Brilliant Careers

I graduated, and I'm bored with beer pong, '80s playlists and Judd Apatow. So what's next? I graduated, and I'm bored with beer pong, '80s playlists and Judd Apatow. So what's next?

I'm not sure I want to spend the next 10 years doing bong hits and playing video games. Nor do I want to join a book discussion group.
  • The lady's Yves

    Yves Saint Laurent's love for women was never so loudly professed as in the lines of his garments.
  • Rick Bragg

    He's gone from Calhoun County, Ala., to Islamabad and back, but the author of "Ava's Man" never leaves his family far behind.
  • Jeanne Moreau

    When you visit the woman Orson Welles called "the greatest actress in the world," don't try to light her cigarette -- you might get burned.
  • Meg Whitman

    The CEO of eBay presides over a company worth more than four times as much as Kmart. Maybe there's something to this e-commerce thing after all.
  • Wilma Mankiller

    The first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, she took tragedy and illness and made strength. And don't even ask where she got her name.
  • Tom Stoppard

    For the last four decades, the playwright has filled the theater world with clever wordplay, big ideas and palpable passion.
  • David Lynch

    The pleasant, bizarre filmmaker who gave us the Lynchian world insists that now, more than ever, we must face the darkness.
  • Roger Payne

    After fighting to protect whales for 30 years, the biologist who discovered that humpbacks sing still feels nothing but awe for the huge "impossible animals."
  • Don DeLillo

    America's premier novelist of ideas has long anticipated a world in which spectacle and terror would achieve totemic significance in our everyday lives.
  • Art Howe

    The laid-back manager of the hard-charging Oakland A's does it his way, laconically and happily. And that drives his critics crazy.
  • Rickey Henderson

    Say what you will about his attitude, he walks the walk. And in the last few days he's walked right into the record books -- twice.
  • Bono

    Over two decades, U2's leader has evolved from heart-on-his-sleeve idealist to irony-drenched rock 'n' roll Liberace to hopeful pragmatist.
  • Paul Harvey

    He's been a radio icon since Limbaugh and Stern were in grade school. More than that, he is the finest huckster ever to roam the airwaves.
  • Anne Bancroft

    Thirty-four years after creating the indelible Mrs. Robinson, she's an actress who still shines in every role.
  • David Mamet

    He mows down b.s. with his satire, yet still sells popcorn.
  • Jonathan Richman

    The rough and charming godfather of punk sings quietly now and makes us nostalgic for a time that never existed.
  • Dion

    His voice belongs not solely to the chart-making pop star but also to another, secret singer, who sang in the margins when practically no one was listening.
  • Janet Jackson

    Her best singles represent the kind of quality craftsmanship that made us listen to the radio in the first place.
  • Marvin Miller

    As the head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, he challenged the assumptions that players are chattel and that labor unions have no place within sports.
  • Shane MacGowan

    The life-embracing, death-defying founder of the Pogues is a king hell drinker, a writer and one of the last of a vanishing breed.
  • Robert Ballard

    The man who discovered the wreck of the Titanic says he's driven by "a childish desire to poke around."
  • John Hughes

    The films he created in the decade of greed made adolescent angst funny and bearable without romanticizing it.
  • Priit Pärn

    The Lenny Bruce of animation comes from Estonia, but his influence is felt all the way to "Rugrats" and "Duckman."
  • Mel Brooks

    The comedy impresario currently steamrolling Broadway owes "Blazing Saddles," fart humor and his dancing Hitler to a red rubber ball.
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