“Best Of” lists for 2010 are usually disappointing. They are filled with people you already know, rehash stories you’ve already read. I wanted to compile a list of eleven people you may NOT have heard of, but deserve your attention in 2011.

These are voices that would do the world great good to hear, and yet are drowned out by those we watch instead: those who shock us with crassness, or comfort us by making the grooves of our biases deeper, or entertain us by playing to our fantasies of obscene wealth and escapism.

I have tried to curate a different kind of list. A list that will challenge your biases, expand your notions, ignite your curiosity and move you to TRY. I know none of them, but feel indebted to all of them.

Here is the full list. Links will follow as I write up individual blogs for each person.

1. Leymah Gbowee: How to Fight a Dictator, and Win
2. Jessica Lin and
3. Jessica Matthews and
4. Julia Silverman and
5. Hemali Thakkar: Kick a Ball, Light a Room. Four Women Engineers Set out to Make a Difference in Africa.
6. Majora Carter: What does Home(town) Security have to do with Storytelling?
7. Peter Greenway: The future of Art is the Painting. But Different.
8. Janette Sadik-Khan: What happens in NYC happens in the rest of the country 10 years later
9. Jeri Ellsworth: How many self-taught electrical engineers do YOU know?
10. Cassandra Lin: Are you doing more for the world than this seventh grader?
11. Bill Hammack: How do you teach science in a new media world?

I hope you enjoy the list. Compiling it has been a gift. I encourage you to make your own lists, and to share any people you think are helping make a better world in the comments.

photo by masepack

From hundreds of meters away you can see it. The temple that glows orange from its center. Its spires twisting and spiking into the night sky, against the brown and red mountains made dark with the loss of sun. The outline made possible by the fires that shoot up from the center of a giant plastic tubing, expertly installed. It spans several feet, and every few minutes flames will burst up and through.  You shiver and pull your coat tighter over you. You touch the inner plastic tubing, hoping to steal some warmth from the Fire of Fires.

The temple is packed at 3am. It pulls people in with a magnetism of quiet and solemnity, so different from the rest of the festival. The winds whip, the dust gets in your eyes.  People mill about, run in circles, go in and out, sit in meditation, rock back and forth with their hands in prayer, in mudras. A man dressed in a black top hat, mascara that extends from the corner of his eyes in branches, sits with his false-lash-draped eyes closed, his hands together in prayer, motionless. A woman with red hair and green eyes bows back and forth before a picture of a young woman.

The columns of the temple are made of flat panels of wood carved in latticed patterns, intricate as a church’s confession screen, decorated as stained glass windows, but instead of color, there is only light, negative space, and the pale yellow of the wood. Layers and layers of lattices, some carved out with open triangles, diamonds, stars. There are certain sections with open squares large enough to crawl through. In one, a young woman looks around through the carvings, fingering the patterns in the wood.

The whole structure vibrates with the passing winds that kick dust through the many openings in the wood. We travel up and down ladders, over stairs, across slanted ramps. A temporary shrine that will burn in silence on the final night. Sharpie markers are the main instruments of prayer here. Writing and drawings blanket the temple walls.
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When I was an undergraduate, one of the most popular classes was one taught by Professor Kenneth Jackson: The History of the City of New York. Some came because they heard good things about it; other because they were fascinated by the Burns documentary in which Professor Jackson appears.

My personal fascination was a bit of both: In my first semester, I had a computer science class in a large auditorium. With over 300 students it was easily my biggest class, so nothing seemed strange when I slipped into a seat in the packed lecture hall, out of breath from running. What did seem strange was that the room was dark, but sometimes Professor Sklar would show us videos of robots playing soccer and the like. What was strange, was that we were watching a movie about New York. I kept waiting for the connection — none came. Eventually, I realized I was in the wrong class: and I wasn’t twenty minutes late, I was forty minutes early!

I stayed in my seat, entranced by the commentary. You can look straight up any of the avenues in New York and see all the way to the top of the city. True! Had I noticed it? No! New York was a city founded by the Dutch to make a buck. It began as a real estate transaction between the Dutch and the American Indians. On and on it went.

The class was too demanding when I finally returned my senior year; Professor Jackson mandated the students attend multiple walking tours and write several papers. But I will always regret missing out on the Midnight Bike Ride through the city, that he took the class on every year. I passed by them in a car on the way home from a date. I wanted to follow them; I had no bike. But nostalgia and regret cannot take away from the pleasure of watching the Burns documentary, New York.

It shocks me that the Flatiron building went up in 1903. That New York invented the Express Train. That the first subways cost a nickel, and remained that way for fifty years. That Ellis Island, on its busiest days, let in 16,000 immigrants. How the city tripled in size in the 19th – 20th century due to immigration. How people from all over the world came here, awed by Lady Liberty, settling into a city of skyscrapers and hopes and dreams, and managed not to kill one another. Much.

More Italians than in Naples; more Irish than in Dublin. “By 1905, four out of five New Yorkers were either the children of immigrants, or immigrants themselves. Forever after, many Americans would view New York as a foreign country.” Did you know Penn Station used to be BEAUTIFUL!