Over the course of a 40-plus-year career, Lawrence “Larry” Summers has seen more than his fair share of major economic downturns, including one as the director of the National Economic Council. In 2009, Summers advised President Obama through the early recovery of The Great Recession, serving to temper the response from being too aggressive…
For the past several decades, Cornel West has been one of the most controversial and prolific academics in America. As an outspoken voice in left-wing politics, West has held professorships and fellowships at some of the top universities in the country…
In his seven seasons in the NFL, Andrew Luck was one of football’s premier quarterbacks, known for his physical gifts as much as his exceptional mind for the game. Signs of greatness shone early for the football star, both on and off the field. In high school he was ranked as the nation’s most accurate quarterback while also serving as his class valedictorian…
In 1981 Sandra Day O’Connor made history by becoming the first woman to serve as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. During her 25-year tenure, she earned a reputation as a pragmatic centrist voice that judged each case on its individual merits, while voting for what she believed best fit the intentions of the U.S. Constitution…
In 2001, American investment manager Jim Chanos detected several red flags in the corporate accounting practices of Enron, then one of the largest energy and commodities companies in the United States. Chanos used his keen eye for corporate catastrophe to place a large bet against Enron, short selling the company’s stock as it was on the precipice of collapse…
In 2009 Ursula Burns made history as the first African American woman to lead a Fortune 500 company when she became Chief Executive Officer of Xerox. A Xerox employee since the early 1980s, Burns was also the Chairman of the Board there from 2010 to 2017…
Letitia “Tish” James is an accomplished lawyer and activist whose long career in the public sector has served to break racial and gender boundaries across the country. In 2018 James was elected Attorney General of New York, making her the first woman elected as attorney general and the first Black woman to win statewide office…
Sridhar Vembu is one of India’s most successful entrepreneurs, a self-made billionaire who pulled himself up from the bootstraps with a great deal of hard work and an Ivy League education. Most famously he is known for building a billion-dollar software company from scratch without taking any external funding…
U.S. Army four-star general David Petraeus is widely regarded to be one of the most prominent military figures of the post-9/11 era. During his 37 years in the Army, Petraeus gained the reputation for being one of the great warrior-intellectuals in American military history, culminating his career with six consecutive commands as a general officer, five of which were in combat…
American economist Paul Krugman has been hailed as one of the most influential political opinion makers of our time. In 2008, Krugman was the sole recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences…
