TIME 25: THEY RANGE IN AGE FROM 31 TO 67

JIM CLARK Digital Entrepreneur

The world changed on Aug. 9, 1995, and not just because Jerry Garcia died. That was also the day the initial public stock offering for Netscape Communications, a company that had yet to turn a profit, instantly garnered an astonishing $2 billion on the strength of one idea. The idea was the World Wide Web, and its gatekeeper, for the foreseeable future, is Jim Clark.

Conquering the light-speed computer industry means leaping ahead one cognitive generation and landing in the right place. Few entrepreneurs turn this trick even once; at 52, Clark has done it twice. In the early ’80s, as the industry’s initial generation of mainframes (see IBM) gave way to a second generation of desktop PCs (see Apple, Microsoft), Clark saw a way to put that data-crunching power to work visualizing information ranging from aircraft fluid dynamics to rampaging velociraptors, then founded the company that made it happen. Fourteen years, 7,200 employees and $2.2 billion in annual revenues later, Silicon Graphics rules its own lucrative roost.

Clark, however, moved on. By 1994 the desktop generation was yielding to the networked, interactive generation. But while his peers were debating how to build the Infobahn, Clark decided it already existed. He’d met Marc Andreessen, who as an undergraduate programmer had helped create the then obscure browsing software Mosaic, which made it easy to navigate the World Wide Web. Navigating the infant Web, which transforms the Internet’s isolated, text-based sites into one vast, hyperlinked, multimedia-capable network, got Clark thinking–and acting. He and Andreessen founded Mosaic Communications (soon renamed Netscape) and built a business around an improved Web browser. The result was one of history’s headiest corporate ascents, as the ubiquitous Netscape Navigator browser helped spawn the world’s startling online stampede. “The Internet was the information highway everyone was looking for,” says Clark. “They just hadn’t recognized it.”

Clark and Andreessen did, and today they find themselves riding the decade’s giddiest economic bubble, counting their stock options and cutting deals with everyone from telephone companies to Hollywood. Virtually the entire data-intensive world–which is to say, virtually the entire world–has concluded that the Web is the future of communications, and is now retooling to stay in lockstep with Netscape (and vice versa: Netscape perpetually updates its browser to accommodate new Web applications). “The list of businesses being transformed,” says Clark, includes “broadcasting, publishing, software, finance, shopping, entertainment services, consumer electronics…It’s a massive, massive change. We just happened to see it first and set the commercial agenda.”

And to the agenda setters belong the spoils. His peers were skeptical when Jim Clark decided to colonize the Web. Well, today Netscape’s value has jumped to $5 billion, Clark’s own net worth stands at $1.3 billion, and he escapes often to enjoy the last laugh while sailing to sun-drenched paradises like Tahiti. He has earned the lush life twice over, even though others share the high-tech glory. After all, Columbus may have discovered the New World, but it was Isabella and Ferdinand who persuaded the royal court to put up the money.

CALVIN KLEIN Fashion Entrepreneur

He is fashion’s Frank Lloyd Wright. In the more than 50 collections he has produced since 1968, Calvin Klein has remained Seventh Avenue’s most devout modernist, its pre-eminent avatar of form-follows-function thinking. Each season his models have ambled down the runway in clothes created in quiet protest against fashion’s outlandish theatricality. He has never dabbled in a world of beaded headgear or rubber cocktail dresses. “I’ve always believed in simplicity,” Klein reflects. “I’ve never been one to see women in ruffles and all kinds of fanciful apparel. To me it’s just silly.” No matter what the Gaultiers and Gallianos are doing, Klein, 53, keeps his palette defiantly muted, his lines aggressively clean, his style obsessively grounded in reality.

And were it not for Klein, reality might have always been one of fashion’s dirtiest words. Early on, colleagues, editors and critics alike mistook his distaste for the fantastical as evidence of artlessness. But they eventually began to appreciate the gracefulness and clarity of his vision. “The clothing is extraordinarily important,” notes Richard Martin, curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “He is the true American Puritan. Even as his style has evolved over time, it’s always about eliminating anything that is not necessary, and always thinking of the garment as being pure as possible.”

One could even argue that Klein’s elegant take on minimalism has come to define the look of the late 20th century in the U.S. “There are hardly any major designers who have not been influenced by the kind of American style Calvin epitomizes,” notes Valerie Steele, a professor at New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology, Klein’s alma mater. Indeed, his spare-chic ethos is reflected in the work of everyone from superstars like Donna Karan, Michael Kors and Miuccia Prada to up-and-comers like handbag designer Kate Spade. More significantly, it is the bedrock of the no-fuss aesthetic peddled by the Gap, J. Crew and Banana Republic, increasingly the purveyors of the American uniform.

But then Calvin Klein, more than any other major designer, has maintained a keen sense of mass-cultural tastes. He has kept his position as a beloved clothier of urbane working women, all the while forging a lucrative star status at the mall with his CK, fragrance and underwear divisions. With the launch of his jeans line in 1978, he became one of the first designers to put Vogue-world cachet within reach of ordinary consumers. In the process he helped strip fashion of its elitism; now countless designers offer lower-end lines.

Klein’s appeal owes much to his genius for marketing. His clothes may be subtle, but he realized early that advertising never should be. His ubiquitous and controversial campaigns featuring near-naked models–Kate Moss, Marky Mark, Antonio Sabato Jr.–have blatantly used sex to move product. His most successful adventure in boundary pushing came last summer with a series of jeans ads that featured models who looked like teenagers in sexually evocative poses. Even President Clinton protested. Klein pulled the ads, but only after he’d reaped as much press from them as possible. A master at elevating his own celebrity, Calvin Klein may be one of the most recognizable names anywhere in the world. Few Puritans can claim that.

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON Sociologist

William Julius Wilson’s books, says Bill Clinton, “made me see race and poverty and the problems of the inner city in a different light.” Indeed, no thinker has done more than the 60-year-old sociologist to explain why the black underclass sank into such misery and isolation at the same time millions of other African Americans were escaping from the ghetto to create a vibrant middle class.

In two widely read and controversial studies, The Declining Significance of Race (1978) and The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), Wilson rejected both the liberal claim that the underclass owed its existence to entrenched racial discrimination and the conservative charge that its impoverishment was due to cultural deficiencies and dependence on welfare. Instead Wilson pointed to sweeping changes in the global economy that pulled low-skill industrial jobs out of the inner city, the flight from the ghetto of its most stable residents for a better life elsewhere, and the lingering effects of past discrimination. All these, he theorized, doomed inner-city blacks to a life of “concentrated poverty” that conventional government programs could not ameliorate. Says Wilson: “It’s quite clear to me that we’re going to have to revive discussion of the need for WPA-style jobs.”

That assertion may well be voiced loudly during this year’s presidential campaign after Wilson’s new book, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, is published in September. Wilson says that it is “deliberately written to influence the widest possible audience” and that it takes dead aim at conservative Republican proposals for overhauling welfare, Medicare and other social programs. “I refuse to be intimated by the rhetoric of the Contract with America,” says Wilson, who calls himself an unashamed liberal. “They have defined the terms of the debate, and I say their way is not the way to do it.”

Wilson’s most dismaying finding is that “for the first time in the 20th century most adults in many inner-city neighborhoods are not working in a typical week.” In this environment, Wilson argues, people have little chance to gain the educational and social skills that would make them attractive to employers. In a series of interviews, several employers admitted that a home address in the ghetto was sufficient reason to reject a job applicant. People from such areas, one executive said, “are not dependable. They have never been taught that when you have a job, you have to be there at a certain time and you’re to stay there until the time is finished.”

Wilson, who will begin teaching at Harvard this fall after 24 years at the University of Chicago, believes the problem of the underclass can be attacked only by “race neutral” programs such as government-financed jobs and universal health care. “The growing gap between the haves and have-nots in our society does not just include blacks, but a lot of Hispanics and even lower-middle-class whites,” says Wilson. “In this sort of economic climate, people are not receptive to messages that address the problems of other groups and ignore theirs.”

SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR Supreme Court Justice

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is not known for writing the kind of high-wattage opinions issued by some of her more ideologically colorful colleagues or asking the most blistering questions from the bench. She would be just another smart, careful jurist were it not for the particular chemistry of the court on which she sits. Any bloc of four Justices looking for a majority decision–liberal, moderate or conservative–has to accommodate her views to carry the day. After a series of landmark decisions by O’Connor on everything from affirmative action to the death penalty, the American Bar Association Journal in 1993 called her “arguably the most influential woman official in the United States.”

Her quiet influence became conspicuous four years ago in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when the court ruled that it was all right for states to make abortion more expensive or difficult, but they could not outlaw it. “She prevented the court from doing what it looked for 10 years like it was going to do one day, which was overrule Roe v. Wade,” says Stanford constitutional scholar Kathleen Sullivan. “We had three elections fought about that issue. And in the end, she voted to uphold Roe.”

Since then O’Connor, 66, has become the swing vote on issues such as affirmative action, racial redistricting and the separation of church and state. So long as John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer form one bloc and William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas the other, she and Anthony Kennedy are the votes to watch. Which may help explain her mail: she receives countless letters from schoolgirls, often including snapshots of them in black robes, saying they want to grow up to be a judge, just like her.

JERRY SEINFELD Comedian

Stand-up comics for years have talked about politics, mothers-in-law and airline food. Jerry Seinfeld was certainly the first to opine on those rubber dividers at supermarket-checkout lines: “Very important, the rubber divider stick. I don’t want other people’s items fraternizing with my items.” Seinfeld didn’t revolutionize comedy, but he adapted it to a new, more self-centered age. He took Woody Allen’s neurotic insecurity but not his pessimism, captured George Carlin’s irony and comic rhythms but left out the social protest. It was the logical strategy for a Jewish kid who grew up in the suburban Long Island, New York, town of Massapequa. “It’s an old Indian name,” he noted, “that means ‘by the mall.'”

The best comics reflect their times. “I guess I came out of the ‘me’ decade, so I did me,” says Seinfeld, 42. What he also did was translate that comic persona into a hit TV show. Seinfeld, which debuted in 1990, revolves around a character very much like the real Jerry, dealing with the same trivial problems that he obsessed over in his comedy, from changing barbers to losing your car in a parking garage. The show spawned obvious knockoffs like Ellen and Friends; it also demonstrated to network executives that baby boomers now controlled the dial and wanted material reflecting their own lives, concerns and hip tastes. “I see my influence out there,” says Seinfeld. “It’s a tone. I’m flattered but not impressed.” After all, he says, his style is really only “reality with a twist of lemon.”

RICHARD SCOTT Hospital Czar

Five years after graduating from high school in 1970, Rick Scott had already served 29 months of active duty in the Navy, graduated from college and turned a money-losing doughnut shop into a winner. Today, at 43, he has put together the largest U.S. hospital company, Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp., which owns 341 hospitals in 38 states and posted revenues of $18 billion last year. Scott’s credo is a classic: quality care doesn’t have to come at a premium price. But it’s the way Scott is accomplishing that goal that is transforming how American hospitals do business. In an industry notorious for waste and inefficiency, Scott aggressively consolidates operations and imposes cost controls. By creating an interlocking system of health-care delivery that offers everything from complex surgery to home therapy, Columbia has attracted business from the insurance companies that have in turn fostered the managed-care revolution.

Typical of Scott’s style was his first foray into health care. In 1987 he and Richard Rainwater, a Fort Worth, Texas, billionaire, each invested $125,000 in a pair of struggling hospitals in El Paso, Texas. Then they acquired a neighboring hospital and shut it down. Within a year, the remaining two posted higher returns.

Columbia’s size allows it to demand deep discounts from suppliers. The company’s doctors, for example, have been encouraged to buy hospital gowns from a single source for a 20% saving. And according to Graef Crystal, who tracks CEO pay, Scott’s 1995 salary of $858,000 was 20% less than the rate in his league (though his Columbia shares are worth $6.9 million). “You know if you’ve been in the hospital that you don’t like the process,” says Scott, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. “We focus on how we can make it enjoyable. And we do it at a price, or a cost, that the American public can afford.”

WYNTON MARSALIS Jazz Impresario

Wynton Marsalis is leading a revolution of tradition. While many of his contemporaries play bland but best-selling smooth jazz and jazz-fusion, Marsalis champions core values: master the instrument, study the greats such as Monk and Ellington and dress and comport yourself with the dignity the music deserves. Though the battle for the music’s soul goes on, the success of other young jazz stars in the ’90s, from saxophonist Joshua Redman to pianist Eric Reed, is proof of Marsalis’ influence. “I’ve played 150 concerts a year for 15 years,” he says. “It helped to rebuild the jazz audience. Younger musicians see you play, and they get inspired to practice. Older musicians, maybe their confidence has sagged a little, see the younger generation coming out, playing the music, and it gives them confidence. Just playing regenerates things.”

Marsalis, 34, comes from a musical family and a musical city. His father Ellis is a pianist and educator; his elder brother Branford is a saxophonist; and one of his younger brothers, Delfeayo, is a trombone player. In New Orleans, a city as overflowing with jazz players as a bubbling pot of gumbo, Wynton was an early standout, a musical prodigy. As a teenager he played with drummer Art Blakey. Before Marsalis turned 22, he recorded a classical album that won a Grammy.

Marsalis has always given back to the musical community. Trumpeter Nicholas Payton, 22, one of jazz music’s new stars, says that when he was 13 his father was on the phone with Marsalis, who, after hearing young Payton playing in the background, invited him over to practice. Says Payton: “That someone of his stature would take the time out to do that says a lot. He believes in the perpetuation of this music.”

Now the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, Marsalis has worked to make the music more accessible through educational programs, symposiums and films. His approach has sometimes come under fire as stuffy. But Marsalis has answered his critics through his extraordinary work, most notably Blood on the Fields, a Big Band jazz epic on slavery performed at the center in 1994; it will be released as an album this year. Says Marsalis: “We want to bring jazz to the people in all its grandeur and glory. And we don’t believe the music is above people.”

STEPHEN COVEY Human-Potential Guru

No one can accuse this man of not practicing what he preaches. In his The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which spent 250 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, Stephen Covey draws a distinction between what he calls the Circle of Concern and the Circle of Influence. The first circle contains things that people worry about–the weather, the stock market, the war in Bosnia–but can do little or nothing about; the second comprises problems–job performance, household budget, social activities–that they can control. “Proactive people,” he writes, “focus their efforts in the Circle of Influence.”

Over the past 25 years, the “proactive” (translation: the opposite of “reactive”) Covey has pushed his circle of influence toward the global. He has met with President Clinton and consulted over the phone with House Speaker Newt Gingrich. His Covey Leadership Center, founded in Provo, Utah, 13 years ago with a staff of two, employs 700 and last year grossed $78 million. The center–and Covey’s inspirational lectures across the country–have drawn thousands of aspiring trainees, including employees of more than half the Fortune 500 companies and the U.S. Postal Service. Entire communities have adopted Covey’s management ideas. Steve Helmich, president of the Chamber of Commerce in Columbus, Indiana (pop. 36,000), says the Covey regimen has made his town a better place to live. “It may sound a little warm and fuzzy,” he concedes, “but I know this methodology works.”

The essence of Covey’s message–that self-knowledge and control must precede effective dealings with the world at large–seems unremarkable. Says Ronald Heifetz, director of the Leadership Education Project at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government: “He is packaging common sense as if it were original and making a fortune doing it.” Covey, 63 and a devout Mormon, demurs: “What’s common sense just isn’t common practice.”

DICK MORRIS Political Consultant

Late at night, while most of Washington sleeps, two political strategists are jaw-boning on the phone. Polishing the next big speech, “war gaming” the next five clashes with their opponent, they argue in a kind of rapid-fire code, a political shorthand developed during a 17-year partnership. One of the two strategists happens to be the President of the U.S. The other, a banty, cocksure New Yorker named Dick Morris, is the most influential–and infamous–political consultant on the planet.

The White House is touchy about Morris because he is the master of triangulation who helped engineer the dramatic gallop to the political center that revived Clinton’s presidency and because his lack of ideological conviction mirrors the same trait critics see in Clinton. Morris, 48, has a history of working for both Democrats and Republicans–a career strategy that has made him a traitor in the eyes of people in both parties. He could work simultaneously for Jesse Helms and Mother Teresa and see no inherent contradiction. (Helms, in fact, has been a Morris client; the Saint of Calcutta hasn’t called him as yet.) What these critics overlook, says Henry Sheinkopf, a consultant who works with Morris on the Clinton media team, “is that Dick is a man of the sensible middle: a brilliant strategist, of course, but one driven by centrist ideas. He wants to draw politicians from the left and right into the mainstream. He does it by using his huge antennae to pick up the issues that are about to move the electorate.”

Morris seldom speaks to reporters, but he gets into hot water all the time. He leaked White House polling data to Bob Dole’s campaign last January in a botched attempt to lure Dole into making a budget deal. But despite such mischief making, Morris hasn’t lost the President’s ear. There are 20 good reasons for this–one for each point by which Clinton leads Dole in the polls.

OPRAH WINFREY Talk-Show Host

A couple of years ago, Oprah Winfrey took a look at the tawdry TV talk world that surrounded her and got disgusted. “There’s no honor, no integrity in it,” she said, as she set about putting her own show on a new path, ignoring sensationalism in favor of “positive” subject matter. Her No. 1 ratings took a dip, while the Ricki Lakes and Jerry Springers became, briefly, the rage. In the end, however, Winfrey proved once again to be a trendsetter. The sleazy talk phenomenon soon peaked: politicians complained, viewers grew bored, shows were canceled–and Winfrey, now in her 10th year on national TV, is still on top, drawing 9 million viewers a day.

Winfrey, 42, had a troubled childhood, but her genius was to realize that those troubles–and similar ones experienced by ordinary people all over America–could make for compelling television. Phil Donahue invented the participatory approach to TV talk, but Winfrey brought a woman-to-woman empathy and a flair for self-revelation that he couldn’t match. Ted Koppel may have set the media’s political agenda, but Winfrey had a direct pipeline to the nation’s psyche. She helped bring such topics as child abuse, homosexuality and marital dysfunction out of the closet and into the public forum. Her legacy can be seen in everything from presidential candidates who discuss their marital problems on TV to the fad for crash diets. And when Winfrey did a show about mad-cow disease earlier this year, beef prices plummeted.

She has talked of ending her program in the next year or two and moving on to other projects, but her charismatic appeal is unlikely to diminish. “Oprah is probably the greatest media influence on the adult population,” says writer Fran Lebowitz. “She is almost a religion.” Amen.

EDWARD WITTEN Physicist

Physicists half jokingly call it the TOE–Theory of Everything. The idea is to describe all matter, all energy, all the fundamental forces of nature in one tidy, elegant set of equations. But it’s so devilishly difficult that Einstein spent his last years in frustration trying to concoct just a partial solution to the problem.

Yet physicists now think they’re finally on the right track with something known as superstring theory; young theorists are flocking to study its abstruse mathematics, convinced that therein lies the path to ultimate truth. And that’s largely owing to Edward Witten, 44, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Witten didn’t invent superstring theory, which posits that the basic building blocks of nature are not tiny particles but unimaginably small loops and snippets of what loosely resembles string–except that the string exists in a bizarre, 10-dimensional universe. The current version of the theory took shape in the late 1960s, when the tall, thin, shy, wispy-voiced scientist was still an undergraduate at Brandeis.

By the mid-1980s, though, when Witten turned his attention to superstrings, he was widely regarded as the most gifted physicist in the world, and perhaps the most brilliant who has ever lived. And simply by choosing to work in the field, he utterly transformed it. Says Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at New York University: “I remember fondly that back in the ’70s, superstring theory was like a cottage industry. Only a handful of us diehards worked on it. But when Ed Witten declared that the theory would dominate the next 50 years of physics, it was like a tidal wave hit.” Superstrings were suddenly hot.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the theory is correct, of course. As Einstein’s example makes clear, very smart people sometimes tilt at windmills. And even in the case of his greatest success, the General Theory of Relativity, Einstein had to wait patiently for experimentalists to go out and verify its predictions. Until they did, the theory was simply a set of clever equations. The same holds true today for superstring theory; unfortunately, it would take an atom smasher thousands of times as powerful as any on Earth to test it directly–at least in its current version.

But with Witten on the case, superstring theory may well be refined to the point where it can be tested in real-world experiments. Already his work on a related idea known as topological quantum field theory, which allows physicists to find connections between seemingly unrelated equations, has earned Witten the Fields Medal, the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize. That’s no small feat, considering that mathematicians usually look down on the dabblings of mere physicists.

Surprisingly, Witten’s undergraduate degree was in history (he planned to be a journalist). But his father was a physicist, and after a short stint working on the McGovern presidential campaign, Ed enrolled in Princeton’s graduate program in physics and never looked back. Now he’s convinced that he and his colleagues are on the verge of cracking a philosophical mystery that’s dogged science ever since Aristotle divided the world into earth, air, fire and water: What is the ultimate nature of the universe? “I can’t say how long it will take,” he says, “but it seems to me that the handwriting is on the wall.” If he’s right, the world’s greatest physicists generally agree, the handwriting looks remarkably like Ed Witten’s.

CAROL GILLIGAN Psychologist

How likely is it that a single book could change the rules of psychology, change the assumptions of medical research, change the conversation among parents and teachers and developmental professionals about the distinctions between men and women, boys and girls? Yet many who read Carol Gilligan’s book In a Different Voice (600,000 copies in print, translated into nine other languages) find that their views on gender will never be the same.

In her landmark study (first published in 1982) and five subsequent books, Gilligan, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, has forced scholars across many disciplines to reckon with the differences in the way boys and girls develop their moral faculties and world views. Like most medical research, studies of moral development were usually based on male subjects. But what if women grew up along a different trajectory? When asked whether it was right for a man to steal a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, were the men who answered no, citing rules of justice, occupying a higher moral plane than women who said yes, citing human compassion?

Because women’s moral judgments placed greater weight on emotional ideas like caring than on abstract notions of justice, they were often graded as morally deficient in psychological studies. “The answer in the field was that women’s sense of self was too much embedded in relationships, that women’s thinking was too contextual, and women’s judgments were too influenced by feelings. That was the going interpretation,” Gilligan, 59, recalls. “I said, ‘Maybe the problem isn’t in the women. The problem is in the theory.’ Bringing women’s voices in changes the theory.”

The result, say many, is that Gilligan’s work has changed the voice of psychology. Her interviews with girls at different stages of childhood and adolescence showed how social expectations can crush a girl’s spirit and shut down her confidence. Maybe girls need to be taught differently, talked to differently, to help master the transition to adulthood. And that suggestion carries broad implications. “No longer is it valid to make conclusions about heart attacks, diabetes, education, without looking at differences between men and women,” says psychologist Norine Johnson of Boston University School of Medicine. “I think [Gilligan’s] major contribution in this society, which loves numbers as a way to make meaning, is that you cannot know about the human race unless you look at what women are doing, and not just make inferences about them from men.”

LOUIS FARRAKHAN Leader of the Nation of Islam

Leo Tolstoy was taken with the idea that the masses always find just the right leader to address the crisis of the age. Last October, with all the fuss about just how many black men showed up in Washington for the Million Man March, it was easy to overlook Tolstoy’s observation at work. Those who arrived at the National Mall had come to move beyond the pieties of “We shall overcome” and to bear witness to their experience of tragic social and economic dislocations that have touched the poor, the well-to-do, the brightest and best among them. And they came to do so at the fiery beckoning of Louis Farrakhan. As leader of the Nation of Islam, he had wandered in his own raging wilderness for nearly 40 years and now finally had an open circuit to the audience he desired.

In traditional American politics, the luster of success is reserved for those who defend the moral high ground. No longer. The high ground belongs to another era now, an old moral topography too idealistic for present use. This belief, so common among black and white youth, has transformed the political landscape. Organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and its leaders seem expendable. This isn’t cynicism so much as despair. It lingers in the words of the rap artists who today quote Farrakhan instead of Martin Luther King Jr. Who can afford to discuss moral issues when the children are dying? Farrakhan’s troops believe devoutly in his message of self-respect yet find it possible to ignore the core beliefs of a raging orator who claims aids is a government conspiracy, reviles Jews and finds “traitors” everywhere.

The black middle class is just as deeply alienated as the young poor, and the support of both groups allowed Farrakhan, 63, who lives in Chicago, to upstage leaders like the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Farrakhan knows the feeling of pain, its patina and scent. Indeed, he says it is his ability to “articulate pain” that has drawn a new following to him. That, and the Nation of Islam’s program of self-reliance, healthful eating and abstinence from drugs, tobacco and alcohol. “The time is now better for such a doctrine of doing for self because everything else we have tried has failed,” says Farrakhan. “And since government is no longer responsive to the needs of our people, then we have to be responsive.” Black Americans have heard it all before. But in the past, racial and economic segregation was legal. Farrakhan asks his flocks to return willingly to a self-dependence that never was. That is his message. In many quarters it is selling quite well.

COURTNEY LOVE Punk Provocateur

Courtney Love, punk rocker, headline grabber and widow of grunge poet Kurt Cobain, stands astride a cultural fault line–between rage and insight, youthful energy and thirtysomething fatigue, between the starry-eyed lust for fame and the alternative-rock aesthetic of rejecting careerism in all its forms. Love and her raucous band Hole have released only two major albums; the first, Pretty on the Inside, was choked with aural distortion and sold only mildly. But the second, Live Through This, was a breakthrough, marrying viciousness and vulnerability, all delivered with sharp guitar hooks and bruisingly cerebral lyrics. “Like a liar at a witch trial,” Love sings on a song called Plump, “you look good for your age.” Love, 31, has also perfected her public persona–a hard-living, chain-smoking, punch-throwing dangerous-woman type who draws you to her even though you know she’s trouble.

She’s protective of her image, reclusive one day, chatty the next; she’s fond of E-mailing fans and detractors, and of placing unexpected phone calls to fume. After the “not guilty” O.J. verdict, she called TIME to declare: “I want to go out and find a riot.”

Hole’s success helped clear the way for a wave of rageful women rockers, from Alanis Morissette to Tracy Bonham to Garbage’s Shirley Manson. Love is not the first female to strap on a guitar and wail. Patti Smith, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, Tracy Chapman and others were pioneers. But Love is the one to watch right now as she leads her coed quartet through concerts and controversy, venting her soul about sin and society, baby milk and high school, sex and death. She is the dysfunctional but still beating heart of a tragic, tabloid time. She looks good for her age.

AL GORE Vice President of the U.S.

The old saw holds that the Vice Presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit, and Al Gore jokes that the former Veep credited with the phrase “actually mentioned another bodily fluid.” But as Clinton has soared in the polls by emphasizing moderation, Gore’s standing with the President, says a senior presidential adviser, “is unparalleled. He has access, trust, respect, continued influence in the campaign and on every major issue.”

In his job, Gore needs to influence only one man, the one with all the power. He and Clinton meet every week for a private lunch, josh about who has better press clips, swap wonk talk and wax philosophical about the future of government. And Gore can admonish the President in front of others. In his 1994 book The Agenda, Bob Woodward recounts an Oval Office meeting at which Clinton was fretting about how he could get his legislation passed. As aides looked on in amazement, Gore finally let loose: “You can get with the goddamn program!” Stunned silence. After a long pause, Clinton laughed and said, “O.K.”

The Vice President has studied the record of previous Vice Presidents to figure out a few keys to success. The first is not leaking disagreements with the boss. Gore has also shouldered thankless but meaty tasks that give him something to attend to besides foreign funerals: reinventing government, overhauling telecommunications law, smoothing relations with Moscow. But part of his sway in the White House flows from being not just an inside guy. His book Earth in the Balance, linking family and ecological dysfunction, sold more than 500,000 copies. He has independent stature because of his decades of patient work on arms control, TV violence, putting computers in classrooms.

He also has electricity that comes from his own presidential prospects. Gore, 48, brushes aside questions about 2000 by pointing to the Scripture hanging on his wall: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” Says he: “The future will take care of itself.” But after one or two terms as best supporting actor, the ultimate promotion beckons. When Bob Dole announced he would quit the Senate, Gore was standing outside the Oval Office with chief of staff Leon Panetta, who said he thought Dole’s move didn’t make sense. “That’s like President Clinton resigning to run for President,” Panetta said. And the deadpan Gore just pulled on his chin and said, “Hmmmm.”

E.O. WILSON Biologist

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.” The biblical proverb augured the work of E.O. Wilson, the pre-eminent biological theorist of the late 20th century who has explored the workings of the cosmos from the altitude of anthills. Wilson, 67, has used the study of minute creatures as a springboard for two crucial ideas. The first, expounded in 1967 in The Theory of Island Biogeography, which he wrote with the late ecologist Robert MacArthur, provides the scientific bedrock for understanding the decline of ecosystems. The second concept, laid out in his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, argues that social behaviors ranging from warfare to altruism have a genetic component. Cornell biologist Thomas Eisner describes Wilson as one of the “prime synthesizing minds in the world today.”

The product of a lonely, itinerant childhood, Wilson began studying insects at age nine. Later, his scrutiny of ants in faraway places ranging from Suriname to Vanuatu enabled the self-effacing Harvard myrmecologist to discover connections between the size and remoteness of ecosystems and their diversity, an idea that has proved crucial to understanding the crisis of extinction. His examination of ant social structure started Wilson on investigations that led him to conclude that the social behavior of all animals, including humans, is influenced by genes.

Alarmed by the loss of species around the world, the celebrated naturalist–winner of biology’s highest honors and two Pulitzer Prizes–has become an ecological Paul Revere. “The loss of biodiversity,” he is fond of saying, “is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.”

TONI MORRISON Novelist

Her 1993 Nobel Prize for literature merely confirmed what her readers and admirers had known for more than two decades: Toni Morrison is a major American writer. But because she is an African-American woman, her importance to and impact on her times transcend the literary. Her example, both in her powerful novels and in her strong, imposing personality, has inspired a generation of black artists and produced seismic effects on publishing.

Thanks to Morrison’s trailblazing success, black women are not only writing more; their books are being bought and read in droves. Bebe Moore Campbell, author of the best-selling Brothers and Sisters and Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad, just out in paperback, vividly remembers coming upon Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye (1969): “When I finished that book, I had all the permission I needed to become a writer. Someone who looked like me had written a masterpiece.” The megasuccessful Terry McMillan, author of the current best seller How Stella Got Her Groove Back, remembers being inspired by Morrison’s books in school and then sensing, once her own work began to be published, that the elder author was not offering her much encouragement. (They write, to put it mildly, dissimilar fiction; Morrison is about as close to Faulkner as McMillan is to Judith Krantz.) Those feelings have passed. When she meets Morrison now, McMillan says, “we hug each other.”

But Morrison, 65, is more than an example and a comforting presence to hopeful writers. Her long experience, beginning in 1965 as an editor at Random House, taught her how to wield influence in predominantly male and white organizations. It was while working on the manuscripts of her writers that she realized she was not seeing the black girls and women, the straitened circumstances of the communities of her childhood, a dearth munificently filled by her own books and those of her proteges. Since 1989 Morrison has held a prestigious chair in the humanities at Princeton University, a bully pulpit from which she has, through her teaching, lectures and academic clout, affected the course of black-studies programs across the U.S. Says Harvard University’s Henry Louis Gates Jr., a longtime friend: “There’s no question that she’s had an enormous influence in literary circles, but in addition she’s an intellectual, and that’s important as well.”

Because Morrison is a writer, her influence will outlive her. As she said in her Nobel acceptance speech in Stockholm: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

MICHAEL HAMMER Management Consultant

He has, in many ways, enriched our work life, to which a cynic might respond, “Sure, if you’re still working.” Michael Hammer calls his lifework “undoing the Industrial Revolution.” And it has been keeping him busy. Hammer, 48, is the originator and flamekeeper of a business concept called “re-engineering,” a term he coined in a book he co-wrote in 1993 called Reengineering the Corporation.

Hammer’s philosophy does not refer to adjusting the knobs on the machinery. Reengineering is radical. It means starting with a clean sheet–if you were going to begin making and selling cars or magazines today, how would you go about it as opposed to how you are doing it now? The answers set in motion a revolution the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Henry Ford introduced the assembly line. Like most revolutions, this one has been extremely messy. Such huge firms as Procter & Gamble, Xerox and American Standard have successfully taken a Hammer to their structures.

At the same time, re-engineering has become synonymous with less elegant forms of reorganization, notably downsizing, in which CEOs fire workers wholesale to make a company more “efficient.” It can be the management equivalent of cutting off a leg of the chair you are sitting on to save wood. Says Hammer: “It is astonishing to me the extent to which the term re-engineering has been hijacked, misappropriated and misunderstood.” He says the goal isn’t to eliminate people. Rather, re-engineering makes what they do more valuable and rewarding. The catch: a re-engineered company initially requires fewer workers. Ideally, the firm grows and creates more jobs. Says Hammer: “Re-engineering changes everything: jobs, skills, processes, expectations. I’m not prepared to call that a disadvantage.”

Hammer, who lives in Newton, Massachusetts, came to his idea the long way. An electrical engineer and a former M.I.T. computer-science professor, he gradually became more interested in what people were doing than in computers. In his forthcoming book, Beyond Reengineering, he attacks the corporate focus on doing “tasks”–making part of a car, say, or doing a credit check. To him, the key to value-creating work is mastering “process,” or how bits of work that form a product or service come together. Says he: “I think this is the work of the angels. In a world where so many people are so deprived, it’s a sin to be inefficient.”

MARTHA STEWART Empress of “How-To”

Martha Stewart’s face is everywhere but on a Wanted poster: in her magazine, on four videos and a dozen books, on TV (twice a day), unofficially on the Internet, at K Mart, and in her catalog (Martha by Mail). In an interview, conducted as she shuttled among her farm in Westport, Connecticut, her two Hampton beach houses on New York’s Long Island and her Manhattan office, she says her aim is nothing less than to take over Christmas. “It is our intention to own areas in communication. I don’t mean to sound egomaniacal, but Perry Como used to own Christmas on TV. By own I mean monopolize and influence.”

She already claimed a chunk of Christmas in 1995 with her Home for the Holidays TV special featuring Hillary Clinton. Many people ceded Easter to her after 1994, when she counseled readers to celebrate by taking a fresh ham, roasting it for five hours and serving it garnished with organically grown grass that had been cut early that morning with the dew still on it. Never mind that most of her magazine’s 5 million readers still buy the honey-baked version at Boston Market or, horrors!, take it out of a can. Even the subscribers who don’t work may think twice before taking on her October 1994 project: “It occurred to us at MARTHA STEWART LIVING that we had never really focused on the pleasures of raising backyard livestock.”

If Martha Stewart relies on people’s actually doing what she suggests, as opposed to just watching her do it, she would be very poor indeed, instead of a multimillionaire empress of elegance. The real secret to Martha is that the perfection she is pursuing is so out of reach of anyone without a staff, or who sleeps more than Martha’s four hours a night, that there is no obligation to actually do it. Being in Martha’s thrall is like buying a treadmill and instantly feeling fit even though it serves mainly as a coat rack; acquiring the Martha oeuvre makes you think you will conduct a beautiful domestic symphony one of these days–when the kids grow up, when you lose your day job and perhaps the lunkhead you’ve married who likes meat loaf and ketchup. The magazine and television show bearing her name and developed with Time Inc. (she and the company are talking about restructuring the relationship) have a Merchant-Ivory movie-set glow. Actual people, as opposed to imported guests, would really mess it up.

So why is Martha, 54, so much more influential than, say, Alice Waters, the Chez Panisse chef who transformed restaurant cooking? It’s because Marthaland is a one-stop shop, for everything from bed to kitchen to garden, where one thing stylishly builds on another. She pulls all this off with total earnestness (except when she is paid to be ironic by American Express, lining her swimming pool with a mosaic of cut-up credit cards). Otherwise, she stays in character: that of a demanding schoolmistress who will be coming around to test for trace elements of bottled dressing in your salade nicoise. When Bryant Gumbel tries to poke a bit of fun at her during her segments on the Today show, she blithely ignores him. If she doesn’t take cake decorating seriously, who will? Dominique Browning, editor in chief of the relaunched House & Garden, due to debut this fall, says Martha’s dominance derives from the fact that “she’s bossy, she knows what’s good for us.” It’s come to pass that the universal zinger for a household shortfall is, “That’s not how Martha would do it.”

Which is another element of her success: rather than bring the subject matter down to the audience, she is bringing the audience up to the subject matter, making it worthy of the effort it requires. Sure it’s easier to identify with Gloria Steinem, who admits she once lived in an apartment for four years before realizing the oven didn’t work. By making the impossible purchasable–at least in magazine and catalog form–Stewart is now simply Martha: cooking, sewing, gilding, planting, wallpapering and painting her way into every corner of your house–and your life. And Christmas? You’d better watch out.

WILLIAM BENNETT Advocate of Traditional Values

Bill Bennett can scarcely walk into an airport or restaurant these days without an admirer’s stopping to scold him about his refusal to run for President. He sometimes responds, only half jokingly, that he would have to give up too much influence. As Education Secretary for President Reagan and drug czar for President Bush, Bennett spent eight years around the White House. “And I can’t imagine,” he says, “how being President could be more interesting than all the things I’m doing now.”

In an era in which many Americans bemoan a decline in traditional values, Bennett, 52, has made himself the virtual CEO of what might be dubbed Virtue Inc. His 1994 anthology of moral tales, The Book of Virtues, has sold 2.3 million copies and has spawned two best-selling sequels and a TV cartoon show. He is a fixture on the Sunday TV talk shows and the lecture circuit, where he commands $40,000 a speech.

Bennett’s appeal is rooted in a combative Brooklyn childhood, a classical education (Ph.D. in philosophy), late-in-life experiences as a husband and as the father of two young boys, and a gift for framing public issues in provocative ways. His central message is simple and passionately argued. Virtue, he insists, must be aggressively taught to the young, especially by upholding exemplary characters and stories. Americans should not hesitate to speak out on matters of right and wrong–but must make clear that they don’t mean to censor anyone. They should shame and boycott entertainment companies–including Time Warner, a favorite Bennett target–that they judge to be trafficking in violent lyrics and trashy TV shows.

While some find Bennett preachy (and taunt him to prove his own self-discipline by losing some weight), he speaks openly, and often humorously, about his shortcomings and challenges even like-minded audiences. He urged Christian Coalition members to avoid a “fixation on homosexuality” and instead turn their attention “closer to home,” to the epidemic of divorce that poses a far worse threat “in terms of damage to the children of America.”

FRANK O. GEHRY Architect

In the end, the character of a civilization is encased in its structures. We see the grandeur of Rome in the Coliseum, the culture of Greece in the Parthenon and the faith of Egypt in the pyramids. What historians would divine of late 20th century America through its architecture is largely in the hands of Frank O. Gehry. More than any other living architect, he has created, if not a signature American style, then a singular way of approaching building. And while some archaeologists might postulate from his jutting, slightly junked-up structures that 20th century U.S.A. was dissonant, disparate and dysfunctional, others will see its democratic nature, its willingness to embrace new ideas, its ingenuity, its will.

Gehry burst onto the California architectural scene in 1978 when he transformed his innocent little pink Dutch colonial home in Santa Monica into a riot of chain-link fence, plywood, exposed joists and corrugated iron. It was unlike anything anyone (especially the neighbors) had seen before, owing as much to sculpture and collage as it did to architecture. Throughout his career Gehry, 67, has gone outside traditional architectural thinking; his design methods have been informed by artists and artistic processes as much as by materials and function. His buildings are exuberant, startling and often just really fun. Who else would put giant Claes Oldenburg–created binoculars at the entrance to the garage of the Chiat/Day/ Mojo offices in Venice, California? “There’s something in movement and chaos that fits our life, the present, and that I tapped into because of Los Angeles,” says Gehry. “It’s an American city that’s ugly to us all, but it’s the highest product of democracy.” Yet his designs can be too much even for the city he loves. After an outcry over funding, his beloved Disney Concert Hall (he poses in a model, at left) is unbuilt.

Nevertheless, on any given day, architects still turn up just to admire his home in Santa Monica. It has been photographed so often that the click of a shutter makes the Gehrys’ dog bark. Today no less a veteran than Philip Johnson counts Gehry among his influences, while the work of such younger architects as Frank Israel also bears his intimations. Gehry nevertheless belongs to no school and will found no movement. His influence is reflected not so much in the way other architects are using cheaper materials, juxtaposing disparate elements and jumbling geometric forms; rather it is embodied in the way he has made Americans experience–and like–architecture.

And just as Gehry has borrowed from many sources outside architecture, nonarchitects are borrowing back. Says New York architect Peter Eisenman: “He’s one of the people who is studied by intellectuals, critics and historians. Frank has been enormously influential in terms of the culture of architecture in relation to thought today.” Significantly, Gehry is one of the few American architects who can maintain intellectual engagement while also being commercially successful, designing everything from teapots to chairs.

Gehry feels his greatest influence has been on his students. “It’s not my formal vocabulary as much as the way I explore, deal with the world and respond,” he says. “I don’t think my ideas, my designs, my architecture should be emulated by kids as much as for them to know that somebody like them was able, by some kind of relentless pursuit, to make space in the world for this kind of work. And because of that, they can do it too.” Not a bad thing for archaeologists to uncover.

PATTY STONESIFER Microsoft’s New-Media Leader

When Microsoft and Dreamworks SKG formed a joint venture last year to fill cyberspace with movie-quality games and adventures, they announced it on a stage full of the biggest names in software and entertainment. Bill Gates and Steven Spielberg were there, and so were David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and, of course, Patty Stonesifer.

Patty who?

As head of Microsoft’s Interactive Media Division, Stonesifer, 40, is defining what may be the most important step in Microsoft’s future: venturing beyond software for PCs into content for all media, including cd-roms, cable TV and the Internet. “We want to be the premier provider of interactive products,” she says. With a $500 million 1996 budget, Stonesifer is in a position to change how millions of Americans get their news and entertainment. She has become, for Microsoft’s growing ranks of media partners (a collection that ranges from nbc to Julia Child), an indispensable new-media problem solver. “There is,” says Gates, “a lot to be figured out.”

Stonesifer, the mother of two small children, has made a career of solving problems. After joining Microsoft in 1988, she transformed tiny Microsoft Press into a strong technical publisher and later reorganized the company’s product-support department. When she arrived in 1991, customers were kept on hold for an average of 20 minutes. By the time she left, the average wait was down to 60 seconds.

Stonesifer’s sense of what works and what doesn’t will be critical if Microsoft is to succeed outside the personal computer industry. And the world won’t have long to wait: Michael Kinsley’s much anticipated Webzine, Slate, is scheduled to debut June 24, and msnbc Cable, the joint NBC-Microsoft all-news cable channel, is due this fall. If Stonesifer’s track record is any gauge, both projects should draw a crowd.

ROBERT REDFORD Godfather of Independent Film

Look at an American independent film, and chances are the background trees will be in bloom. You can thank Robert Redford for that. Sundance Film Festival, the Park City, Utah, showcase he took over in 1985, is now so crucial for indie auteurs that many plan their movies around it. “They’ll shoot in the spring,” says Todd Solondz, whose Welcome to the Dollhouse won Sundance’s top prize this year, “then edit in the summer and finish by the fall deadline so they can be shown at Sundance in January.”

It is springtime for off-Hollywood film, with maverick hits like Fargo, Flirting with Disaster, The Brothers McMullen–and Pulp Fiction by that spawn of the indies, Quentin Tarantino. Redford had a fine, leathery hand in all that too. In ’85 some 50 independent films were made; last year there were 700. They earned $735 million at the U.S. box office, nearly triple the gross in 1992. Redford’s festival created an aura that welcomed young directors and persuaded Hollywood to do the same. Says indie producer John Pierson: “Sundance totally dominates the independent landscape.”

Why would a hunky Hollywood star want to promote un-Hollywood films? “I’ve never been at ease with formula,” says Redford, 58. “And around 1980 films were getting more formulaic, more like cartoons. Diversity was in danger. Helping independent film was a way to keep the industry broad.” So in 1981 he created the Sundance Institute. It was host to powwows with indie and industry heavyweights, gave grants to some films and in February launched a Sundance cable channel. The institute has even gone global, inviting foreign talent to Utah.

Redford frets that independent film now has a “Belle Epoque fashion.” But if it’s lucky, it will last as long, and weather as smartly, as its most cogent cheerleader.

PHIL KNIGHT Nike’s Lord of the Flyers

If Michael Jordan is God, then Phil Knight put him in heaven. By paying Jordan and other athletes millions to endorse his shoes, the chairman and CEO of Nike has helped turn them into household names, (make that household gods) and shaped sports to his liking. His pantheon includes Jordan and Charles Barkley, Andre Agassi and Deion Sanders, Alonzo Mourning and Monica Seles. Knight, 58, who lives in Beaverton, Oregon, is the master of the mantra of the age (“Just Do It”) and the proprietor of the unmistakable swoosh, the icon that has turned the lowly sneaker into winged sandals, an aid to Everyman and Everywoman as they attempt to approximate the divine. Each pair promises the inspiration of Nike’s athletes: the myth-defying rebelliousness that has let them fly to the sun without melting their wings. Knight’s stars are frontiersmen, exponents of an in-your-face brand of American optimism. And thus sports, as Knight has asserted, are “the culture of the United States.” By exporting the culture he has conquered the world for America.

Knight, however, does not believe empires last forever. Business cycles will displace front-runners, even Nike (which made $397 million last year). The pursuit of cheap labor, for example, can redound on the mighty. But Knight also believes in the eternal return–that Nike’s pre-eminence can be restored again and again. Geoff Hollister, a sports consultant who has worked with Knight for 25 years, advises rivals: “Laugh at him once, and see how long it takes for him to catch up with you.” Swoosh.

GERALDINE LAYBOURNE Television Executive

Researchers for Nickelodeon did a survey a few years ago asking young viewers to compare TV networks to food. Fox, the kids said, is like junk food. The Disney Channel is ice cream. And Nickelodeon, they decided, resembles pizza and spaghetti. Geraldine Laybourne, longtime creative chief of the children’s cable network, loved that answer. “We’re good for them, but we’re so much fun that being good for them isn’t boring.”

Today this may seem an obvious approach to children’s TV. But it was something of a radical notion in 1980, when Laybourne, a former schoolteacher and the mother of two, first joined the fledgling cable operation. Children’s TV at the time was divided fairly neatly into two realms: “educational” fare, mostly on PBS, and all the other junk that kids watched, mainly bad cartoons. “Our dream was to bring back variety to television for kids,” Laybourne said. Nickelodeon programming, from the raucous game show Double Dare to rude cartoons like Ren & Stimpy, hit a happy middle ground: it didn’t insult kids’ intelligence or their sense of fun either.

With her relaxed, collegial style, Laybourne, 49, did more than just develop good children’s programs. She showed the cable industry during its formative years that a channel with a strong mission and a well-targeted audience could be a financial success. Nickelodeon, now seen in 66 million homes, is the highest-rated basic-cable network, and it has spun off lines of imaginative toys as well as another cable channel, TV Land (ne Nick at Nite), aimed at baby-boomer parents. Nickelodeon has also provided a role model for reformers seeking to upgrade network fare for children. Says Kathryn Montgomery, president of the Washington-based Center for Media Education: “Nickelodeon shows that you can create more quality programming for kids in the commercial market.”

Laybourne moved on to a bigger commercial market last February, when she was hired by the new Disney/abc media combine to oversee cable operations. One big project, a 24-hour news channel, has just been shelved, but Laybourne will have ample opportunity to test another of her pet ideas: that doing good and making money are not incompatible concepts. “I’m an idealist,” she says, “and I don’t make any apologies for that.”