[lbo-talk] Ranking Intellectuals

[Brian Siano]

Slate has a short fluff piece about Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" 
feature, which allows users to search for text within a lot of the books 
they sell. The article (http://slate.msn.com/id/2090394/) decides to 
follow up on Richard Posner's news-media-mentions-based rankings of 
intellectuals. After some jiggery-pokery (removing government officials 
and ambiguous names), _Slate_ came up with the following:

George Bernard Shaw (3,449 hits using Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" 
feature)
George Orwell (3,271 hits)
Toni Morrison (2,148 hits)
Salman Rushdie (1,991 hits)
Norman Mailer (1,826 hits)
George Will (1,036 hits)
William Safire (652 hits)
Alan Dershowitz (296 hits)

Sort of fun, but it occurred to me to try a search on some other names:

Noam Chomsky: 1,921 hits
Gore Vidal: 1,335 hits
Howard Zinn: 387 hits
Alexander Cockburn; 289 hits
Victor Navasky: 162 hits
Molly Ivins: 152 hits
Michael Moore: Too many "Michael Moore"s in the results. Can't determine.
Doug Henwood: 73 hits

And what the hell,
Brian Siano: 8 hits