Word: personalizing
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...never thought I would be a famous historian. This is largely because I'm not an academic or a biographer or particularly interested in history. I am, however, very interested in being famous. So when TIME didn't pick a Person of the Decade this year, I decided to do it myself...
...wanting to read a bunch of old newspapers, I sought advice from former TIME editor Henry Muller, who picked Mikhail Gorbachev as the 1980s Person of the Decade. "The process is pretty simple. Pretend to consult a lot of people, and then make the decision yourself," he told me. I did him one better. I pretended to pretend to consult a lot of people and made the decision myself. (See TIME's 2009 Person of the Year: Ben Bernanke...
Another problem was that I'd have to write a profile on my person, and none of my choices seemed likely to respond in the 48 hours between when I thought of this idea and when the column was due. Which is how I decided on the Google guys, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They have a publicist who returns e-mails. And if I've learned one thing these past 10 years, it's that without the help of a high-level exec at their company, there's nothing a man can do to stop his No. 1 Google...
...greatest thing about picking Person of the Decade is that you get to write in the inflated style that TIME reserves for this issue. It doesn't even have to make sense; it just has to sound as though it makes sense, like the stuff Sarah Jessica Parker typed on Sex and the City: In a decade when power shifted from organizations to individuals, when writers became cheap and librarians dear, when giving things away was the most successful business model, these men used their ingenuity to organize, connect and map our planet. For these reasons, and the fact that...
...Google guys, however - after Googling a few of my columns - decided not to talk to me. But this did not stop the writers who profiled TIME's Person of the Year when they were unable to score interviews with the computer (1982), the planet (1988) or even You (2006), when You were too busy flipping houses and hedge-fund investing. It's not going to stop me either...