Roland Fryer Makes Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential List

Some first-grade classrooms perform “Acknowledgments,” wherein children sit in a circle and take turns publicly praising a classmate for some good or wise act. Bloggers can do this too. Here is the first of three Acknowledgments you’ll read on this blog today.
It is with great pride that I report that my good friend Roland Fryer was honored by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
When I first met Roland, I think he would agree, he was among the world’s least influential people. He was a Penn State graduate student in economics who was knocking on every faculty member’s door at the University of Chicago economics department to see if anyone was interested in what he was doing — and not many of us were very interested. Who would have thought that 10 years later he would be shaping our world. That is simply incredible.
He needs to get a better publicist, however. I knew he was under consideration to make the list, but when my copy of Time magazine came in the mail I looked through all the pictures on the cover. When I couldn’t find him, I figured he hadn’t made the final cut. It turns out they put his picture in the lower left-hand corner on the cover, directly underneath where the mailing labels go.
(Congratulations also to Nate Silver on making the list.)