effects as well as the nation's tendency to "look through the prism of the military" when dealing with international problems such as Islamic extremism in Africa (AFRICOM).
I've been a fan of Zakaria since his Foreign Affairs days. He's one of two young hotshots I admire. The other is the less-famous (outside of political science, at least) Steven Levitsky.