Most Intriguing People on the "Time 100 Influential" List

The Time "100 Influential People in the World" issue published April 30th was of course populated with a veritable who's who list of movers, shakers and otherwise incredibly important people in the world.



Of these individuals, below are the fourteen (with the Time pieces hyperlinked) that stood out to me as particularly interesting and people I'd want to know more about (making this my sort of "Most Intriguing Within the 100 Most Influential" list)...

- Sara Blakely: founder of Spanx - According to an earlier vignette in this issue, the world's youngest self-made female billionaire at 41 ... if that's not interesting, I don't know what is.

- Christian Marclay: artist behind the 24-hour long clip film "The Clock" - Sounds to be a fascinating movie and both it and Marclay are featured in "The Hours" by Daniel Zalewski for The New Yorker.

- Salman Khan: founder of Khan Academy - Remarkable story of free education tutorial videos from a guy whose work featured in both a Businessweek profile and Fast Company Most Creative People in Business list.

- E.L. James: writer of the 50 Shades of Grey trilogy books - An author having the top four spots, including a 50 Shades box set, on the current New York Times Fiction Bestseller List is nothing if not interesting.

- Louie C.K.: comedian - Known for doing things completely his own way both creatively and in business with his television show Louie and self-produced and sold online comedy specials.

- Ben Rattray: founder of change.org - The site which helps enable social change became much more well-known earlier this year with its petition asking for prosecution of George Zimmerman for shooting Trayvon Martin.

- Ann Patchett: author / bookstore owner - It I'm sure helps her cause to be a best-selling author, but was a cool story of Patchett seeing her hometown of Nashville, TN being without an independent bookseller and as a result, opening Parnassus Books.

- Barbara Van Dahlen: Runs the nonprofit organization Give An Hour devoted to assisting with the mental health of veterans and their families. Seems a great mission and reminds me of the Joe Klein cover story "The New Greatest Generation" for Time.

- Hans Rosling: Became known for a 2006 TED talk on worldwide socio-economic development told through statistical models... now with 4 millions views on the TED site.

- Walter Isaacson: Biographer who wrote both the bestselling Steve Jobs (which I reviewed here) and similarly acclaimed works on Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.

- Erik Martin: 33 year old general manager of the site Reddit, which I first heard about a Jason Fagone piece for Wired written about in this blog post.

- Cecile Richards: The leader of Planned Parenthood and responsible for providing health care and advocating rights for many women in need nationwide.

- Virginia Rometty: IBM CEO who has helped the company to its current position of financial strength and (as the Time piece on her states) she's someone known for pushing the company in the area of corporate responsibility.

- Hillary Clinton: Someone who has obviously lived many lifetimes in terms of her influence and has by almost all accounts done an exemplary job as U.S. Secretary of State.

Time Magazine Pieces: Future of Oil / Kony 2012 / Change.org / FanFiction / Draw Something

I've already just linked to a few Time Magazine pieces, but there's been a number of other recent Time stories of interest to note here.

The March 26 issue of Time featured "The Warlord vs. the Hipsters" by Alex Perry on the "KONY 2012" video about African warlord Joseph Kony and US-backed efforts to apprehend him. Additionally of note in the piece is information about the group Invisible Children that produced the video (now viewed 86 million times on YouTube). Perry details how the video creators have received a large amount of criticism for things ranging for being too sensational to them directly calling for military action against Kony. Likely due in part to this, Invisible Children just announced (as is detailed in this piece by The Guardian) a sequel video coming April 3rd.

A second Time feature that stood out recently was its April 9 cover story, "The Future Of Oil" by Bryan Walsh. I've linked to a number of pieces by Walsh and as is usually the case, his story comes across as thorough and well-reported. Upshot of the piece is that oil isn't running out imminently (predicted as recently as a few years ago), but new sources of oil are going to be deeper, more remote and require more invasive drilling methods to reach. Result is that people don't need to worry as much about not having oil, but rather should have great concern over the economic and ecological costs of getting to what there is.

Also from this recent issue of Time was "Change Agent" by Bobby Ghosh and Elizabeth Dias. Profiled is the organization Change.org and its founder Ben Rattray. The site allows anyone to launch a petition on behalf of their particular cause and is detailed in the Time piece as being "a certified B corporation that benefits entrepreneurs who want both to make a profit and seek social change." Ghosh and Dias also write significant content about the Change.org petition asking for prosecution of George Zimmerman for shooting Trayvon Martin... now at 2.2M electronic signatures.

Finally, two additional (and short) Time pieces stood out with an interesting concept from each.

"Drawsome" was about the OMGPop created app Draw Something that was recently purchased for $180M by Zynga. Of note in the piece was description of how the game was built not as a competition, but rather collaborative effort (between either friends or complete strangers) to complete Pictionary-like drawing challenges.

Last piece to mention was about a book I likely won't read, but find interesting how it was written. "Homer-Erotic" details The Song of Achilles from high school teacher Madeline Miller. Concept is a "based in potential fact" fictional retelling of the Trojan War as depicted in The Iliad from Homer. It's a fascinating genre of writing, this idea of spinning off from the truth (or spinning off from characters created by others as FanFiction does).