By Joel Stein
You’ve seen 2014 Time 100 most Icon list and probably have your own views about it. Time magazine contributor Joel Stein has his own idea of what a ‘100 coolest people in the world’ list should look like.
Read through his own version -and find out why these people are the coolest on planet Earth.
1) Beyonce Knowles: Everyone thinks she’s sexy and classy and smart and feminist, and she doesn’t have to prove any of those things ever.
2) Jay Z: He’s married to Beyoncé.
3) Lena Dunham: She is authentic. You can tell because she doesn’t wear too much makeup.
4) Amy Schumer: Also authentic, despite wearing a lot more makeup.
5) Amy Poehler: In between, makeup wise.
6) Jenji Kohan: She created Orange is the New Black which is the first filmed performance with sexy lesbian stuff that you can watch and feel smart about without subtitles.
7) Olsen Twins: Have no idea what they’re up to, but I was told that they’re important. I’m guessing fashion. Or dating celebrities.
8) Leandra Medine: She writes a fashion blog called The Man Repeller, since that’s, after all, what fashion does. She was on Fast Company’s 2013 in 2013, “100 Most Creative People” list, and that’s the kind of 100-people list cred that makes me feel less insecure about picking someone.
9) Tavi Gevinson: “Rookie does less bitching about things than blogs tend to do. It’s the only one that has staying power because it has an aesthetic. It’s not just yelling about something else. Her little stable of writers largely drawn from her peer group is the first platform that is not just a bunch of quasi-youth and paid-for-youth talking to actual youth.” — Thomas “Baby Balls” Morton, Vice editor.
10) Kim Kardashian: She has a butt.
11) Other Kardashians: They are related to Kim Kardashian.
12) Stephen Colbert: When #CancelColbert was launched, he turned it into the funniest explanation of the difference between text and subtext that the Earnest Generation has heard. Then he cancelled anyway.
13) Jimmy Fallon: King of the Earnest generation.
14) Justin Timberlake: The entertainer in chief.
15) Sophia Amoruso: The founder of CEO of Nasty Gal she makes clothes for gals who, in my opinion, aren’t really that nasty.
16) Cara DeLevigne: When Kara Buettner, a 25-year-old media strategist at OMD Worldwide, told me to put her on the list, I wrote it down as ‘Tara Day Levine.’ I have no idea who she is. To which Kara said, ‘You don’t know who that is. Oh my gosh? She has like 4 million instagram followers. Google her.’ I did. She was named by the Evening Standard as one of ‘London’s 1,000 Most Influential of 2011’, in the category of “Most Invited” and by The Sunday Times Magazine as one of the ‘100 Makers of the 21st Century’ list of influential British people. Still have no idea who she is.
17) Sean Rad and Justin Mateen: They created Tinder, without which young people would not have sex since it would require going outside and talking to strangers in public, and our race would end.
18) Karlie Kloss: Women like models a lot. This one made a cookie for Momofuku Milk Bar called the Perfect 10 Kookie because it contains dark chocolate and no gluten, which is how women justify eating crap. She is on the Top 50 Models Women list by Models.com and Vogue Paris’ 30 models of the 2000s. Time needs to make a list of models pronto.
19) Kate Upton: I wondered if women liked her when they put her in that new chick flick. They do. Surprising.
20) Miley Cyrus: She does her own thing and is her own person, as long as those things and that person are totally different from whom you thought she was five years ago.
21) Ellie Goulding: It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.
22) Lorde: The first pop singer to call the culture on its materialism and shallowness in a cool way since Bob Dylan.
23) Michelle Phan: A YouTube celebrity who teaches people how to put on makeup. Why anyone goes to law school when there are this many career options is beyond me.
24) James Franco: If the Renaissance had Renaissance Men, the Millennials have James Franco.
25) Zooey Deschanel: Influencing preciousness across the globe.
26) Banksy: How lazy are 18-34 year olds? Too lazy to go to museums or galleries. They want their art on walls when they’re walking by.
27) Mindy Kaling: She’s authentic and honest and on TV.
28) Tina Fey: The original Mindy Kaling.
29) Louis CK: He’s the only person who gets to do exactly what he wants on TV except Jimmy Fallon, who happens to want exactly what network executives want.
30) Kanye West: He really doesn’t care.
31) Mark Zuckerberg: If not for him, young people couldn’t brag about quitting Facebook.
32) Kate Middleton: Just a normal civilian who got to be a princess. Even in 2014, that’s all it takes to get on a list of people influential to young women.
33) Michele Obama: All the importance of a politician, without politics.
34) Shonda Rhymes: She made that Scandal show.
35) Malala Yousafzai: By campaigning for education for girls in Pakistan, she was shot. As she recovered, the Taliban vowed to kill her. She is like Tupac, only with a purpose.
36) Jon Stewart: The Walter Cronkite of young people.
37) Nina Dobrev: An actress on The Vampire Diaries, a show on the CW, a network whose senior vice president, Joanna Klein, helped make this list. You do the math.
38) Pope Francis: He’s the pope, but he’s also like one of us. Young people don’t like when even the pope acts like he’s better than them, even though he was chosen by God and they, less so.
39) Arianna Huffington: The Huffington Post attracts a lot of young readers for a new site. But not for a site that is mostly photos of side boob.
40) Jen Selter: Queen of the butt selfies.
41) Edward Snowden: He flipped of The Man, told the truth, became an outlaw and had a girlfriend who had some really hot Instagram shots. He should be on this list five times.
42) Taylor Swift: She breaks up with guys and sings about it.
43) Anna Wintour: Still in charge of what women wear or want to wear.
44) Rachel Zoe: Or maybe she’s in charge of what women wear or want to wear. There are probably a whole lot of people in charge of that, come to think of it.
45) Sheryl Sandberg: Telling young women to lean in was something they could understand without having to read a whole book.
46) Harvey Levin: If not for him, no one would know what inane chatter cameramen try to make with celebrities outside restaurants.
46) Veronica Roth: The 25-year-old author of the Divergent trilogy, a young adult science fiction series, she’s kind of like the Hunger Games woman. I should add the Hunger Games woman.
47) Suzanne Collins: She’s the Hunger Games woman.
48) Jenna Marbles: She’s funny, she’s pretty, she obviously can’t act or she’d be in movies by now. But since her 2011 YouTube video “How To Trick People Into Thinking You’re Good Looking” she has amassed 13 million subscribers to her YouTube channel and marketed dog toys called Kermie Worm & Mr Marbles named after her dogs. That’s kind of like being a movie star nowadays.
49) iJustine: Perhaps the greatest lifecaster on the web, depending on what ‘life caster’ means. You may have noticed I’ve included a lot of social media stars. That’s because I’m hoping they share this list and it goes viral and makes Time rich. That’s how the economy works now.
50) Avicii: DJ’s are the new rock stars and this is only one since Moby who wrote a song I know.
51) Skrillex: This Corey Feldman lookalike is the first person in my entire lifetime to become famous for making a type of music that adults think is awful noise.
52) Armin Van Buuren: It was a tough choice between Danish DJ Tiesto and Dutch DJ Armin Van Buuren, but in the end, Van Buuren’s Wikipedia page looked longer when I quickly scrolled down them both.
53) Nadezhda Tolokonnikova: Not only did the Pussy Riot member free people everywhere to say the word “pussy” everywhere in a way that even the Sopranos failed to do, she also took a great stand for freedom. “I scoffed at the Pussy Riot thing but going through with the jail terms changed my mind. Did you read that letter from jail? It’s like some Solzhenitsyn shit. It upped her game a little.” –Thomas “Baby Balls” Morton, Vice magazine editor Verizon & Live At Roseland Ballroom.
54) Lady Gaga: She has empowered feminists, the LGBT community, fashionistas and monsters. She is also the most famous person in the world who no one knows what she looks like.
55) Nicki Minaj: She’s the Lady Gaga of rap.
56) Evan Spiegel: The inventor and CEO of Snap Chat created a way that young people could send photos of their junk to each other without a permanent record. But instead young people sent photos of themselves making silly faces. Stupid young people.
57) Paul Tollett: The Coachella music festival is weirdly important to young people out West, who seem to think its Woodstock. The founder and booker of the festival also books the country equivalent, L.A.’s Stagecoach festival for country music which is attended by people who don’t want it to be Woodstock at all.
58) Ben Silbermann: The CEO of Pinterest must know, by now, way too much about what handbags women want.
59) Chad Dickerson: The Etsy CEO must know way too much about what handbags women would want if they had to make them themselves.
60) Kevin Systrom: The former CEO and co-founder of Instagram before he sold it to Facebook, he was the first frat boy with enough engineering skill to put a filter on everyone so they look better.
61) Seth McFarlane: Now for the ones for dudes. Seth McFaralane is beloved by 18-34 year olds for hosting the Oscars. No. It’s for his album of standards. No. It’s for remaking Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series. No. It’s because he makes cartoons with race jokes.
62) Dana White: Preside of the UFC which is the sport of choice for young men. Not to participate in; just to watch. The sport of choice, participation-wise is videogame playing.
63) Freddie Wong: A professional video game competitor turned YouTube filmmaker, Wong is all up in it and stuff.
64) Shane Smith: The CEO of Vice, which does some of the best reportage from dangerous international locations and the very best reportage of what it’s like to be wasted on various drugs.
65) Mike Farah: The head of Funny or Die knows every celebrity and how to appeal to their vanity to get them to do dumb things – the most valuable skill of the 21st century.
66) Young Chop: This 20-year old rap producer from Chicago, he produced a lot of his high school friend Chief Keef’s hit songs. He’s in charge of a collective called BandKamp that includes Paris Bueller, CTC Reaper, 12 Hunna, C-Sick, Smylez and Poo Mack. Baby Balls Morton says his music, “shares a lot of similarities to the birth of Oi! music or hardcore. It’s full of anger. It’s good listening.” I cannot figure out if I prefer Poo Mack or C-Sick as a name. Depends on my mood, I think. When I’m feeling high-brow, it’s C-Sick; when I’m just chillin, it’s Poo Mack.
67) Kevin Hart: The most popular stand up comic in America shows that success is 99 percent perspiration, and 1 percent shiny clothing.
68) Robert Kirkman: The creator of The Walking Dead comic books, he tapped into the fact that dudes love zombies.
69) Judd Apatow: The launcher of Lena Dunham, Seth Rogen, James Franco, Kristin Wiig the movie star and dick jokes as we know them today, which is with a touch of sadness.
70) Questlove: Making things cools in every medium, especially hair.
71) Daniel Tosh: Making cruelty okay through charm weekly.
72) Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman: The founders of Reddit, the front page of the internet, have allowed us to see what frustrated young men think about when they’re alone at their computer. For some reason famous people decided that would be a good place to let people ask them anything.
73) Nathan Fielder: Replacing Jimmy Kimmel as our prankster-in-chief.
74) Jonah Peretti: The founder of Buzzfeed developed an algorithm that figured out that human beings digest information best in list featuring photos of cats.
75) Perry Chen: Thanks to the CEO and co-founder of Kickstarter, everyone feels way too comfortable asking their friends for money.
76) Kendrick Lamar: No one will destroy this rapper’s climb to the top of the rap world unless some bitch comes and kills his vibe. He’s very, very vulnerable to this. Vibe-killing bitches are like his kryptonite.
77) Adrian Peterson: Dudes like sports. Especially inspirational sports figures. It’s what they cry over. That and bitches killing their vibes.
78) Dan Okrent: Former Time Inc editor who also happened to invent fantasy sports and thereby has taken up 3-4 hours of most men’s day.
79) Roger Goodell: Keeping football footballing.
80) LeBron James: One cannot overestimate how much young men love sports. The only equivalent is how much old men love sports.
