Gore Vidal.

Noam Chomsky. Author of Manufacturing Dorothy and leader of the Syntactibubble (TM) advertising campaign.

William Safire.

(I missed the boat last week, I'm not gonna this week!)

And of course, Mr Robert Hope.

Well, you're the first on board, but the boat's not leaving yet. No Chomsky, no Vidal, no Safire, and certainly no Hope!

"Manufacturing Dorothy" is, however, brilliant. If it's not the title of some overhyped first novel by the latest photogenic chronicler of hipness, it should be.

Were any of them in the top ten?

Henry Kissinger. "Bubble-52: It's Napalm for Your Mouth!"

Def Leppard

Goddam, Rory, we were just thinking that! Some sort of subversive Hitchens recommendation which turned out to be a scathing if tipsy inditement against Norweiganness?

Although napalm's nice, too.

A combo answer from the Hackleboot: Andrew Sullivan?

Marshall McLuhan?

(Not meant to indicate any doubt in my previous guess, mind you.)

Howzabout Tricky Dick Holbroke?

Nope. The correct answer is someone much more famous than either Sullivan or Holbrooke.

Although I won't estimate his Q rating vis-a-vis the boys who brought us "Pour Some Sugar on Me." I hear they're still big in Japan.

Rory, incidentally, nailed the bonus question -- Kissinger topped Posner's list.

Rush?

No, not the Canadian rock group. Though I'm not convinced that Hitchens has becomes such a self-parody as to be suggesting that Limbaugh should get a Nobel.

I had a feeling Kissinger was lurking in there somewhere.

All right (God help me):
Newt Gingrich

Incidentally, Nobel Prize for what? Concupiscence?

John Updike.

Or, perhaps, in an ironic twist, Christopher Hitchens? (Nothing like a little horn-self-tooting to get those folks in Geneva rolling.)

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

No one's been right yet...

Sidney Blumenthal?

What realm is this person in? (politics, business, a writer, philosophy)

Ad-man, Ozaphile, public intellectual. . .

More famous than Sullivan or Holbrooke. . .

Bigger than a breadbox. . .

George Will?

Ah, now, that would be telling.

A couple of hints: he lives in New York, but he's not from here. And though he was well-known in some circles from the early 1980s onward, it wasn't until the end of that decade that the man became truly world famous.

Salman Rushdie.

Bill Clinton? (Though the late 80s are a little early for him being world famous, eh?)

I think KF is right. Famous in the early 80s, world famous in the late 80s (Satanic Verses), wrote ad copy in the 70s, lives in NYC but not from the US

Indeed -- it was perhaps inevitable that a scholar of contemporary fiction would put the pieces together. Posner's 9th was in fact Salman Rushdie, who of course advanced into a dubious sort of world fame in 1988 with the fatwa and all that. I wanted to squeeze into the clue something about his winning the "Booker of Bookers" in I think 1993, but that would have made it too obviously literary.

Heh. I actually didn't know the bit about the ad copywriting (though it makes all kinds of sense). Learn something new every day.

What a relief! My next guess was going to be Bob Haldeman.

And, just for the record, I figured it wasn't Camille Paglia.

Ever notice how you never see Camilla Parker Bowles and Camilla Paglia together?

Mmmmm-hmmmm!

Now that you mention it, I can't remember ever seeing David Duke and Al Sharpton together, either. . .

Oh, and I'm pretty sure that I've heard Hitch say that Def Leppard deserved a Nobel. We were pretty freakin' baked at the time, though. He may have actually said Salman Rushdie, but with all those cheez puffs in his mouth it was hard to tell. We were definitely _listening_ to Def Leppard, though.

That's such a bloody lie, Johnny -- first of all, you were the one hogging the cheese puffs. I never touch 'em. Secondly, you were clearly too fried to remember that when you couldn't find the Leppard you had sworn was "somewhere in this fucking library, dammit" we wound up putting on Live/Dead. I seem to recall you passing out on Camilla Parker-Bowles lap during "Death Don't Have No Mercy."

Shut up you fat dipsomaniacal acid-jazz fans! You smuggle the shit into the fucking pope hut during cannes when you're busy cruising for barely legal french tail, bitchy-hitchy, and you know you like it missonary style with men in funny hats! You just best watch yr back, turncoat lefty.