September 18, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
In an effort to play down its usual parade of celebrities and private-jet-owning business moguls, Vanity Fair (October) has shaken up its annual list of the 100 most powerful people in the world by including leaders in the nonprofit world.
“With the economy in the dumps and global warming threatening the environment,” the magazine said it wanted to give more weight to charitable work by the members of the so-called New Establishment.
“It’s why we’ve added William McDonough, who’s constructing buildings that produce more energy than they consume, and Jeffrey Sachs, who says that global poverty can be eliminated for a mere $200-billion a year,” the magazine says in its introduction to the list.
“Maybe the other 98 members of this year’s New Establishment list will listen to Sachs and McDonough — and ante up the funds they need to begin fixing up our world.”
In a separate article, the actor Brad Pitt nominates Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch, to the magazine’s “hall of fame.” Mr. Roth, who has led the group for 15 years, has “quintupled the organization’s budget and greatly expanded its impact,” Mr. Pitt writes.
The key to the group’s success, he writes, is rooted in “meticulous field research, which creates an incontrovertible record of human-rights crimes coupled with hardheaded advocacy.”
The magazine’s list is online.
