CIW Who to Watch: 14 in ’14
At CIW, we keep a constant pulse on the current trends in business, academics and entertainment. Just what will we see in 2014? We’ve compiled a list of the 14 people we think will have the most influence on the conversations we have, the movies and music we buy and even the apps we download in the coming year.
And the discussion doesn’t end here. We’ll also be running a series of pieces spotlighting these individuals and the influence they have on our city, our country and our world over the coming months. So, in no particular order, here are the 14 influential, innovative and electrifying people we’ll be keeping tabs on in 2014.
1. Biz StoneBiz Stone has stumbled on to tech gold twice. First, he co-founded Twitter, whose stockhas been rising since its 2013 IPO. Now he’s the “accidental” CEO of Jelly, an application that lets users crowdsource answers by posting pictures. Although Jelly is, at this point, just a question itself: It launched in early 2014 and whether it will catch on like Twitter remains open-ended.
2. Pope Francis
Pope Francis inherited a Catholic church plagued by sex abuse scandals, the first retirement of a pope in 600 years and policies that many young Americans consider hopelessly outdated. In response, he’s ushered in the most forward-thinking, reform-oriented era since Vatican II put a stop to Latin masses in the 1960s, and he’s made Catholicism relevant even to the non-Catholic. As he nears the one-year mark of his term in April, we expect we will see more of this iconoclastic Pope as he shares his vision for the Church and humanity by visiting Rome’s poor at night and taking to the pulpit to argue for economic equality.
3. Zach Braff
Northwestern alum and Scrubsstar Zach Braff is making an unexpected comeback this year. His second directorial effort Wish I Was Here, funded through Kickstarter, opened to positive buzz at Sundance and was quickly snatched up by Focus Features. He’s also set to star in the Broadway version of Woody Allen’s Bullets over Broadway. It’s actually his second role in a Woody Allen work. You might just remember his two lines in Manhattan Murder Mystery, when he played Allen’s and Diane Keaton’s college-age son.
4. Chance the Rapper
From dropping his first mixtape to performing at Lollapalooza, 2013 was a good year for Chicago native Chance the Rapper. But he’s just getting started. 2014 brings a slew of exciting firsts for Chance, including a potential upcoming album, a performance at Coachellaand a new house with an old friend.
5. Mikaela Shiffrin
18-year-old world champion skier Mikaela Shiffrin has emerged from behind Lindsey Vonn’s star and is on track to becoming an Olympic-decorated athlete at this year’s Sochi Olympics. We should be seeing a lot of exception female skiers at Sochi: It’s also the Olympic debut of women’s ski jumping.
6. Seth Meyers
Another SNL–to–Late Night transplant, Seth Meyers takes over Jimmy Fallon’s hosting gig in February. Expect SNL alums such as Amy Poehler, interviews with “imaginary” characters like Meyers conducts as Weekend Update host and maybe just a little bit of controversy, depending on how Jay takes it this time.
7. Travis Kalanick
The CEO and co-founder of Uber is rapidly growing the taxi application service, planning to take on 1,000 new hires in 2014. We caught him early in his career; he gave a CIW Megatalk way back in 2011. Today, he’s also using economics to his advantage—as well as, sometimes, to his PR disadvantage—with dynamic pricing that surges when demand for Uber cars increases. This means that the pocketbooks of some recent Uber travelers have been particularly hit by recent snowstorms.
8. Lizzy Caplan
She should have been on a 14 in ’04 list back when she was the feminist hero Janis Ian of Mean Girls. But she’s finally getting the recognition she deserves as an actress with her role in Showtime’s Masters of Sex, set in the academic world of sex research in the 1950s. Along with show runner Michelle Ashford, she’s using her newfound celebrity to spark an interesting conversation about sex, power and how far—or not far—we’ve progressed in the past 60 years.
9. Edward Snowden
This year we expect to hear less about Snowden’s girlfriend and more about the governmental practices he brought to light. Whatever your opinions on his whistleblowing tactics, you can’t deny that Snowden changed the conversation about the clash between national security and personal freedoms. Without Snowden’s tactics, would we have reacted so strongly to Target’s credit card troubles or be so intrigued by dark technologies?
10. Evan Spiegel
The Snapchat co-founder turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (being bought out just “isn’t very interesting,” he told Forbes). Now he’s helming the rapidly growing texting app while saving on rent by living at his dad’s house in L.A.—and learning how to navigate murky PR waters with recent wide-scale hacks of its customer database and of its newest security system.
11. Janet Yellen
Recently confirmed as the Federal Reserve Board’s Chairman, Janet Yellen is slated to replace a long list of men as the first woman to hold that title. She’s kept the economic conversation on point even as she’s fielded a series of questions about her marriage to George Akerlof and family life and received backlash for her apparently boring wardrobe choices. Something tells us Bernanke wasn’t subject to that line of criticism. (Although, to be fair, Alan Greenspan was: Here’s The New York Times’s 1989 discussion of his trademark glasses and Woody Allen–like appearance.)
12. Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Joseph Biden
…and every other politician positioning themselves for a 2016 presidential bid. After this November’s midterm elections, the exploratory committee floodgates will open, and we won’t be able to turn on Sunday morning TV without hearing these politicians’ opinions on domestic and foreign policy. Of course, even this early on in the political cycle, some of these presidential hopefuls have more hopethan others.
13. Sasheer Zamata
Saturday Night Livetried to brush off criticisms of the relative lack of diversity of its cast with a tongue-in-cheek cold openstarring Scandal’s Kerry Washington. When the conversation about just why SNL hadn’t had a black woman in its cast since 2007 still didn’t die down, the 30-year-old television institution wisely gave in. Zamata brought her witty, off-beat and often feminist-tinged comedic style to SNL this January, and we can’t wait to see what she’s able to do with the national platform.
14. Vladimir Putin
“All roads lead to Russia,” a recent Forbes article declared, and we wholeheartedly agree. The former Russian Prime Minister turned President (turned P.M. turned President, yet again—his bio is worth the read) has been working his hardest to stay relevant in 2014. With the Sochi Olympics, the string of homophobic stances he has taken and his country’s entanglement with that “strange guy” Edward Snowden, Putin is a political wildcard who will continue to crop up in news stories just when you least expect it.
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