The most valuable contribution a magazine employee can make is to invent a franchise: TIME’s Person of the Year, Fortune’s Fortune 500, People’s Sexiest Man Alive, Franchise Times’ Top 200 Franchises. With magazines dying and the recession not abating, I had to come up with a new franchise to save my job. Which is how, after several minutes of thinking, I came up with Joel Stein Presents: The Coolest Person of the Year™.
The slight problem was that neither TIME nor I am an obvious arbiter of cool. But, I argued to myself, it’s precisely the mass of uncool who can best determine who the cool is. The editors at People, for example — not all that sexy.
