The 100 People Who Are Changing America

WHAT SHE'S CHANGING: At 19, the biggest star in country and teen pop has managed to keep her head on straight — no drinking, no smoking, no limousine peekaboo — without seeming like a prude. Swift has given country music a new audience: teen girls who identify with her wholesome persona as much as her music.

TWEET: "Rehearsals today with Miley. We ate an entire pizza in about five minutes."

SEE THE CHANGE: Taylor Swift on MySpace

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Photo: Caulfield/Getty

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: Schiff, a physician-scientist at Weill Cornell, led a team of doctors who transformed a minimally conscious patient by stimulating his brain with implanted electrodes. After six years in a near-coma, the patient was able to speak, eat and express emotions.

SKEPTICS SAY: The case was based on a single patient; Schiff is now beginning to try the procedure in 11 others.

NEXT FIGHT: Evolving new rehabilitation approaches for traumatic brain injury, which could help soldiers with severe head trauma from combat zones like Iraq.

SEE THE CHANGE: Weill Cornell

Photo: Weill Cornell Art and Photography

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: The expectations for public education in America. The ex-CEO of Chicago's public schools has the resources — $100 billion in stimulus funds — to turn the crisis in our schools into opportunity. Duncan is committed to removing obstacles to innovation — including bad teachers — and intercepting at-risk kids before kindergarten.

FRIENDS SAY: "He just wants to find and scale the ideas that work, period," says Wendy Kopp, CEO of Teach for America.

NEXT FIGHT: Working with the politically powerful teachers' unions to match pay to classroom performance.

SEE THE CHANGE: U.S. Department of Education

Photo: Ernst/Getty

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: The nature of the campaign poster. His iconic HOPE posters for the Obama campaign were the latest step in a career that began with stickers reading "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" in 1989, when Fairey was at the Rhode Island School of Design.

FRIENDS SAY: "Shepard's rewriting the rules of where the art world begins and ends," says Lance Armstrong.

NEXT FIGHT: To remain relevant as a provocateur — he has collaborated with Public Enemy and contributes heavily to Mexico's revolutionary Zapatista movement — while sipping from the corporate cup.

SEE THE CHANGE: Obey Giant

Photo: Barnard/Getty

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: Disco and punk flirted with each other in the early Eighties, but it took Murphy's work as a producer (with his crew DFA) and an artist (with LCD Soundsystem) to make the two genres fully get it on. Now, indie kids are wearing out their Chuck Taylors on the dance floor — and acts from Hot Chip to the revived Daft Punk owe him a hit of E.

FRIENDS SAY: "He takes that quality disco shit to the mainstream," says producer Diplo.

SIGNATURE MOVE: Plays killer cowbell solos in LCD's insanely great live shows.

SEE THE CHANGE: LCD Soundsystem's Official Site and DFA Records

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Photo: Horowitz/Getty

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: The cliché of the aloof academic. To write his book Gang Leader for a Day, Venkatesh, a native of Madras, India, who's now a sociologist at Columbia, embedded himself with Chicago's Black Kings for seven years.

FRIENDS SAY: "He never seems to realize how extraordinary his knowledge is, and how atypical," says Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics.

NEXT MOVE: While the Gang Leader movie is in production, Venkatesh is at work on his own documentary on scholars and artists at risk and continuing a project on sex work in New York and Chicago.

SEE THE CHANGE: Sudhir Venkatesh's Official Site

Photo: Lovekin/Getty

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: He built TPM's brand by hound-dogging the U.S. attorneys firing scandal, which led to the resignation of Alberto Gonzales. He's now asking the $180 billion question: Whose bad bets is the American taxpayer covering by pumping billions into AIG?

FRIENDS SAY: "[He] will win a Pulitzer someday," said Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Z?niga.

KEY QUOTE: "Bondholders have a gun to the head of the world economy. It's a real gun. And it may be loaded."

SEE THE CHANGE: Talking Points Memo

Photo: JD Lasica

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: Jackson, co-founder and president of the Land Institute in Kansas, believes the way we feed the world is unsustainable. He and his colleagues are working to transform staples like wheat, sunflowers and sorghum into perennial crops, eliminating the need for plowing and replanting, and minimizing the use of fertilizers. If he's successful, farms might be transformed from industrial factories into natural ecosystems.

NEXT FIGHT: Getting the Obama people to think differently about agriculture.

KEY QUOTE: "We live off of what comes out of the soil, not what's in the bank."

SEE THE CHANGE: The Land Insitute

Photo: Upaya.org

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: He's a global director shaking Western prejudices in film. He created a terrifying vision of a post-global-warming, post-economic-crisis future in the thriller Children of Men, but he's shown a playful side, undertaking the third Harry Potter installment, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J.K. Rowling said it was a favorite).

FRIENDS SAY: "Children of Men is arguably as well-directed a picture as there's ever been," says Sean Penn.

KEY QUOTE: "Guantánamo is not that different from Azkaban. There are Dementors over there, too."

Photo: Carr/Getty

WHAT HE'S CHANGING: The science of punditry. Blogging at FiveThirtyEight.com, Silver shocked the political class with his uncanny election predictions. He accurately predicted the general-election outcome in 49 states, and every Senate race, counting Franken in Minnesota.

PREDICTION: The legalization of marijuana sometime after 2023 — "We'll see some other once-unthinkable things like legalized gay marriage first," Silver writes.

FRIENDS SAY: "He earned his place among the elite political analysts the only way that counts — by getting it right," says Markos Moulitsas Zúniga.

SEE THE CHANGE: FiveThirtyEight.com

Photo: Robert Gauldin