Time's Most Influential People

Arts & Entertainment Forum

Who are the people Time magazine says help shape our world?

Artists & Entertainers

This diverse galaxy of influential stars has won fans and spawned imitators around the globe.

J.J. Abrams
George Clooney
Dixie Chicks
Ellen DeGeneres
Nicolas Ghesquiere
Wayne Gould
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Arianna Huffington
Ang Lee
Renzo Piano
Rain
Rachael Ray
Jeff Skoll
Kiki Smith
Will Smith
Zadie Smith
Howard Stern
Meryl Streep
Reese Witherspoon
Rob Pardo
Daddy Yankee
Tyra Banks
Dane Cook
Matt Drudge
Stephen Colbert


Scientists & Thinkers

Whether by harnessing the power of the Internet or probing the mysteries of the mind, they have come up with the big ideas of our time.

Mike Brown
Kelly Brownell
Nancy Cox
Richard Davidson
Kerry Emanuel
Jim Hansen
Zahi Hawass
Bill James
John Jones
Ma Jun
Jim Yong Kim
Steven Levitt
Jacques Rossouw
Andrew von Eschenbach
Jimmy Wales
Geoffrey West


Leaders & Revolutionaries

Dictators, democrats, holy men (and a TV host)—these are the people with the clout and power to change our world.

Muqtada al-Sadr
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
Hugo Chavez
George W. Bush
John McCain
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Ayman al-Zawahiri
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Pope Benedict
Condoleezza Rice
Wen Jiabao
Ehud Olmert
Pervez Musharraf
John Roberts
Ismail Haniya
Angela Merkel
Jigme Singye Wangchuk
Archbishop Peter Akinola
Junichiro Koizumi
Oprah Winfrey
Bill & Melinda Gates


Heroes & Pioneers

Meet some global icons—actors, politicians, athletes, entertainers and others—who are using their influence to do the right thing.

Bono
Michelle Wie
Wynton Marsalis
Angelina Jolie
Bill Clinton & George H.W. Bush
Steve Nash
Orhan Pamuk
Elie Wiesel
Jan Egeland
Joey Cheek
Chen Guangcheng
Ian Fishback
Wafa Sultan
Pernessa Seele
Ralph Lauren
Mukhtaran Bibi
Paul Simon
Al Gore
Katie Couric


Builders & Titans

Innovation, grand plans, style and substance—that's what it takes to be influential in the world of business.

Vikram Akula
Tom Anderson & Chris DeWolfe
Franz Beckenbauer
The Flickr Founders
Sean Combs
Jamie Dimon
Brian France
Tom Freston
Huang Guangyu
Omid Kordestani
Eddie Lampert
Patricia Russo
Sheikh Mohammed
Anne Mulcahy
Nandan Nilekani
Jim Sinegal
Steve Wynn
The Skype Guys
Dieter Zetsche

J.J. Abrams
The Double-Threat Storyteller
By TOM CRUISE

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

A story this size isn't enough for this man. It's hard to convey with brevity the extraordinary experience of knowing and working with J.J. Abrams. First of all, is there anything in a name—J.J.? Look at the Jays we have now—Jay Leno, J. Lo, Jay-Z—but he's got two Js. He was born to impinge and invade pop culture. Any person who has been exposed to his TV creations Alias or Lost has felt the rapture of his storytelling. He is a story dealer. He delivers what could be called the Lay's of yarns: you can't watch just one. I watched all of Alias' first season in two days, pushing all aside to the near destruction of my personal and business life. I had to tear myself away. They harken back to the classic cliffhangers of early cinema serials, with the bravado of my favorite pulp-fiction novels—the adventure, the characters, all of it. I just couldn't get enough. And in spite of the trepidations of many and sundry movie executives, I knew it was a no-brainer to hire him to direct the third Mission: Impossible. I couldn't wait to work with the Double J. From the very beginning, there was an insouciance that promised anything was possible. He's a creative juggernaut and someone who recognizes the joy of creating. We had great fun laying waste to the specious barriers and the each-person-does-his-own-job structure of filmmaking. J.J., who is just 39, even did three Industrial Light & Magic special-effects shots in the movie personally. He is an actor, writer, director, closet cartoonist, a composer, puppeteer, puzzlemaker, humorist, modelmaker, loving husband to his beautiful wife (can you believe this coincidence?) Katie and father of three glorious children. Gotta give it up for that J2.

Cruise is the star of Mission: Impossible III, which opens May 5

George Clooney
Hollywood's Man of Mystery
By BELINDA LUSCOMBE

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Some handsome men are like diamond bracelets. They show up on some woman's arm, and you admire them, but they never really seem worth what you'd have to pay. Others are like Swatches: cute, disposable and interchangeable. In this taxonomy, George Clooney is a family heirloom.

First, he has the elegant patina of age. Second, as man and movie star, he's more of a talking point than a bauble. Third, and most crucially, if he's not yours already, short of murder, he never will be.

Onscreen (and by many reports off) Clooney, 45 and Hollywood's hardiest bachelor, is one of those guys who's charming to everyone and close to few. If that is deliberate, it's genius. Nothing makes a star plummet to earth quicker than overfamiliarity. It's no accident that many of Clooney's most successful roles are men with a history. He plays a lot of ex-cons (Out of Sight; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; Ocean's Eleven; et al.), and won an Oscar for his portrayal of the controversial spy Robert Baer in Syriana. This is a guy with secrets. Secrets the right woman—whom every woman in the audience thinks is she—could unpack.

Frankly, with that air of mischief (which he earned) and those looks (which he didn't), he could coast. But he seems driven to do more. To direct. To fight poverty with the One campaign and one.org. Thus he gains that final thing heirlooms have over other gems: gravitas. Makes him almost worth killing for.

Dixie Chicks
Country's Defiant Darlings
By RICHARD CORLISS

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Natalie Maines' 15 words can't top George Bush's 16—the ones about uranium in Niger—for political effect. But when the Dixie Chicks played London in 2003, 10 days before the Iraq invasion, and Maines said, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas," the tremors in the conservative country music scene were seismic. The Chicks, whose previous two CDs had hit No. 1 on both the pop and country charts, lost album sales and radio play. Some fans stomped their discs to bits.

Maines, 31, Emily Robison, 33, and Martie Maguire, 36, didn't cringe and curtsy. On their tart, tasty new album, Taking the Long Way, they make stands and take hostages. The title song sets a defiant tone ("Wouldn't kiss all the ass that they told me to") that peaks in the CD's first single, the power-pop Not Ready to Make Nice. Maines' vocal intensity counters that of fans whose doting curdled into death threats, including "a letter/ Sayin' that I better shut up and sing/ Or my life will be over."

The Chicks, bless 'em, don't just carry a macrochip on their shoulders. There's instrumental virtuosity and a songwriting range that spans regions and decades. One country and one form of music aren't enough to contain them or stifle their passion. They'll sing but they won't shut up. That seems downright American.

Ellen DeGeneres
The Bravest Comedian In Show Biz
By BOB NEWHART

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Hearing from her appearances on talk shows that Ellen DeGeneres considers me an influence in her early stand-up fills me with a great deal of pride. When I was starting out in stand-up, many people influenced me, including Jack Benny, George Gobel and the duo Bob and Ray. When you first do stand-up, you tend to hide behind someone else, so that it isn't you dying out there, until you develop your own voice and become confident. DeGeneres, 48, has certainly done that in a very short time, as embodied in her "Camping and Hunting" routine, my personal favorite. Benny once shared an old saying with me: A comic says funny things. A comedian says things funny. DeGeneres says things funny.

Benny was the bravest comedian I have ever seen work because he wasn't afraid of silence. He was also the most honest comedian I've ever seen. DeGeneres is the bravest and most honest female comedian I have ever seen work because she publicly announced she's gay. That revelation could have ended her career, as she had to be aware, but she also knew she had to be honest. Thank God for Ellen DeGeneres. And it isn't often you see the name of a gay person and God in the same sentence these days.

Newhart, the stand-up comedian, will have a new book, I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This, out in the fall

Nicolas Ghesquiere
Meet Fashion's Double Threat
By KATE BETTS

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

He's often called a designer's designer and compared to Yves Saint Laurent in his ability to feel and shape fashion. As the creative director for the iconic house of Balenciaga, French-born Nicolas Ghesquiere, 35, has spent the past nine years shaping his own fashion vision as well as that of the greater global fashion business. His ability to wow the front-row crowd with a heady blend of street style and historical reverence is unparalleled. His signature silhouette of skinny pants and blouson jacket, a vestige of Ghesquiere's obsession with the '80s (think Bow Wow Wow), is a virtual staple in fashion's contemporary market. His is that rarest combination of talents: untethered creativity plus commercial savvy.

The son of a golf-course manager in the small town of Loudon, France, he liked to sketch images from his mother's glossy magazines. By age 15, Ghesquiere had obtained an internship at agnes b. in Paris and at 21 was working for Jean Paul Gaultier. But his big break came in 1996 when the owners of the then unfashionable house of Balenciaga hired him to design a line of uniforms for a Japanese licensing partner. He was quickly promoted, and by 2000 his clothes were coveted by the likes of Chloe Sevigny, Nicole Kidman and the Olsen twins. It seems the label was a particularly good fit for the soft-spoken Ghesquiere. Just like Cristobal Balenciaga, he has a relentless sense of innovation. He knows what you're going to want to wear before you do.

Wayne Gould
Sudoku's Typhoid Mary
By WILL SHORTZ

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Not since—well, ever—have the numbers 1 to 9 been so popular. In less than a year, sudoku, the numerical logic puzzle with the funny name (pronounced soo-doh-koo), has swept the globe. Nearly every major newspaper in America has now started a daily sudoku, as have a multitude of papers abroad. Sudoku books rule the puzzle and game best-seller lists, beating out crosswords, poker and everything else. And it's not just on paper. Handheld electronic devices, capable of generating a seemingly infinite number of original sudoku puzzles, sell briskly.

The man responsible for the mania is Wayne Gould, 60, a mild-mannered New Zealand puzzle enthusiast, formerly a judge in the criminal courts of Hong Kong. In 1997 he spotted a sudoku volume in a bookstore in Tokyo. He fell in love with the game. During the next few years he wrote a computer program for generating sudoku puzzles and—just as important—rating their difficulty. In November 2004 he persuaded the London Times to print them. The rest, as they say, is history.

While Gould didn't invent sudoku (credit goes to Howard Garns, an Indianapolis architect, in the 1970s; the puzzle eventually made its way to Japan, where it got its modern name), Gould had the genius to recognize its elemental, addictive appeal. He also had a brilliant if counterintuitive marketing model: give the puzzle away. More than 400 newspapers worldwide run his Pappocom sudoku puzzles free in return for promoting Gould's computer program and books. The results must be lucrative, as sales of the books alone have passed 4 million.

Sudoku lovers, be happy. Like the crossword, sudoku shows every sign of being here to stay.

Shortz is the crossword-puzzle editor of the New York Times

Philip Seymour Hoffman
The Actor Who Is Always "There"
By VANESSA REDGRAVE

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

The warm consonants of his name and my daughter Natasha Richardson's excited reaction when I told her that Philip Seymour Hoffman was cast to play Jamie Tyrone to my Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night stoked my imagination. I didn't know his work when we first sat down to read the play, and I didn't know the man when the Tyrone family took its last bow on Broadway in August 2003. But I saw this conjuror bring Jamie Tyrone out of the obscurity that embeds the greatest of scripts. No, I didn't see the conjuror. That's the whole point. I never saw the conjuror. Jamie Tyrone appeared. When? I don't know. The desperate, accusing eyes of the drunk looked hard into the eyes of his mother the morphine addict. A thousand horrible and tender memories pierced through the addictions, demanding appeasement at all costs. All this long before costume, hair and makeup. Harold Pinter writes of the great Irish actor Anew McMaster's King Lear and Othello. You see the old man in his 60s; you see and hear the actor's greatness. I can convey only a faint impression of Hoffman. If he had maintained his tousled hair and rehearsal trousers, he would still have been Jamie. Seven times a week, Hoffman propelled himself with one deep groan into the darkness of the stage, and as Pinter says of McMaster, "He got there." And he has stayed there; Hoffman, 38, won the Best Actor Oscar this year for his portrayal of Truman Capote. I hope I get to see him play King Lear when he's 50.

Redgrave won a Tony Award in 2003 for her portrayal of Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night

Arianna Huffington
The Woman Who Made a Sharp Left
By AL FRANKEN

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

I first met Arianna in 1995 at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. We had both been invited by the Washington Times, and I insisted on sitting next to the striking Greek-born redhead (though not, strictly speaking, redheaded-born Greek). We hit it off. Arianna introduced me to her friend Newt Gingrich. I told her the Gingrich revolution was a fraud. Arianna had signed on for the part of the revolution that wanted to unravel the social safety net and replace it with faith-based programs. She took the mission very seriously but soon discovered that the Gingrich Republicans did not. "Effective compassion" was just a fig leaf for closing down the Department of Education, cutting Medicare and getting rid of the Environmental Protection Agency. A disillusioned Arianna took to bed—with me—in our "Strange Bedfellows" segment on the TV show Politically Incorrect. No doubt because of my (persuasive) prowess and Arianna's intellectual openness, she switched, becoming a lefty. With her indefatigable persistence, resourcefulness and good humor, Arianna, 55, has gone from ambitious project to ambitious project with varying degrees of success, finding herself the proprietor of the widely read, hugely influential liberal blog Huffington Post. None of this would have happened were it not for me. And it seems oddly ironic that it is Arianna, not I, who has been named one of TIME's 100 most annoying (sorry, influential) people. Arianna should be writing about me.

Franken is a humorist and an author as well as a talk-show host on Air America Radio

Ang Lee
The Cross-Cultural Cowboy of Film
By ZIYI ZHANG

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Because of Ang Lee, so many more people know about Chinese filmmaking and about Chinese films. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a Chinese-language movie, mesmerized Western audiences in 2000. And last year, with Brokeback Mountain, yet another unimaginable success, both with critics and audiences, he captivated the entire world and reached the pinnacle of moviemaking.

Lee's ability to be such a huge cross-cultural influence is, I think, unique. His Taiwanese upbringing, which kept him deeply rooted in the Chinese way of being and living, combined with his well-informed understanding of Western mores and filmmaking techniques have allowed him to speak to those two worlds in a way no other director has.

It's as if when Lee, 51, makes a film, he is able to erase the cultural lines and have its profundity understood at a universal level. He creates characters that draw in an audience no matter what language they speak. His insight into the human heart crosses all boundaries.

I know he is also making a huge influence in the lives of younger filmmakers and actors. I, for one, will be forever indebted to him for casting me in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. When I went to audition for him, I had made just one film (The Road Home) and had never done any martial arts. I was 20 and didn't feel up to any of it. He still gave me that chance. Why? He saw what I could be capable of and was willing to let me have a go at it. How great is he?

I love that he never limits himself either. He's a good role model for all of us. Director Ang Lee lives in the future.

The Beijing-born Zhang starred most recently in Memoirs of a Geisha

Renzo Piano
The Bellissimo Builder
By RICHARD ROGERS

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Renzo Piano is an absolute master of light and lightness. He has a fantastic understanding of construction and the scale of pieces. I don't think there is anybody like him. He's the son of a builder who was very close to his father and very proud that he was a builder; it gives him tremendous roots. The unusual thing about Piano, 68, is that he works from small to big. I had never met an architect like that before.

He doesn't approach a building from the point of an idea; it grows out of the ground. He's also one of the most elegant architects I know. He's elegant in person, but also his structures are very elegant, very humanistic. They aren't pieces of abstract sculpture. They grow out of understanding how buildings go together and how light comes through them; he designs roofs that pull light in. Piano has moved on from the massive machine—like the Pompidou Center in Paris, which we designed together and which is full of people, like a big climbing frame—to very beautiful museums and libraries. Each one is a bit more elegant. Piano has terrific range. I love the San Nicola football stadium in Bari, Italy, which is a massive statement—big petals of concrete that come out of the ground. Then there is the Beyeler building in Switzerland that is as light as anything. I won't say which of his buildings is my favorite. I will say he's my favorite architect. He's one of the supreme modern architects of his generation. He's also a fanatical sailor. He designs his own boats. When we were first friends, almost 40 years ago, he designed a concrete sailing boat. And actually it worked very well.

Rogers designed London's Lloyd's Building and the Millennium Dome

Rain
The Magic Feet from Korea
By BRYAN WALSH

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Rain is big—big!—in Japan. The South Korean king of pop also fills seats in Beijing, Pusan and Bangkok. In Hong Kong his concerts sell out in 10 minutes, and across much of Asia, fans snap up pirated videos of his soap operas. Thanks to his angelic face, killer bod and Justin Timber— like dance moves, Rain, 23, has ridden the crest of hallyu, or the Korean wave, the Asia-wide obsession for that country's pop culture. But the ambition that lifted Rain (real name: Ji Hoon Jung) out of a one-room house in Seoul won't be sated by simply conquering the biggest continent on earth. Rain is looking east to the U.S., studying English day and night. He sold out two shows at Madison Square Garden's smaller venue in February, and that could be just a few drops of the deluge that some think will follow the release of his English-language debut album this fall. Yet even if Rain, whose style virtually clones American pop, fails to make it in the U.S., the trend he represents is here to stay. Rain is the face—and well-muscled torso—of pop globalism. Before he visited the U.S., Rain already had a fan base, thanks to Internet music sites, satellite TV and DVDs of his soap operas. Those are the same media that make it easier than ever for growing numbers of Americans to get their fix of Japanese anime, Bollywood films and Korean music—and vice versa. Pop culture no longer moves simply in a single direction, from the West to the rest of the world. Instead, it's a global swirl, no more constrained by borders than the weather. Rain, after all, falls on everyone.

Rachael Ray
Turning Up The Heat At Home
By MARIO BATALI

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

In fewer than five years, Rachael Ray, 38, has radically changed the way America cooks dinner. Her perky-girl-next-door swagger, her catchphrases for techniques and her dinner ideology of simpler, less expensive and just in time have sold billions of books and placed her at the top of the talent love heap at the Food Network, which has changed its focus from information exchange to helpful encouragement. Dinner at her house with my kids is tastier than I could have imagined. My boys went wild for the veal, meatball and pasta stoup, as she calls it, and, like her audience, were quickly softened to putty in her kitchen-confident hands, disarmed of their usual ingredient suspicions by Ray's "just try one" allure.

At book signings and public appearances, I have seen her fans faint, tremble, mumble, moan and ultimately hit the front of the line and embrace their food hero, repeating her mantras such as "let's run a knife through it" and "easy peasy" like Catholics at Sunday Mass. Mass—mass appeal—is the message. Ray dresses like a suburban American—not a chef (that is key)—and her ease with basic kitchen techniques and a simple-to-find-in-Topeka ingredient list does not challenge viewers but entices them to join her in the famous "carry the stuff from the fridge to the counter" move with her anti-food-stylist packaged groceries. The promise of a meal in less than 30 min. is delivered every day and is calculated to hit all those who ever had a family or thought of having one, coaxing them to eschew the trap of fast-food facility and truly cook—even the easy fast stuff—at home.

Chef Batali has a line of cookbooks, restaurants and food products

Jeff Skoll
The Maker of Take-Action Movies
By STEPHEN GAGHAN

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Two things about Jeff Skoll: he wants to make the world a better place, and he didn't found eBay. I first met Skoll, 40, at an abandoned mental hospital in the Maryland countryside. He tells me film can change the world. He tells me you can build companies based on trust. He speaks softly. His company, Participant Productions, has just relieved Warner Bros. of half the budget of my film Syriana. That seems sort of risky, and I'm very curious about Jeff. His last company was eBay—perhaps you've heard of it? He was its first employee, its first president. He tells me eBay's secret. "It's a community," he says, "and communities are built on trust." He tells me that he believes people are basically good, and if you give them the opportunity to be good, they will be. He tells me eBay's competitors believed the opposite, so they erected barriers to community, created escrow agents, credit checks, vouchsafed repositories of Social Security numbers—all predicated on the fear of being ripped off. "If you look at our track record, what we proved is that people are good," he says softly. "And that's pretty cool."

He tells me his new business is a movie company that asks of every project, How is this film going to make the world better? We're eating lunch on set, the abandoned mental hospital, which is perfect because nobody in Hollywood talks like that. It's too straightforward, too idealistic, not bottom-line oriented and certainly naive. In Hollywood people would rather be dead than naive. Skoll wants to change the world right now and believes film can help to do that. And how is he doing? Well, in less than three years he has made, among others, these films: Syriana; Good Night, and Good Luck; Murderball; North Country; and the soon to be released Fast Food Nation and An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's documentary about global warming. So far his releases have—incredibly—garnered 11 Academy Award nominations. Both Truth and Nation are being screened at Cannes, and the former looks to be a massive hit in the U.S. More important, as Jeff says, "This Al Gore film, whoa—this movie may save the planet. That's pretty cool."

Gaghan is the director and Oscar-winning screenwriter

Kiki Smith
Delighting in the Debased
By CHUCK CLOSE

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

In the face of an era (now more than 25 years in duration) dominated by appropriation over invention and innovation, what are we to make of the career of Kiki Smith? Her work is the epitome of innovation, invention and unique personal vision. While many artists, especially sculptors and installation artists, are steadfast members of a "slacker" generation, Kiki, 52, embraces craft, the dreaded C word of the art world. In myriad materials such as glass, fiber and beads (some associated more with amateurs and craft-show practitioners than with professional artists), she has embraced a dizzyingly diverse vocabulary of the demoted, debased and despised—and she makes you like it. All this she does while putting her unique and personal stamp on everything—thrilling audiences from the most sophisticated art-world insiders to the casual gallery goer. She is one of our greatest artists.

As children, Kiki and her twin sisters often sat at the feet of their father, minimalist sculptor Tony Smith, fashioning small cardboard models for his giant iconic sculptures. She also often mass-produced small modular units from cardboard, which would be used to incrementally build his larger more complicated pieces. It is tempting to assume that her penchant for keeping her hands busy with repetitive activities stems from her association with her father. It seems to me, however, that it could also derive from the women in her life. She has a real connectedness, in my opinion, to what used to be called women's work—quilting, crocheting, knitting—activities in which small units go together to make bigger pieces. This is an interest I share with her. I recently had the privilege of exhibiting next to her at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was thrilling to see so much of her work in one place. Always diverse, it was by turns magical, quirky, sexy, humorous, poignant, scatological and mesmerizing. Her work informed mine, and mine benefited by its association with hers. It helps to hang next to a great artist.

Close is the American painter, photographer and printmaker known for his distinctive photo-realist portraits

Will Smith
The Smart Mouth with a Sweet Heart
By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

He has become our designated Wise Guy—the cool dude confronting aliens, villains and wary, foxy chicks while armored in nothing more than a knowing attitude and an enviable wardrobe. But Will Smith, 37, is something more than clothes and quips. What we always sense about the Wise Guy is that he's essentially a Sweet Guy, eager to learn, eager to please, eager to be heroically helpful and romantically obliging. He may be our most insinuating movie star and, amid all his studly competitors, the one with the lowest profile. Mostly he lives quietly (with wife Jada Pinkett Smith and his three kids) and works hard.

It could have been otherwise, for he began his public life as a rapper at age 12 and was TV's Fresh Prince of Bel-Air when barely in his 20s. Youthful stardom can be toxic to a performer, but his ambition for better things paradoxically kept him centered. His performance as a kid pretending to be Sidney Poitier's son in the movie version of Six Degrees of Separation made him an actor to be reckoned with, while such roles as the smooth street cop opposite Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys and the edgy rookie to Tommy Lee Jones' seen-it-all alien chaser in Barry Sonnenfeld's great Men in Black, made him a star. Last year's megahit Hitch, in which love—and Smith—conquered all, even the critics, proved his durability. He once said he wanted his career to be both "dazzling" and "eclectic." It's a goal he has pretty much achieved.

Zadie Smith
Chronicler of Cultural Clash
By JANICE C. SIMPSON

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Cultures don't clash in Zadie Smith's books. They arm wrestle, get in one another's faces and climb into one another's beds. Smith's precocious debut novel, White Teeth, published in 2000, just three years after she graduated from Cambridge, centers on two World War II buddies—a white working-class Brit married to a Jamaican Jehovah's Witness and a Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh who imports what he thinks will be a traditional wife from the old country. But it's also the story of their children, who grow up, as Smith did, in a post-postcolonial London where the old gentlemen's agreements about class and race are being shredded. The book earned lavish critical praise, was turned into a TV mini-series and established a model for how to make sense—and art—out of the complexity, diversity and pluck that have defined the beginning of this century.

Smith, 30, likes to work big. Her narratives sprawl with Dickensian swagger. Her cultural references leap the high-low divide from John Milton to Eminem. Plus she's funny. Refugees from the era of political correctness and others who are easily offended probably should stay clear. Last year Smith published On Beauty, a novel set in the hothouse of American academia and scheduled to be made into a movie produced by Scott Rudin, who has adapted such provocative works as The Hours and Closer for the screen. Like White Teeth and her second novel, The Autograph Man it is simultaneously intellectual and visceral, a panoramic view of the way we live now.

Howard Stern
New King of Satellite
By DAVID SPADE

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Even though I didn't catch on to the Stern craze till the mid-'90s, I still consider myself a hard-core fan. I was wrapping up my run on Saturday Night Live and usually slept in every day, so I missed his show. But I knew he was a big deal. I had heard people repeating bits he did, and they always made me laugh. He came in one day to meet with Lorne Michaels, and everyone was freaking out. That was the first time I met him. Way taller than I thought (who isn't?) and quieter. And nice to everyone. Which still shocks me.

Stern, 52, was the first guy to make it seem cool to be a loser. To a lot of us who stay at home in a dark room eating Hot Pockets, he seemed like a buddy. He would make fun of good-looking famous people and make girls show their boobs. What's not to like about that? I was sold.

After 10 years, he can still make me laugh and get me jealous when he thinks of something so fast that I don't see it coming. He's at his best when he's complaining—the FCC, George W. Bush, whatever. Being a guest on his show, I get to hear the good and bad of my so-called life and career. Let me tell you, it's a lot easier having Katie Couric tell me I look cute (as she did one day) than volunteering to go in and have Howard dissect every loser aspect of me that I would rather keep hidden. If I didn't believe he thought I was funny, I'd never go on. He doesn't do a lot of "Your movie's great."

He does a lot of "You're not good-looking. Girls date you only because you're on TV. Most of your movies suck. You probably killed Chris Farley. You're jealous of Sandler. I have a caller who says he hates you and another who thinks you're gay." Not exactly James Lipton. But because he makes me laugh, it's a lot (a little) easier to take.

The other day, I was pulling into the parking garage at my gym, listening to Stern. I did what I usually do if Stern is on a roll: I parked right before going underground so it wouldn't cut out. I turned to my right, and some guy in a Subaru was parked next to me laughing. I rolled down the window and asked, "Stern?", and he nodded. Two more fans out of millions having another laugh with the King of All Media. Or at least the Subaru.

Spade is the host of The Showbiz Show on Comedy Central

Meryl Streep
You Should Hear Her Sing
By ROBERT ALTMAN

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006
Meryl Streep is at once angelic and down to earth. She's perhaps the smartest actor I have worked with. She needed not one thing from me, and in any case, no guidance, direction or suggestion I could have given would have matched her flawless instincts. That made me feel blissfully inadequate. On A Prairie Home Companion she glided onto the set, her personal warmth transfixing us all and setting the tone for the day.

I have long admired the choices Meryl has made in her career. She's fearless. She navigates comedy and tragedy with equal ease and can move from one to the other in the blink of an eye. Working with her, you come to realize that her humanity off the set is no less remarkable. Meryl may be the most celebrated actor in the world, but she has never succumbed to the notion of celebrity. Her dedication to her privacy and family is fierce and rare.

Although Meryl, 56, chose to be an actor (a decision for which gratitude is the only response imaginable), I came to understand on the Prairie set why that might have been a terrible mistake. Because Meryl can sing. And I can't tell you how happy it will make you to hear her do it. When Meryl and Lily Tomlin sang Goodbye to My Mama, everyone on set was in tears. Moments like those make you suppose you might be doing something right. If only in choosing your actors. Meryl's one in a million.

Altman's A Prairie Home Companion will be out in June

Reese Witherspoon
The Look of a Competitor
By LUKE WILSON

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

I made two films with Reese Witherspoon, Legally Blonde and Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde. In the first one, I played a high-powered lawyer who becomes her boyfriend. In the second one, I played a boyfriend—the high-powered lawyer part didn't seem to figure so much—who's becoming her husband. Although she had made some pretty good films before that, including Pleasantville and Election, Reese wasn't really a household name until she played Elle Woods. And of course, she hadn't yet won her Oscar for playing June Carter in Walk the Line. But you could sort of tell she had a future.

There is something in Reese's face and expression that reminds me of certain great athletes I've met. It is friendly and open, yet in their eyes there is the gleam of the competitor. This is not to be confused with cockiness. That would be a waste of time and energy. It is the look of someone with the will to win. The will to work hard. Sure, there is nothing wrong with coming in second. It's just that it's not what's right for them. As a mother, as a wife, as a filmmaker, Reese, who has only just turned 30, gets the job done. Quietly. With decency.

Mostly I just liked being around her. When people ask me what it was like to work with her, I say, "I was always on my best behavior around her." I wonder if that's why she was so good as June Carter. Reese has the same air of responsibility.

I met her mother one time on the set. I'll be damned if she didn't have the same look in her eyes.

Wilson can next be seen in Hoot,and later this summer will star in My Super Ex-Girlfriend

Rob Pardo
Architect of Virtual Worlds
By LEV GROSSMAN

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

There's a country of 6 million people that's not on any map. It's called World of Warcraft, and it's a virtual country, a computer-generated fantasy environment that you can access, for a monthly subscription fee, via the Internet. It's also one of the most immersive and successful video games ever created, and it could be the future of electronic entertainment. Rob Pardo, 35, vice president of game design for Blizzard Entertainment (although minor deity would also be an applicable title), led the team that designed World of Warcraft, which involved generating from scratch history, geography, anthropology and ecology of a fully realized fantasy world spread over two continents. The game's 6 million fee-paying players can slay monsters, go on quests and even perform everyday tasks like fishing, cooking and tailoring. If World of Warcraft—aficionados call it just WoW—gets any more popular, it may be up for a seat in the U.N.

Pardo didn't invent this kind of game (which enthusiasts refer to as "massively multiplayer"); he merely perfected it. It takes an obsessive mind to make sure there's something interesting going on everywhere in an entire world, all the time, for both newbies and veteran players. If anything, he's almost too good: some players have a tendency to confuse their virtual lives with their real ones. WoW is so addictive that among gamers, it's known by the nickname Warcrack.

Daddy Yankee
Reigning Champ Of Reggaeton
By CAROLINA A. MIRANDA

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Any visitor clicking on a link on Daddy Yankee's website, daddyyankee.com, is greeted with the jingle of a cash register ringing up sales. There couldn't be a better metaphor for the meteoric success of Puerto Rico's supreme ambassador of reggaeton, Latin music's latest thing. Yankee has sold 2 million copies of his album Barrio Fino in the U.S. He has a $20 million record contract with Interscope and a lucrative endorsement deal with Pepsi. And he—with his many diamonds—has graced various U.S. magazine covers, from the Source to Latina.

It's an impressive resume for a kid raised in the rough-and-tumble barrios outside San Juan. Born Raymond Ayala at some point in the 1970s (he refuses to reveal his age), Yankee has been at the forefront of a two-decades-long musical movement that is a stew of Jamaican, Panamanian and Puerto Rican styles. The music is hardly subtle (sample lyric: "My [woman] doesn't stop when it's time to work her bum bum"). But it's infectiously danceable. And Yankee's rapid-fire rapping, boyish good looks and exceptional work ethic have helped turn what is basically club music into an international phenomenon. Although some critics have already heralded the end of the reggaeton craze, Yankee believes that it's a form that is just being born. Other stars in the genre, such as Tego Calderon and Ivy Queen, have also attracted the attention of the major labels. Expect a lot more registers to be ringing.

Tyra Banks
Supermogul with A Business Model
By HEIDI KLUM

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Everyone knows Tyra as supermodel, as host and producer of America's Next Top Model and her own talk show, and as whip-smart business mogul. She is all those things. But I also know her as a close friend. When I started as an "Angel" for Victoria's Secret, Tyra was already an established pro there. During lunch, I'd grill her about the business: whom she would recommend as an accountant, an attorney, a business manager. Not everyone was, let's say, superfriendly, but Tyra was always nice. She shared her experience and knowledge with me. In this industry there are a lot of people who don't want to help each other, but I guess Tyra was and is secure because she was always willing to share what she had learned—and, trust me, I asked a lot of questions.

That open, warm side of her was more apparent as we became friends and spent a lot of time together at shoots. Tyra and I could always be goofy together and remind each other that, hey, this is fashion, not life or death. On the flip side, when situations got too crazy, we could always turn to each other for a reality check.

I'm not surprised that Tyra, 32, has achieved such phenomenal success. She's one of the most hardworking people I know—I've seen her go straight from a late night of press to an early-morning shoot with no complaints. Even more important, she is passionate about her projects and compassionate toward the people involved in them. Her appeal is obvious to anyone who knows her, whether personally or professionally or just from her shows. She is dynamic, positive and real, and we are only at the beginning of her special brand of global domination.

Klum is a supermodel, businesswoman and host of the reality show Project Runway

Dane Cook
Standing Out in the Art of Stand-Up
By RICHARD ZOGLIN

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Once upon a time, stand-up comics ruled the earth. You remember, back in the '70s, when pioneers like George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Steve Martin played to packed arenas, released best-selling records and seemed to be the voices of a generation. Then Saturday Night Live took over the comedy world, and the iconoclasts were replaced by the satiric ensemble, sketch players, guys who could do a Bill Clinton impression. Enter Dane Cook, who just may swing the pendulum back.

After serving his time in the comedy-club trenches, Cook, 34, broke through with a hot website, offering downloads of routines and chatting with fans. His second album, Retaliation, debuted last year at No. 4 on the Billboard pop chart, the hottest-selling comedy album since Martin's Wild and Crazy Guy in 1978. Now Cook has an HBO deal and a budding movie career—and has hostedSNL too. His targets are familiar—sex, dating, eating at Burger King. But what makes him stand out is his hyperarticulate exuberance. He greets life's exasperations not with the whine of Seinfeld or the assaultive rant of Chris Rock but with the thrill of a class prankster turned cultural anthropologist. He longs to own a pet monkey, take part in a heist, watch a pedestrian get hit by a car. When a couple in the supermarket line get into a "nothing fight," Cook abandons his cart to go listen. Creeped out by that weird guy in the office? Cook's advice: make friends. Then when he starts shooting up the office, he'll skip you, offering instead a friendly, "Thanks for the candy." Sweet.

Matt Drudge
Redefining What's News
By ANA MARIE COX

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

So Matt Drudge was right. Not about Bill Clinton's love child or John Kerry's affair, but he was right about this: "We are all newsmen now." Drudge hates the word blogger, yet his exclusive about the former President and intern Monica Lewinsky set out an animated-gif siren for an army of armchair pundits to follow. Today a flotilla of freelance fact checkers make life more difficult for the salaried employees of what has come to be known as the MSM, or mainstream media. With 10 million readers daily, Drudge, 39, has paved a generous path for the blogs; without his example, semipro scribes might not have unearthed "Rathergate." Of course, the price for such cyberscoops has been the coarsening of the evening news; Drudge has goaded traditional media into playing catch-up on sordid stories they once safely ignored.

But just because Drudge has followers doesn't mean anyone can fill his shoes. The fedora, acquired long before the profiles started and yet, one suspects, in anticipation of them, his whine, his obsession with injured pets—Drudge may have seen journalism's future, but he's also a throwback to its past. It's easy to imagine him at an old Hearst paper, staging photos and conjuring wars. Now the source of a seven-figure income,drudgereport.com hasn't changed much in eight years. A ludicrous combination of gossip, political intrigue and extreme weather reports, it's still put together mostly by the guy who started out as a convenience-store clerk. Of his big break, he is both modest and defiant: "It took just two fingers, a modem and guts," he once told Miami New Times. "And not giving a [well, you know]!" Matt Drudge may have lowered standards, but in the MSM we still can't curse.

Founder of the blog Wonkette, Cox is a Time.com columnist

Stephen Colbert
What's So Funny About This Guy?
By BRIAN WILLIAMS

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Many people are surprised to learn that Stephen Colbert was born in France. As a young boy in the town of Fronsac in the Bordeaux region, he would go home each day after school and work for his parents on the family farm. After his father's goat-cheese business failed, Colbert went by boat to the U.S. To help make ends meet (and egged on by friends who adored his Franco-American delivery and comic timing), Colbert performed at a small comedy club in New York City one Friday night on a lark. As the French say, "Il a tue [He killed]!" You know the rest of the story.

Actually, none of that is true. I made the whole thing up. And in that, this piece has a lot in common with The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. Colbert, 41, is the bawdy counterweight to cable-news talking heads who each night, just a few channels away, deliver a fresh supply of material for parody. In Colbert Country, a guest is more of a foil than a source of intelligence. The high and mighty drop by anyway, along with the mediocre and recently demoted. As a spin-off graduate of the Jon Stewart school of comedy, Colbert launched under intense scrutiny and quickly delivered. While his nightly audience is tiny (forgive me here) by network-evening-news standards—1 million viewers a night vs. roughly 25 million to 30 million watching the networks—Colbert is sitting atop a ratings gold mine, as his young viewers make up the demographic most attractive to advertisers.

My friends tell me that Colbert's mimicry of the narcissistic, preening, puffed-up personalities who inhabit TV news these days is spot on. Personally, I don't see it, but they find him very funny.

Williams is the anchor and managing editor of the NBC Nightly News

Mike Brown
Pluto's Worst Nightmare
By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Mike Brown honestly doesn't care whether Pluto is a planet or not. "It's like asking whether Australia is a continent," says the Caltech astronomer. "The word has no formal scientific definition." Nevertheless, Brown brought that long-simmering issue to a head last summer by discovering an object he nicknamed Xena. It's similar to Pluto—only bigger. If Pluto is a planet, as astronomers have classified it for more than 70 years, then we have at least 10 planets in the solar system. If Xena isn't, we have only eight.

Fortunately for Brown, 40, defining the word planet is the job of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which has been wrestling with the question for months now. Brown's forte is finding heavenly bodies, and there's nobody better at it than he. Since the late 1990s, Brown has been scanning the skies with an old 48-in. telescope that is too small for exploring distant galaxies but perfect for the sort of patient, methodical search needed to find dim worlds out beyond Neptune.

Brown and his team have already found at least five such bodies, including Santa and Easter Bunny (like Xena, these are nicknames) and Quaoar and Sedna (these names are real). None of them are as big as Pluto, but they are all substantial worlds in themselves—and all challenge the simple nine-planet model of our solar system that most of us grew up with. And there are undoubtedly more to come. Any number of small planets could still be lurking out there. If the IAU ends up broadening the definition of what counts as a planet, Brown will, in that instant, become the most successful planet hunter in the history of our solar system.

Kelly Brownell
Battling America's Obesity Epidemic
By MIKE HUCKABEE

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Kelly Brownell isn't "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" and is clearly not "lovin' it" when it comes to fast-food restaurants. One of the leaders in the fight against childhood obesity, Brownell, 54, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, has helped set the U.S. agenda by calling for a ban on sweetened-cereal ads aimed at kids and a tax on high-fat, low-nutrition food (with the revenue earmarked for children's nutrition). He wonders whether Ronald McDonald on a billboard is any better than Joe Camel.

While I think Brownell is wrong to criminalize Ronald, we agree about the dangers of childhood obesity. With health-care costs rising faster than even gas prices, obesity is a health crisis that could cripple our country for generations to come unless significant changes are made.

Brownell, in my view, oversimplifies the problem by suggesting such steps as removing soft-drink machines from schools, and I fear that a tax on calories would just end up penalizing the poor. All things work in moderation. There is nothing wrong with a child enjoying a modest quantity of Cocoa Puffs or an occasional trip through the Golden Arches. But I agree with Brownell that children and their parents need better food choices and that it's important for kids to get outside for some regular exercise. I thank him for putting us all on the right track.

Huckabee is the Governor of Arkansas. In the two years after he learned he had diabetes, he lost 110 lbs.

Nancy Cox
Heading Off the Next Flu Pandemic
By ALICE PARK

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

In her lab at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, virologist Nancy Cox is engineering a nightmare public-health scenario: growing the bird-flu virus together with a highly contagious human influenza strain. No, she's not crazy. She figures a merger of those two microbes—which could happen in any person anywhere in the world and trigger a deadly pandemic—is too important to leave to chance. So she's putting the microbes together in a controlled way, under strict safety conditions, to see whether all the hand wringing is justified. "The goal is to see if these gene combinations are actually viable or not," she says.

There may be no better person to oversee the study than Cox, 57. A soft-spoken native of Iowa who chooses her words carefully because they carry such weight in the medical community, Cox is analyzing blood samples from patients around the world infected with bird flu, looking for clues that would help her design a vaccine. "When you work with an organism like influenza that's ever changing, you learn something new every year, so it never gets dull," she says. Already she has learned enough to suspect that one vaccine won't be enough; Cox believes we'll likely need at least two different vaccines tailor-made against specific viral strains. So far, the virus is winning; it mutates too quickly to be pinned down. But if anyone can do it, it's Cox.

Richard Davidson
East Meets West in His Laboratory
By ANDREW WEIL, M.D.

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Although they both work with the same organ—the brain—the Western tradition represented by neuroscience and the Eastern tradition represented by meditation seemed to have little to do with each other—until Richard Davidson started collaborating with the Dalai Lama. Davidson is a researcher at the University of Wisconsin and a pioneer in the exciting frontier of mind-body medicine. At the university's W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, he is correlating mental and emotional states with observable patterns of brain activity.

His best-known work focuses on neuroplasticity, the capacity of the brain to develop and change throughout life, something Western science once thought impossible. By wiring up Tibetan Buddhist monks—masters of the art of dispassionately observing the inner workings of their own minds—Davidson, 54, has been able to demonstrate precisely how meditation alters brain function. His research legitimizes, for scientists as well as monks, the study of internal states of consciousness by linking them to the objective reality of electrical activity in the central nervous system. It also gives us a handle for understanding spiritual experiences that have heretofore seemed purely subjective and beyond the reach of scientific investigation. For example, his work identifies the left prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain behind the left forehead, as a locus of neural activity strongly associated with deep meditation.

Davidson's tools are the new technologies of brain science: quantitative electrophysiology, positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. By identifying interactions between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala (a key center for processing memory and emotion), his studies may lead to new therapeutic approaches for mood and anxiety disorders. Who knows? They may also reveal, we can hope, strategies for protecting ourselves from age-related memory loss and cognitive decline.

East and West not only meet in Richard Davidson's laboratory; they are also starting to exchange a great deal of useful information about human experience and human potential.

Weil is a TIME columnist and the author of Healthy Aging

Kerry Emanuel
The Man Who Saw Katrina Coming
By JEFFREY KLUGER

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

It's easy to argue about the hypothetical causes and effects of global warming. It's a lot harder for any serious disagreement to continue when extreme weather is demolishing a major American city. The U.S. experienced just such a moment of clarity last year when Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, awakening all of us to the true cost of climate change. It was Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped us make the connection.

Less than a month before Katrina hit, the journal Nature published an extensive study that Emanuel had conducted in which he surveyed the power of roughly 4,800 hurricanes going back decades. His findings are as damning as they are scary. In that span of time—the period during which climatologists have been warning that greenhouse gases are steadily raising atmospheric and ocean temperatures—the power of the storms doubled. Warm ocean water is like nitroglycerine for hurricanes, and while many researchers had been predicting an explosion of more powerful storms, Emanuel, 51, offered evidence that it was actually happening. "I didn't expect to get people's attention with this paper," he says, "but the timing, so close to Katrina, may have helped wake them up some."

Wake up they did. According to a TIME/ABC News/Stanford University poll, 85% of Americans now agree—about as close to unanimity as a fractious population like the U.S.'s ever reaches—that the earth is growing warmer. Emanuel alone did not drive us to that understanding. But just as nature has its trigger points, so does public opinion, and Emanuel was clearly one of the forces that nudged us across an important line. Before you can begin to solve a problem, after all, you have to accept that you've got one.

Jim Hansen
The Wisdom of a Climate Crusader
By AL GORE

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Nearly 20 years ago, as the chair of the U.S. Senate science subcommittee holding hearings on climate change, I questioned a brilliant scientist from NASA—a brave, plainspoken Iowan who had the audacity to believe that the facts speak for themselves, that science should drive policy and that politics should not be allowed to distort the data. Jim Hansen had become a thorn in the side of many who resisted the idea that global warming was real. The business-as-usual occupants of the White House at the time—then as now—tried to censor and ridicule his conclusions and silence his warnings.

Hansen, 65, continues to document and explain the catastrophic implications of climate disruption caused by human greenhouse-gas pollution. The energy industry and its apologists continue to distort his findings, and the current White House continues to try to silence him. But Hansen has had the courage to stay and fight for the right to tell the truth as he sees it—and to fight against the pollution-as-usual policies that he describes as "a recipe for environmental disaster."

His message is beginning to sink in. The world's premier climate modeler has helped push Americans to their own tipping point—to the realization that global temperatures are rising dramatically, that the consequences are grave and that there are solutions available that can reverse those planet-altering trends. He not only speaks truth to power—over and over again—but he also has succeeded in making concepts such as "dangerous anthropogenic interference" understandable to a world that will be tragically affected by it if we do not change our energy-consumption habits.

When the history of the climate crisis is written, Hansen will be seen as the scientist with the most powerful and consistent voice calling for intelligent action to preserve our planet's environment.

Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth will be released May 24

Zahi Hawass
The Guardian Of Egypt's Antiquities
By ELIZABETH PETERS

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

He walks briskly toward the television cameras, the perfect image of a modern-day archaeologist—having traded his suit for jeans, blue work shirt and trademark Indiana Jones hat. The confident stride is justified. Zahi Hawass, 58, head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, is The Man. He determines who will excavate in Egypt and when and where. Unlike some of his predecessors, he does not keep a low profile. He ranges the world lecturing, making TV appearances and turning out a stream of books and articles.

Hawass has to be—and is—a master of multitasking. A friend and I once had coffee and shisha (water pipe) with him in Cairo. He sipped his coffee, chatted with us, dictated to a secretary and took phone calls more or less simultaneously. He has been described as theatrical, passionate and controversial. He is passionate about Egypt and its antiquities and doesn't hesitate to use words like magical, thrilling and marvelous when describing his discoveries in the Valley of the Golden Mummies or his recent investigation of the battered mummy of Tutankhamen. He isn't afraid of controversy—in fact, some might say he courts it. He makes news by demanding the return of objects "stolen" from Egypt by excavators and museums. (The word is accurate in some cases, not all.) His recent edicts restricting new excavation, particularly in such popular sites as Saqqara and the Valley of the Kings, have aroused the ire of some foreign archaeologists.

Yet those regulations as well as his focus on conservation may be Hawass's most lasting legacy. There are already too many monuments in danger of destruction, both by natural forces and by the tourism on which Egypt's economy largely depends—and which Hawass has done so much to encourage.

Peters' most recent mystery set in Egypt is Tomb of the Golden Bird

Bill James
Baseball's Sultan of Stat
By JOHN HENRY

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

The Red Sox raised a few eyebrows by hiring maverick statistician Bill James in 2002. That was before the team won its first World Series in 86 years. When I asked our general manager, Theo Epstein, what he thought about James' impact on the game, he said, "The thing that stands out for me is Bill's humility. He was an outsider, self-publishing invisible truths about baseball while the Establishment ignored him. Now 25 years later, his ideas have become part of the foundation of baseball strategy. But where's Bill? Where's the gloating? Where's the publicist? He's like somebody outlining the Internet in the '80s and watching silently as it comes to pass."

What we now know as Moneyball and sabermetrics came from James, 56. He taught us, among other things, that individual ballparks have a profound effect on a ballplayer's production, that the largest variable determining how many runs a team will score is how many times the leadoff hitter gets on base, that much of what we perceive as pitching is actually defense. What I call Jamesian principles infuse our thinking with a perspective that is objective rather than subjective. What James demands is that we take the time to listen to what the game is telling us over and above what we are predisposed to believe.

Henry is the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox

John Jones
The Judge Who Ruled for Darwin
By MATT RIDLEY

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Judge John Jones must have seemed like the answer to creationists' prayers: a Bush-appointed Republican federal judge, and a Lutheran to boot, chosen by lot to decide whether school-board guidance on the teaching of intelligent design to public schools in Dover, Pa., breached the First Amendment separation of church and state. When Jones delivered his judgment in December, however, he proved to be the answer to Darwinians' prayers instead.

In a rebuke to the proponents of intelligent design, Jones called the phrase "a mere relabeling of creationism," intended to get around the 1987 judicial ban on teaching creationism as science in public schools, and a "breathtaking inanity" that fails the test as science. He castigated its proponents and said Dover's students, parents and teachers "deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom."

Intelligent design was indeed a euphemism specially intended to get around judges. But it didn't get past Jones, 50, the grandson of a golf-course developer of Welsh ancestry, whose previous claims to fame were a failed attempt to privatize Pennsylvania's state liquor stores as chairman of the Liquor Control Board—and banning Bad Frog Beer on the grounds that its label was obscene. He now finds himself an unlikely hero for scientists, many of whom credit his decision with taking some steam out of the intelligent-design movement.

Had Jones been a Democrat or an atheist, his judgment might have had less impact. He displayed not only a quick wit in the courtroom but also an easy grasp of complex arguments about such things as the molecular motor that drives the bacterial flagellum—which the creationists believe has "irreducible complexity" and therefore could not have been designed except by a designer. Perhaps now, after Jones, people will accept that if they want to teach children about God, they should do so in church, not in science classes.

Ridley's biography of Francis Crick comes out next month

Ma Jun
The Man Who Would Save the People's Water
By ED NORTON

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

It's safe to say that if you put Ma Jun's face on a billboard in Beijing next to basketball star Yao Ming or screen beauty Ziyi Zhang, your average passerby wouldn't have a clue who Ma is. But those who know might argue that China needs heroes like him much more urgently than it does a sports giant or a movie star.

As the rapid industrial expansion of the world's most populous nation surges forward, China's decisions about how to use its natural resources and control its pollution will affect environmental health around the world.

Ma Jun's 1999 book China's Water Crisis may be for China what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was for the U.S.—the country's first great environmental call to arms. A journalist turned environmental advocate, Ma has emerged as a powerful voice in China, raising the alarm about the potentially catastrophic consequences of heedless, unsustainable growth.

One might wonder how an individual takes on the policies of China's tightly controlled one-party state apparatus without great personal risk, but Ma, 38, is surprisingly optimistic.

"There is now more awareness of environmental rights and the rights of people as citizens," he told the New York Times last year. "For such a major problem, they believe they have the right to know about it and at least have their views heard. For the first time, there is some legal basis for public participation ... a major step forward."

My father Ed Norton Sr., who helped found the Nature Conservancy's landmark collaboration with the People's Republic in Yunnan province, says that during its first industrial century, the U.S. had plenty of time to learn from its mistakes. "China doesn't have that kind of time," he says. "They are going to have to learn faster and leapfrog the problems we created in the West."

It won't happen without people of courage and vision. People like Ma Jun.

Norton, the actor, will be seen next in Down in the Valley, which he also produced

Jim Yong Kim
Treating the "Untreatable"
By TRACY KIDDER

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

What does it mean to be the chief of both the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Division of Social Medicine at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital? For Jim Yong Kim, 46, it means trying to solve some of the world's most difficult problems.

Ten years ago, Kim was working in the slums of Lima, Peru, with a team of doctors from the charity Partners in Health, based in Cambridge, Mass. They encountered an epidemic of drug-resistant TB. Experts had long agreed that it was impossible to treat this disease in such a setting. Kim and his colleagues proved the experts wrong. Moreover, Kim led a campaign that forced down the prices of the necessary drugs about 90%. Since then, 36 countries have adopted the protocols Kim and his colleagues devised.

"If we can do this with drug-resistant TB, why not with AIDS?" Kim said to me when I first met him. In wealthy countries, AIDS has become a treatable disease. But in what is euphemistically called the developing world, millions still die from it every year, and only 300,000 were being treated as of 2003. Working for the World Health Organization, Kim created a campaign to increase the number treated to 3 million people by 2005. He called the effort 3 by 5. An impossible goal, many experts felt, and they were right. But by 2005, more than 1 million new patients were being treated, and the total in Africa had increased eightfold. In the high councils of international health, the 3 by 5 campaign was, as Kim put it, "like a bowling ball thrown into a chess match." Officials who two years ago were arguing against universal treatment for AIDS now say they were in favor of it all the time.

One of his students told me that Kim was his most inspirational instructor; he made you believe you could change the world. I have no idea what he'll do next. But looking forward to it gives me a sensation that feels a lot like hope.

Kidder described Kim's work in Mountains Beyond Mountains

Steven Levitt
Thinking Way, Way Outside The Box
By MALCOLM GLADWELL

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Not long after Freakonomics came out, Steven Levitt and I had a public debate at a salon in downtown Manhattan. The subject was crime. In my book The Tipping Point, I had argued that the cluster of innovative policing strategies known as "broken windows" played a big role in the dramatic drop in New York City's crime rate. Levitt and his co-author Stephen Dubner argued, to the contrary, that "broken windows" was an illusion and that other factors, like the demographic changes brought about by the legalization of abortion, played a much bigger role. It was a straightforward back-and-forth. Levitt got up and made his case. I got up and made mine. But halfway through, I glanced over at Levitt and had a realization that I'm not sure I've ever had before with an intellectual opponent—that if I made my case persuasively and cogently enough, he would change his mind. He was, in other words, listening.

This is not a great moment for listeners in American society. The public conversation is dominated by those whose minds are unalterably made up, and we have come to view the man or woman whose views remain steadfast, even in the face of overwhelmingly evidentiary assault, as a kind of moral hero. Those people are not heroes, of course. They're usually just stubborn.

In Freakonomics and in his astonishing, wide-ranging academic work at the University of Chicago, Levitt, 38, reminds us that we owe a bigger debt to those with the humility to go wherever logic and discovery lead them. Does the possibility that abortion reduces crime raise uncomfortable questions? Of course it does. But Levitt believes that if we are to have an honest conversation about things like crime and abortion, we are obliged to consider those phenomena in all their dimensions. It takes a certain amount of courage to make an argument like that. And by the way, if you can come up with some good evidence to the contrary, Levitt will listen, and if you're really convincing, he's the sort of person who will change his mind. That takes courage too.

Gladwell is the author of The Tipping Point and Blink

Jacques Rossouw
Women's Health Is His Passion
By BARBARA EHRENREICH

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

As far as medical research was concerned, males were forever the default sex and women little more than a footnote. Long-term studies of health issues usually excluded women as too hormonally variable, so their medical care tended to be based on hunches rather than science. The most famous one went like this: estrogen cures hot flashes, so it might prevent other age-related ills like heart disease and dementia, right?

No, fatally wrong. When the U.S. government finally put together a large, multiyear study of older women's health—the Women's Health Initiative (WHI)—estrogen supplements, when combined with progestin as part of hormone-replacement therapy, actually increased women's risk of heart disease, stroke, dementia and breast cancer. More revelations from the WHI have rocked the biological world of women in just the past few months: calcium supplements don't necessarily save their bones, and a low-fat diet—long touted as the acme of nutritional virtue—doesn't seem to do much good at all.

A lot of people, most of them women, deserve a round of applause for their role in the WHI's myth-busting operation. U.S. politicians like Barbara Mikulski, Olympia Snowe and Pat Schroeder first pushed the government to recognize women as a biologically distinct demographic. Dr. Bernadine Healy, former director of the National Institutes of Health, launched the WHI. And what about the more than 160,000 women who took part in those studies, patiently following their assigned regimens and letting WHI physicians stalk them for years at a stretch?

But the standing ovation goes to a man, Jacques Rossouw, 63, the South African-born physician who heads the WHI. A modest fellow, he considers himself "gender impaired," but maybe it took a man to make it happen—"a real insider," as Cindy Pearson, director of the National Women's Health Network, puts it. "He's passionate and committed, articulate. It may have been 'women's work,' but he was the man for the job."

Ehrenreich is an essayist and author of Bait and Switch and Nickel and Dimed

Andrew von Eschenbach
Entering the Fray at the FDA
By MICHAEL JACOBSON

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

The FDA wields enormous influence on American lives. It regulates roughly a quarter of the U.S. economy, including food, drugs, medical devices and cosmetics. But despite a long-standing reputation for operating above politics, the agency for the past several years has been roiled with problems of a political nature: advisory committees accused of conflicts of interest; a partisan approach to the Plan B contraceptive drug; the recent finding that marijuana has no medical benefit, despite evidence that it does; and the sudden and mysterious resignation of Lester Crawford, who served as commissioner for only two months. Stepping into that battleground is Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach, 64, a longtime Bush family friend and urological surgeon who left the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in 2002 to head the National Cancer Institute. Given the political minefield surrounding Plan B—some powerful Senators haven't forgotten that the Bush Administration broke its promise to decide whether Plan B should be sold over the counter—von Eschenbach may never be confirmed as commissioner. If the Senate does hold confirmation hearings, the doctor will have to overcome suspicions that he is more concerned with drug approvals than with drug safety.

Although his career has been focused on curing disease, von Eschenbach has a unique opportunity to prevent disease by bolstering the long-neglected food side of the agency. Americans spend $30 billion a year for drugs to treat hypertension and heart disease, and obesity costs the nation $100 billion more. Yet apart from occasionally updating food labels, the FDA does almost nothing to improve our diet. (Just helping Americans halve their salt consumption and banning partially hydrogenated vegetable oil could save 100,000 lives a year.) If von Eschenbach spends as much energy on foods as he is expected to spend on drugs, he could make a signal contribution to the public's health.

Jacobson is executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest

Jimmy Wales
The (Proud) Amateur Who Created Wikipedia
By CHRIS ANDERSON

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

"Edit this page." Just three little words, but what a miracle they have wrought. Just about every entry on Wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia, invites visitors to fiddle. Is the entry incomplete? Add something. Is it wrong? Correct it. Is it biased? Edit away. That such a remarkably open-door policy has resulted in the biggest (and perhaps best) encyclopedia in the world is a testament to the vision of one man, Jimmy Wales.

Wales, 39, is a former options trader who in 1999 set out to reinvent the encyclopedia for the Internet age—free, up-to-date and available to all. He started the way most encyclopedists start, by commissioning articles from experts and subjecting them to peer review. After 18 months, he had a pitiful 12 entries; at that rate, it would take a few millenniums to equal Encyclopaedia Britannica. So Wales created a free-form companion site based on a little-known software program called a wiki (the Hawaiian term means quick) that makes it easy—with the "edit this page" button—to enter and track changes to Web pages. The effect was explosive. That simple button turned readers into contributors and contributors into evangelists. Wikipedia now has more than a million articles in English, nearly 10 times as many as in Britannica. That number nearly doubles each year. And most extraordinarily, the site has not been defaced by vandals or hijacked by zealots. Or more precisely, it is vandalized every day but is usually repaired within minutes by any one of the millions of users who are motivated to protect and nurture the site.

Today Wales is celebrated as a champion of Internet-enabled egalitarianism. He describes himself not as antielitist but as "anticredentialist." That's a key distinction. It means that amateurs can have as much to contribute as professionals and that talent can be found anywhere. Everyone predicted that mob rule would lead to chaos.

Instead it has led to what may prove to be the most powerful industrial model of the 21st century: peer production. Wikipedia is proof that it works, and Jimmy Wales is its prophet.

Anderson is the Editor in Chief of Wired magazine

Geoffrey West
Master of Complexity
By MURRAY GELL-MANN

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

There aren't a lot of theoretical physicists who have helped solve an old puzzle in biology. But then, not a lot of theoretical physicists are Geoffrey West. As president of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), West brings one of the research community's most versatile minds to bear on some of nature's most complex questions.

Science has never been a world of discrete disciplines. Rather, physics, geology, economics, psychology, even the arts all overlap in a kind of meta-system, with the principles of one touching those of the others. Investor behavior can mimic that of schools of fish; genealogical trees for languages can resemble those for species; mathematics can drive music.

In 1984, I was co-founder of SFI, a nonprofit research facility for theoretical work on just those kinds of phenomena. Geoffrey West's current research is among our most fascinating. Working with ecologist Jim Brown of the University of New Mexico, he has studied, for example, the relationship between the average weight of a species of mammal and such variables as blood pressure or metabolic rate. Such formulas are remarkably precise, holding true from shrews to whales. West and Brown are trying to see if similar relationships apply for social organizations such as cities and companies.

Think those things don't affect you directly? Think again. Studies of social animals, for instance, can teach us a lot about how armies and terrorist groups work, allowing us to respond better to security threats. Knowing how our brains learn can help us design better computers. Understanding the behavior of schools of fish can help us avoid disasters like the 1987 stock-market crash.

West, 65, a former theoretical physicist on the faculty at Stanford University and later head of the particle-theory group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, became SFI's president in 2005. His gifts are precisely what's needed to encourage scientific disciplines to mingle so freely.

Gell-Mann won a Nobel Prize in 1969 for discovering quarks and gluons

Bono
"I Knew That He Was Genuine"
By JESSE HELMS

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

When I was first told in 2000 that Bono wanted to meet with me to talk about boosting U.S. aid to Africa, I didn't know who he was. But my Senate staff certainly did. After so many years in Washington, I had met enough people to quickly figure out who is genuine and who is there for show. I knew as soon as I met Bono that he was genuine. He had his facts in hand and didn't have any agenda other than doing all he could to help people in desperate need.

Along with Franklin Graham, Bono, 45, helped me understand the scope of the tragedy in Africa, especially the pain it is bringing to infants and children and their families. Once I understood, I made both men a promise that I would do all I could to help. Senator Bill Frist and I were allies in creating and passing a bill to commit $200 million to fight AIDS in Africa. The challenges are still enormous, but I think there can be a very good future for Africa if the cycles of death, poverty and armed conflict can be overcome.

I admire Bono's dedication and his willingness to make decisions. There is no pretense about him. In fact, he has opened himself up to criticism because he has been willing to work with anyone to find help for these children. After our first meeting, he invited me to be his guest at a U2 concert. My grandchildren were only too happy to come along. Bono enjoys telling people that I said watching the audience swaying to the music reminded me of a cornfield rustling in the wind. It was also a reminder of the millions he manages to touch every day with his music and his heart.

Helms is a former Senator from North Carolina

Michelle Wie
Golf's Teenage Sensation
By JEFF CHU

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

For Michelle Wie, it's sweet to be 16. The Hawaiian high schooler, who turned pro only in October, is already No. 2 in the women's world golf rankings. She tops the pay scale, pocketing about $10 million a year in endorsements from Nike and Sony. Her sponsors are betting on a player who has never won a pro tourney. "They believe in my dreams," she says.

Those dreams are big. Wie is driving her way straight through golf's formidable gender barriers. She refuses to limit herself to ladies' events and intends to be the first woman to play the Masters. She has the talent: her game has both power and finesse, and her tenacity is Tiger-like. With her pinup looks and giggly charm—deployable in English, Korean, Japanese and teenspeak (pop star Rain, a fellow Time 100 honoree, and Star Wars' Hayden Christensen are "supercute"; her prom dress this year is "soooo pink")—she's already drawing new fans to golf around the globe. To quiet her skeptics, Wie will need to win titles, and she thinks this may be the year. "I can feel it coming," she says confidently. Fore!

Wynton Marsalis
Saving New Orleans
By AARON NEVILLE

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

My friend Wynton Marsalis comes from a rich musical-family tradition in New Orleans that I share with my family. From that core of talent and tradition has sprung an amazing young man who has worn many hats in his career: musician, composer, ambassador, activist, arts administrator and more. He's an original in so many ways and has a tremendous influence on the popularity of modern jazz and its deep roots in New Orleans history. We share a love for our universally beloved hometown and were shattered by its recent destruction.

No one has done more than Wynton, 44, to bring the plight of today's New Orleans to the attention of the world. Over the past year, we have shared the stage many times, performing at post-Katrina fund raisers. I look at him, he looks at me, and you can feel the mutual pain. Gone are the many nooks and crannies of the place we called home and which brought us so much joy and brotherhood. Wynton and his music personify New Orleans and its great musical tradition, today displaced but not destroyed. His willingness to give of his time and talent in preserving and promoting the New Orleans music heritage is a great tribute to his character and personality. When you've known someone as long as I've known Wynton, nothing surprises you, but in his case, it is a wonder that he still finds time to pay homage and support to the place that gave him his start. Wynton is a special brother, whose music and persona flow forth freely with truth, talent and tenacity.

Award-winning singer Neville, whose home was destroyed by Katrina, has been active in the relief effort

Angelina Jolie
Taking on Her Toughest Role
By MARK MALLOCH BROWN

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Recently, I took my 13-year-old daughter Maddy to a New York City event honoring Angelina Jolie. Every parent will relate to the fact that Maddy often finds the world of celebrity magazines more interesting than the world of her father—which in my case centers on the United Nations and its work fighting poverty. That night Angelina brought those two worlds together. Maddy was awed by how Angelina used her celebrity to lift all of us beyond the glamour of a Manhattan ballroom and make us confront the grim realities of poverty in the farthest corners of the globe.

That ability to transcend worlds has something to do with Angelina's movie-star charisma—but it also says something about her diligence and grit. Angelina, 30, spends a great deal of time in the developing world, visiting refugee camps, speaking and listening to the men, women and children she is working to help. Those people, Angelina explained, "have seen so much, they've felt so much pain—lost more than anyone could bear, and yet they contain joy of life and appreciation for small things we often forget." It was a further indication of Angelina's humanity that she stopped to listen and talk to Maddy as the city's power brokers hovered impatiently, awaiting their brush with celebrity.

Angelina's commitment as goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has pushed her to speak out about root causes—economic failure and lack of justice. She urged me relentlessly to meet her last year during a stopover at an airport where our paths happened to be crossing, so that I could brief her ahead of her appearance at a big international meeting. It is typical of her. The subject was the Millennium Development Goals—a set of objectives agreed upon by the world's governments. They range from eradicating poverty to reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS. As always, she wanted to be prepared—not just to share impressions of poverty but to be able to speak seriously to the issues. Angelina went on to make a film for MTV on a village in Kenya, where a pilot project is under way to fight poverty, hunger and disease.

That blending of the activist and the performer, not on the set but in the African bush, reflects her determination to stick with a subject, immerse herself in it, make it part of her life—and then bring her public with her. It is celebrity advocacy at its most effective, most intelligent and most sincere. For that, she has my enduring respect and gratitude—and Maddy's.

Malloch Brown is Deputy Secretary-General of the U.N.

Bill Clinton & George H.W. Bush
Proving The Power Of Two
By MICHAEL DUFFY

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Can anyone recall a more unlikely partnership than that of George Herbert Walker Bush and William Jefferson Clinton? One grew up in Greenwich, Conn., where his father was a U.S. Senator. The other hails from Hope, Ark., where his father was a rambler. One was known for his discretion, the other for his lack thereof. One has a son in the Oval Office; the other has a wife with an eye on the job. In a family in which nicknames mean something, it fell to Barbara Bush to give them theirs: the Odd Couple.

But by joining forces, Bush, 81, and Clinton, 59, have done remarkable and lasting work in the past year. After teaming together to lead the U.S. response to the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, they suited up again last fall to raise money to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. They put their dormant fund-raising networks on high alert and in eight months have collected more than $120 million for Gulf Coast colleges and universities, churches, and for use by the Governors of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Next week the two men plan to deliver a joint commencement address to the graduating class at Tulane and announce their final $30 million in grants.

Two other back-to-back Presidents, John Adams (No. 2) and Thomas Jefferson (No. 3), needed a decade to repair the personal damage from their ferocious political battles; it took Nos. 41 and 42 just a few years. Not long ago, Bush tried to surprise Clinton with a visit to his friend's office in New York City's Harlem; when Bush arrived, he found Clinton was overseas. So Bush sat down in his successor's office, put his feet up and called him on the phone. "Bill! It's George. Nice view! Nice desk!"

The partnership has its advantages, as well as its limits, for both clans. And the two men still have their differences. But Bush and Clinton have created a new postpresidential brand and put it to work sealing the cracks between public need and public aid—and reminded us of what people can accomplish even in an era of deep partisan division.

Steve Nash
Why the NBA Needs This Man
By CHARLES BARKLEY

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

I've been all over the world, and I always think people won't know who I am. They do. The way basketball has been embraced globally always amazes me. And I'm glad the world has got a chance to learn from a guy like Steve Nash.

What has he taught us? It pays to be selfless. You can be content just to make the players around you better. There are too many scoring point guards in the NBA today, and the game has suffered. People think that in order to be a great player, you have to lead the league in scoring. Forget that—despite averaging only 15.5 points a game, fourth best on his team, Nash was the MVP of the NBA last season, the first Canadian ever to win that honor. He deserved it: his 11.5 assists per game clinched it for him. And he's doing an even better job this season. To top it off, Nash, 32, is just a nice guy. He recently used endorsement money to help pay for a new pediatric cardiology ward in a Paraguayan hospital. That's beyond admirable. Over the past few years, his popularity has exploded. His ego could have swelled—everyone else's does. But he still just wants to pass the ball.

I'm a lucky guy to be living in Phoenix. The sun. The golf. And I get to watch Nash act like a magician on the court. Can't top that. And who knows? Maybe he'll inspire a whole new generation of kids to pass out of double teams the way he does. Like Nash, maybe they'll be selfless off the court too. That would be even better.

Barkley was just voted to the NBA Hall of Fame

Orhan Pamuk
Teller of the Awful Truth
By HOWARD CHUA-EOAN

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

Under the auspices of fiction, dead men speak, and trees tell tales—feats displayed in the Ottoman otherworldliness of Orhan Pamuk'sMy Name Is Red. Magic realism, as all writers know, is a way of subverting the harder-edged world we all share in order to reach essential truths. But what happens when rock-solid political realities bump up against the paper-borne creations of a writer? Which vision wins out?

Pamuk, already the most famous author in contemporary Turkey (Snow; The Black Book), became a global cause celebre early last year after he pointedly criticized his country's all-too-willful historical blind spots: the genocide of Armenians in 1915 by the Turkish military and a similar suppression of the country's Kurdish minority. Criticism from nationalist groups forced Pamuk, 53, to flee Turkey for a while, and then, after he returned, the government prepared to put him on trial for "insulting" Turkey and Turkishness. Human-rights organizations and writers' unions around the world lined up in Pamuk's support even as Turkish patriots lobbied for punishing him to the full extent of Turkish law—up to three years in prison. The charges against Pamuk were dropped,officially because of a technicality but perhaps because of Ankara's impending talks on Turkey's admission to the European Union, an impossibly sensitive discussion that touches on money, ethnicity, history, modernity, Islam and secularism. In the end, Pamuk's name has become even more recognized and his words even more influential. In the confrontation of rock-hard reality and paper-thin artistry, sometimes, as in the children's game, paper overcomes stone.

Elie Wiesel
He Taught Us How to Answer Evil
By OPRAH WINFREY

Posted Sunday, Apr. 30, 2006

I remember the icy snow crunching beneath our every step, the subzero wind biting at our bare faces, the quiet utter stillness. As we walked the vast landscape of Auschwitz, I had the honor of being on these once cursed, now sacred, grounds with Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Being in his presence, exposed to his wisdom, has been one of the great blessings of my life. He is my hero not only for what he has endured, but for what he has become—a teacher, a sage, an activist, a humanitarian, a great spirit. Despite the horrors he has survived, he is one of the most loving spirits I have ever known. Slowly he led me back in time to the moment 62 years ago when he, a terrified 15-year-old boy, stepped off a cattle car into a world where it was, he says, "human to be inhuman." Wiesel lived through a dark, dark night where everyone was there either to kill or to die. Standing in front of Block 17, his former barrack, even this master of words had no words for what he had experienced there. At the remains