"I asked [Bono] why, in his opinion, [Tony] Stark couldn’t be content with charitable work à la Bill Gates, shaping the world with his billions. "You have to understand these guys," was Bono's one-line reply. "Bill's software. Stark's all hardware." Vanity Fair profiles a year in the life of Tony Stark, and asks what the literal and figurative ascent of the inventor/playboy/superhero means for 21st Century geopolitics. Is Iron Man "the embodiment of an outdated American fantasy -- a self-made, unilateral, technological solution to hopelessly complex problems"? Or is he merely the improbable but logical outgrowth of one young man's vast wealth, careless hedonism, prodigious intellect, and strained familial and mentor relationships? Christine Everhart examines the political implications and personal motives of Stark's quest to beat swords into plowshares -- while profiting from the retrofits.
posted on Sep 12, 2008 - View this thread

Malcolm Gladwell takes a look at the effectiveness of criminal profiling.
posted on Nov 8, 2007 - View this thread

Margaret Talbot's wonderful profile of David Simon, the creator of "The Wire." Simon said, he and his colleagues had “ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy—not Aristophanes. We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state.” He went on, “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”
posted on Oct 15, 2007 - View this thread

Imagini Visual DNA. A ten-webpage survey supposed to profile your personality. [via Robot Wisdom]
posted on Sep 18, 2007 - View this thread

meta-markets Online stock market for trading socially networked creative products.
posted on Sep 3, 2007 - View this thread

People of the Web --very well done short video profiles of interesting people online. Mike Rogers of blogactive is on the front page now. Links to previous profiles are on the right, including Kirk Cameron, Caleb Shikles, Sherman Austin, and Josh Wolf.
posted on Jun 1, 2007 - View this thread

“I wanted to try to capture the intelligence of the design, not just the outcome of the design.” “In 1977, [Donald] Knuth halted research on his books for what he expected to be a one-year hiatus. Instead, it took 10. Accompanied by [his wife] Jill, Knuth took design classes from Stanford art professor Matthew Kahn. Knuth, trying to train his programmer’s brain to think like an artist’s, wanted to create a program [TeX] that would understand why each stroke in a typeface would be pleasing to the eye.”—from a profile of Knuth in the Stanford Magazine (May '06). Salon calls him “computing’s philosopher king” (Sep '99). NPR’s Morning Edition interviews Knuth as “the founding artist of computer science” (Mar '05). Perhaps a MeFite somewhere has one of these? (Previously)
posted on Apr 23, 2007 - View this thread

claimID is an online identity management tool, recently out of beta. Essentially it's a way of helping people and search engines understand who you are, but also who you are not. It's closely tied to the OpenID project, discussed briefly in this thread.
posted on Jun 25, 2006 - View this thread

John Ashcroft: activist attorney. Long and revealing article about Ashcroft's "my morals and religious beliefs first and law second" political history.
posted on Jul 16, 2002 - View this thread

It's strange to think Harmony Cousins is part my generation when she's lived ten times the life I have. But the fact that even after all this she can pull herself back to together proves that she's ten times the person most of us are. How many of us have her strength?
posted on Apr 1, 2002 - View this thread

Colorgenics forms a profile based on your choice of colors from a given color spectrum. Accurate? I thought so. So how much does mood affect how you respond to colors, and how much do colors affect your mood?
posted on Dec 14, 2001 - View this thread

A little humor found in the deep recesses of our profile data. Seems Rodii has a sense of humor [caveat: I'm not promising "LOL", but it certainly left me with a ""]
posted on Mar 9, 2001 - View this thread