Simon Doonan looks around, adopts "an expression of extreme gravitas", and concludes that we've become stupid and shallow and that everything was awesome, way back when. How does he know this? Well, if you make a list of the people that smart people think about when they think about the middle of the last century, it's startlingly light on vapid pseudo-celebrities; smart people were famous back then! A golden age, for sure. But look at today: Kim Kardashian! She is famous ... for being famous. A trivial nothing of a person has captured our attention! Moral decay!

Why, back then...

Even if you loathed opera, you knew and respected Maria Callas and her commitment to her art...

Popular singer was popular for singing. Was she popular for anything else?

...to mention nothing of her commitment to dramatic black eyeliner and swallowing a tapeworm to get thin, allegedly.

Mmm. Gravitas.

Why have we shoved all today’s accomplished people onto the back burner? Yes, we have Adele, but I am looking beyond the popular-music realm to the broad areas of accomplishment alluded to above and asking where, fer chrissakes, are the glamorous neurophysicists? Where are the charismatic, overachieving innovators and inventors? Steve Jobs? A unicorn! A lone example. You are going to have to do better than that if you wish to upend my hypothesis.

Okie dokie...

• Bill Gates
• Stephen Hawking
• Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Richard Branson
• James Cameron
• Mark Zuckerberg
• Elon Musk
• Jimmy Wales

Slackers. Slacking in obscurity. Nobody knows who they are.

If only we were as smart and serious-minded as those upstanding citizens of yore, those fine chin-strokers who didn't know anything about gossip, tabloids, sensationalism, shallow reporting or celebrity culture.

If only we were that smart.