Flamboyantly attired R&B icon Erykah Badu has released multiple multi-platinum albums since her watershed 1997 record Baduizm.

Glass is America's most famous contemporary composer.

The former gossip columnist for the Daily News was born in 1955. He grew up in Los Angeles and Greenwich, CT, and earned his B.A. in English from Yale, truly cementing his place as a model citizen of average, middle America (not).

Brownridge is no longer the right-hand man to Jann Wenner, but he hasn't left the mag world behind: He's the chairman of Alpha Media, the owner of Maxim and Blender, which is funded by Steven Rattner's Quadrangle Group.

Gary Crittenden

One of three sons of the now-deceased publishing titan William B. Ziff, Dirk has a net worth of $3.7 billion and serves as co-chairman of the investment firm Ziff Brothers Investments, which he runs with brothers Robert Ziff and Daniel Ziff.

Arguably the most popular American soprano of our age, superstar opera diva Renée Fleming was born in Pennsylvania to two music teachers, and raised in Rochester, New York. She began performing in school musicals at an early age, and eventually went on to study voice at SUNY-Potsdam. She then attended the renowned Eastman School of Music in Rochester and later, Julliard in New York City. As if her resume alone doesn't speak volumes about her ridiculous talent, before attending Julliard, Fleming won a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Germany with another opera legend, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

The female half of New York's cultural power couple, (her husband is Jerry Speyer), Farley graduated from Brown in 1971, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1976. She joined real estate behemoth Tishman Speyer in 1984 and quickly rose from minor executive to major player (along the way she met Mr. Speyer and married him in 1991). She is now a senior managing director at Tishman.

She graduated with a BFA from RISD in 1977, and her first New Yorker cartoon was published in 1978. She became a full-time staff cartoonist in 1979. On August 4th, 1986, her got her first New Yorker full-color cover. Chast's cartoons are often slice-of-life send-ups, featuring interior scenes and people who are "generally hapless, cheerful 'everyfolk.'" She also occasionally contributes to the "Talk of the Town" and "Shouts & Murmurs" sections of the magazine. New Yorker editor David Remnick describes her as "the magazine's only certifiable genius."

Best known for her role as sardonic sourball Miranda on HBO's Sex and the City, Nixon is also successful off-screen: she is the recipient of two Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Emmys, a Tony, and a Grammy.

Rifkind was born in 1972 and grew up in Merrick, Long Island. His father, Jules, was the founder of Spring Records. Young Steve worked for his father before relocating to LA to manage R&B group New Edition from 1986-1988. He founded Loud Records in 1991, and quickly became hip-hop's tastemaker. He was influential in launching the careers of the likes of the WU-Tang Clan and Three 6 Mafia. He's become known for promoting "street-style" hip-hop, and once told thesource.com that, "Nobody should put out a record before they know what the street thinks."

Formerly an investment banker at Lehman Brothers, Bob Lieber was tapped by Mayor Bloomberg to be the city's deputy mayor for economic development after Dan Doctoroff vacated the position in 2007.

Agyness Deyn, born Laura Hollins, is the blonde Brit model of the moment, well known for her bleached pixie haircut and striking resemblance to a 12-year old boy.

What Susan Powter was to fitness, Suze Orman is to finance. The self-help guru, bestselling author, and TV host preaches about money matters to millions of impoverished consumers.

The son of Edgar Bronfman Sr. and an heir to a family fortune, Matthew Bronfman is the managing director of ACI Capital as well as chairman of the real estate firm the Bronfman-Fisher Group. His brother is Edgar Bronfman Jr. and his ex-wife is socialite Liza Belzberg.

Madden was born in 1958 in Far Rockaway and raised in Nassau County. He briefly attended University of Miami, but left in 1977 after two years when his father said he would no longer pay tuition so that Madden could "golf year-round." Don't be mad Daddy, little Madden was just practicing to be a CEO!

The 718 iteration of Robert Morgenthau, longtime Brooklyn DA Hynes has prosecuted characters ranging from mobsters to corrupt Supreme Court justices to red light-runners.

Born in 1946 and raised in D.C. as the youngest of ten (yes, ten) children, Chung got her bachelor's degree in journalism from U-Maryland, College Park. Talk about getting off to a running start, she began her career in the enviable position of being the DC correspondent for CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite during the Watergate scandal.

Bulwark of paternity tests and lifetime supporter of getting out-of-control kids under control, talk show host Maury Povich has more than four decades inside the sordid culture study that is daytime TV.

Ken Aretsky