credit By David Kushner
Photograph by Carlos Serrao
Television: The Creator
description Tim Kring | Heroes Tim Kring doesn’t know Magneto from Wolverine. You’d never know it from watching Heroes, his hit show about everyday people with extraordinary powers. 
credit Photograph by Carlos Serrao
Masi Oka, who based Hiro’s wide-eyed innocence on an anime character, wants Heroes to include more geek references: "Sometimes I try to sneak one in there."
credit By Mark Horowitz
Photograph by Michele Asselin
Education: The Detective
description Henry Louis Gates Jr. | Ancestry-Based Curriculum Henry Louis Gates Jr. keeps a framed printout of his DNA sequence on the wall of his kitchen. The director of Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research first got tested in 2000. Since then, in articles, interviews, and a PBS documentary, he has been pitching Americans on using the new technology to explore their African heritage. (His own sequence revealed some unexpected European lineage.) Now he has an even bigger goal. "My plan," he says, "is to revolutionize the way we teach history and science to inner-city black and minority kids." With several colleagues, he’s creating a public school curriculum that lets students study the science behind their own DNA and reconstruct their own genealogy. He’s planning to do a test run later this year and has been inundated with emails from schools volunteering to be test sites. "Instruction in history and science is failing these kids," he says. "This is going to work because everyone’s ultimate subject is themselves." 
credit By Liesl Schillinger
Photograph by Harry Borden/Corbis Outline
Business: The Mogul
description J. K. Rowling | Harry Potter, Inc. In 1990, before the rise of Second Life and World of Warcraft, before the triumph of MMORPGs, a young woman named Joanne Rowling was stuck on a delayed four-hour train ride to King’s Cross station in London. She began to conjure up an outcast boy heading to a sorcery school called Hogwarts. Seven years and countless drafts later, the first Harry Potter novel plunged readers into a parallel universe more compelling and enveloping than any online world imaginable. Rowling was paid a $4,000 advance. Today she is the first person on the planet to become a billionaire by writing books. And when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final volume in the series, apparates on July 21, it will mark the conclusion of an incredible run: more than 325 million books sold in 200 countries, not to mention the $3 billion or so earned by the first four movies and billions more from games, action figures, and product tie-ins. Rowling is the reigning master of what you might call MMFWs — massively multireader fictional worlds — inspiring a generation of screen-fed kids to devour old-fashioned books on paper. 
credit By Steve Silberman
Photograph by Bryce Duffy
Science: The Cartographers
description The Allen Brain Atlas
From left: Ed Lein, Paul Wohnoutka, Michael Hawrylycz, Allan Jones, Paul Allen, Chinh Dang, Carey Teemer If the brain is the ultimate computer, the Allen Brain Atlas is the ultimate tech-support manual. Launched with $100 million in seed money from Paul Allen — Microsoft’s other founder turned philanthropist — the atlas provides researchers with the first complete genetic map of the mouse brain. The map identifies more than 21,000 genes, and because mice share 90 percent of their genetic material with humans, the project is a huge step toward understanding how genes regulate the brain’s structure and function. (The next rev of the atlas will map the human neo cortex.) Allen, who survived Hodgkin’s disease in the 1980s, funded the atlas after asking neuro scientists what single project would give them the boost they needed to better tackle disorders like autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, and schizophrenia at the genetic level. By determining which genes are active in each cell of the mouse brain, the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science has given researchers a breakthrough tool to understand how things go wrong, while giving drug developers the data they need to design innovative treatments with minimal side effects. The institute’s massive mapping effort began in 2003, using laser microdissection and high-throughput informatics to extract data from thin shavings of rodential gray matter. Now hundreds of scientists a day consult the searchable 3-D maps that made their official debut on the Web in September. The Allen team has already uncovered a few surprises, like the fact that, in certain regions of the brain, 80 percent of all the genes are switched on — much more than previous estimates. "As someone who thinks like an engineer," Allen says, "that kind of efficiency blows my mind." 
credit By Adam Rogers
Photograph by Sian Kennedy
Print: The Storyteller
description Brian K. Vaughan | Graphic Novelist Graphic novelist Brian K. Vaughan recently learned a new term: shmuckbait. "It’s what they call a cliffhanger that puts your protagonist in jeopardy," he says. "If your hero falls off a cliff, only the idiots in your audience think he’s going to die." Vaughan knew the concept, he just didn’t know it had a name until he took a gig as a story editor on Lost. He got the job on the strength of his comic books — quirky, acclaimed stories that don’t pander and still pound pulses. Pride of Baghdad tells the story of lions in an Iraqi zoo after the invasion. His series Ex Machina is about the ex-superhero mayor of New York, while Y: The Last Man is about exactly what it sounds like: the one man left on earth after a mysterious event leaves only women alive. Vaughan’s series are finite, meticulous, years-long story arcs. "That’s storytelling, with a beginning, a middle, and an end," he says. "Something like Spider-Man, a book that never has a third act, that seems crazy." Between Lost episodes, Vaughan is working on screenplays for Ex Machina and Y. After that? "I’m going to take a nap." Does that mean that our hero won’t create more comics featuring monkeys and jetpacks? Only a shmuck would believe that. 
credit By Jon Gaudiosi
Photograph by Susanna Howe
Games: The Fraggers
description Cliff Bleszinski and Tim Sweeney | Gears of War and the Unreal Engine 3 The blockbuster hit of the 2006 holiday season was that gloriously gory shooter Gears of War. Kudos for its photorealistic carnage go to lead designer Cliff Bleszinski (left) and his team at Epic Games. But equal credit goes to the Unreal Engine 3, designed by Epic cofounder Tim Sweeney and his crew. The Unreal Engine is the underlying software that renders the geysers of blood when Gears of War players eviscerate a bad guy. It also streamlines the creation of everything from the in-game physics to the online networking. Unreal Engine 3 (now with geeky bennies like per-pixel lighting and dynamic shadows) has already become a blockbuster in its own right — the company has licensed it to many of its biggest rivals, including Electronic Arts, Activision, and Capcom. "Game engines today are as complex as the operating systems of 15 years ago," Sweeney says. He’s already hard at work on the Unreal Engine 4, which he expects to roll out around 2011. 
credit By Nancy Miller
Photograph by Bryce Duffy
Film: The Seer
description Alfonso Cuarón | Director, Children of Men He stood by and watched as his Mexican compatriots Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) and Alejandro Gonzólez Iñárritu (Babel) hogged the spotlight — and the awards — this year. But with the DVD release of Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón, the man who brought Harry Potter to the brink of puberty and slipped a tequila-fueled three-way into your mama’s multiplex, earns our nod for writing and directing the best sci-fi film in recent years. Starring Clive Owen and based on a P. D. James novel, Children of Men is a stylistically stunning yet grim political thriller. "I wanted to make a ’chase’ movie but with much more to it," Cuarón says. "I wanted this film to have moments of truthfulness and a bit of hope through the bleakness." Cuarón’s depiction of a hyperviolent, apocalyptic London in 2027 was too much of a downer for holiday moviegoers when it debuted last Christmas, but Children demands a viewing at home. Magneto, an X-Men spinoff, is rumored to be the director’s next sci-fi project. 
credit By Michael Hirschorn
Photograph by Carlos Serrao
Renegade: The Catalyst
description Arianna Huffington | The Huffington Post Face it, we all hated on Arianna when the Huffington Post went live in May 2005. It was so clubby, so incestuous, so old-guard. In early posts, Hollywood machers like Tim Robbins and Rob Reiner opined on topics they may or may not have known anything about. It all carried the whiff of social climbing. Today, Huffington’s blog seems prescient, even pathbreaking. She helps frame, magnify, and propel coverage of scandal after scandal: WMD, Libbygate, Guant namo, Abu Ghraib, Katrina (about which Harry Shearer contributes relentlessly and brilliantly), and the firing of eight US attorneys. Huffington took the promise of blogging literally: If it’s a conversation, let’s start talking. Along the way, she broke the MSM monopoly on opinion-mongering, providing a new on-ramp for political ideas. And for all the charges of elitism, her club turned out to have a fairly permissive entrance policy: 900 contributors now post dozens of mini op-eds a day. "We’ll take something and stay with it, invite other people to blog about it," Huffington says. "Staying on a story is the only way you can break through the static." Next up? A satirical site for grown-ups called 23/6, and (this fall, in conjunction with Yahoo and Slate) a virtual, broadband presidential debate. 
credit By Angela Watercutter
Photograph by Peter Yang
Music: The Synthesizer
description Gregg Gillis | Girl Talk Just when it seems like mashups are played out — or playing dead, thanks to litigious record labels — along comes Girl Talk (née Gregg Gillis). For last year’s album Night Ripper, the laptop mixologist used more than 250 samples from 167 artists. Raps by Ludacris rub up against a Boston riff, the Ying Yang Twins whisper over the Verve’s "Bittersweet Symphony." As the album became an indie sensation, Gillis resigned himself to the inevitable cease-and-desist order. But it never materialized. "Labels are starting to realize that something like Night Ripper isn’t going to hurt their artists," Gillis says. "If anything, it will promote them." Gillis is also famous for his uninhibited live shows — on YouTube, you can watch him crowdsurfing and stripping down to his skivvies between sessions spent pounding the keyboard of his Toshiba Satellite M115 laptop. And while the 25-year-old from Pittsburgh still has a day job as a biomedical engineer, he’s also remixing tracks for major-label artists and planning his next album. "I’m jumping on a plane to London to do a show with Beck and flying back to get in the cubicle Monday morning. It’s pretty bizarre." 
credit By Joe Brown
Photograph By Donald Milne
Industrial Design: The Stylist
description Walter de’Silva | Audi R8 When Walter de’Silva was 8 years old, Italian singer Fred Buscaglione crashed a 1959 Ford Thunderbird into a truck full of stone and died. De’Silva remembers feeling terrible — for the car. It wasn’t the only time in his youth de’Silva would defy expectations in favor of an automobile. His father, an architect, gave him art lessons, hoping the boy would follow in his footsteps: "He’d give me paper and pencil and tell me to draw a building, but from the beginning I drew only cars." Today, de’Silva is one of the world’s leading automotive designers, and the Audi R8 — which brings Italian style to German function — is his masterpiece. Most cars emphasize either beauty or brawn, but the R8 is like a 6-foot supermodel who runs the 40 in 4 flat. Its beautiful front-back symmetry is a result of the midmounted engine, while the slanted vertical "sideblades" conceal intakes that feed air to the ravenous powertrain that blasts the R8 to 60 mph in 4.5 seconds. Now in charge of design for the entire Volkswagen group, de’Silva is set to bring his style to everything from $15,000 hatchbacks to million-dollar Bugattis. 
credit By Sonia Zjawinski
Photograph by David Harry Stewart
Blogs: The Town Crier
description Jen Chung | Gothamist Back in 2002, Jen Chung and her college buddy Jake Dobkin started emailing each other stories related to life in New York City. They kept adding friends to the list, which quickly became unmanageable. So, they switched to a blog, and Gothamist was born. The site is dedicated to tracking news where it matters most — at a hyperlocal level. Today, Chung oversees a network of 15 city-specific Web sites that can steer you to the best dim sum or latest protest in your neck of the woods, whether that’s Boston, Paris, or Shanghai. Gothamist got big by thinking small: Chung keeps her sites trained on what’s going on in readers’ backyards. "As we were starting the site, I thought, how many people know who their city council member is?" says Chung, who still has a day job as an advertising exec in Manhattan. "We’re relentlessly focused on stories that larger outlets might have mentioned in passing but have otherwise neglected." 
credit By Thomas Goetz
Photograph By Sian Kennedy
Medicine: The Code Doctors
description K. S. Bhaskar, Maury Pepper, and Joseph Dal Molin | WorldVistA In an age when nearly every piece of information has gone digital, one crucial category remains stubbornly analog: your medical records. Less than 25 percent of US health care providers use electronic records; the rest use file folders bulging with paper. Three technologists, along with an army of open source coders, are out to change that. Dubbed WorldVistA EHR, their software will make it easy for hospitals and doctors to trade in dead trees for bits and bytes. That efficiency could save thousands of lives — and millions of dollars — every year by eliminating redundant questionnaires, incomplete files, and unnecessary treatments. The project began with a medical-records program called VistA at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (the VA had the name long before Microsoft). That system helped transform the VA from a medical backwater into the country’s best-run, most cost-effective health care organization. The WorldVistA founders took the VA’s public-domain software and turned it into a collaborative project, with all the hallmarks of open source: The software doesn’t cost much to implement, and a large community stands ready to offer support. It’s also surprisingly easy for hospitals and clinics large and small to use, which means it could become the de facto standard in the US, and perhaps beyond. "Our goal," WorldVistA COO K. S. Bhaskar says, "is nothing short of world domination." 
credit By Frank Rose
Photograph by Susanna Howe
Video: The Explainer
description Michael Wesch | Web 2.0... The Machine Is Us/ing Us How do you sum up the power and potential of Web 2.0 in a 271-second video? By moving really, really fast. When Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, made "Web 2.0... The Machine Is Us/ing Us," he’d been working for months on an academic paper that would explain new Web tools. As he struggled to define concepts like hypertext, tagging, mashups, and wikis, he had an epiphany: He was working in the wrong medium. He needed to use the tools of Web 2.0 to explain Web 2.0. Anthropology — humans studying the experience of being human — is a recursive discipline, and Wesch’s is a recursive video, cutting quickly between screenshots that show him bookmarking Web sites with del.icio.us, creating a blog with Blogger, and posting pictures on Flickr. Wesch, whose video was viewed 1.8 million times on YouTube in six weeks, now has his digital-ethnography class conducting fieldwork about YouTube itself. "It’s just amazing to see all the humanity people put out there," he says. "My students are hooked."
— Frank Rose 
credit By Jennifer Kahn
Photograph By Donald Milne
Technology: The Wizard of OS
description Mark Shuttleworth | Ubuntu Used to be, Linux was easy to champion but hard to use. That was before Ubuntu. The free open source operating system — complete with a word processor, Web browser, spreadsheet application, and PDF reader — is elegant, secure, and intuitive. For that, we can thank South African tech entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. He sold his digital-security company to VeriSign for half a billion dollars, then blew off some steam by riding the Soyuz shuttle to the International Space Station. Next he took some cooking classes and tried online dating. "I made a good playboy for a while," Shuttleworth quips. "But you start to feel that crushing sense of uselessness." So he decided to save the world from Windows. He’s already spent $25†million on the project, hiring top-tier open source developers and negotiating with computer manufacturers to start selling PCs with Ubuntu preinstalled. Geeky first-worlders won’t be the only beneficiaries: Shuttleworth is sending Ubuntu (already translated into 35 languages) to anyone who asks, anywhere in the world. 
credit By Bob Cohn
Photograph By Nigel Parry
Politics: The American
description Arnold Schwarzenegger | Governor of California Confident, funny, untethered to political orthodoxy or party — Arnold plays governor like some pol from a utopian future. He comes by his independence naturally: a self-made movie mogul, a Republican married into the Kennedy family, a Californian in a nation that has always cocked an eyebrow at the Golden State, a moderate in a party that increasingly tilts hard right. And since his reelection as governor last November, he has staked out politically heretical positions on key science and tech issues. He’s for state-funded stem cell research; for mandating aggressive reductions in carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases; for spending more state money on infrastructure and health care. All this has members of his own party calling him ghastly names. "The most common accusation I hear is that Arnold turned Democrat," he says. "What do I care? They can call me anything they want.... We don’t have Democratic roads and Republican roads. We don’t have Democratic schools and Republican schools." It wasn’t always so. After first winning office in 2003, Schwarzenegger came on like Hans and Franz. He took record amounts of cash from corporate interests and ridiculed Democrats as "girlie men." But when his poll numbers went south, he made a sharp turn to the center. "Message received," he said at the time. Now he calls himself "post-partisan" — and exhorts the rest of America to follow "the California way." That path is less about ideology than about a new style of leadership. "What I want to do," he says, "is represent not the party but the people."
