Well it wouldn’t be an unpaid internship in the 2014 if the bosses upstairs didn’t have me doing a listicle, so I’m proud to present to you a new feature: The Savage Minds Rundown. Every week, I’ll be bringing you an informative list of items that I think you should be paying attention to, if you want to impress your colleagues. This week, I bring you the top 11 big thinkers that you, as an anthropologist, should be reading right now.

You won’t believe who’s on this list. Number seven nearly stopped my heart! Without further ado:

1. David Brooks has cracked the culture of poverty.

2. Amy Chua is practically the MacArthur Genius of figuring out why some races are better than others.

3. Nicholas Kristof has a clear line-of-sight over academia and professors, and has time and again made genius prescriptions for the betterment of our careers.

4. Elaine Morgan is doing groundbreaking work in human evolution that finally explains why my fingers wrinkle when I take long baths.

5. Nicholas Wade offers us a unique and timely 21st century perspective of the role that genetics plays in human biocultural diversity.

6. Richard Dawkins has this cool new idea called “memes” in which he supposes that cultural practices behave like genes.

7. Jared Diamond has time traveled all the way to Papua New Guinea to see how our ancestors lived.

8. Steven Pinker is the authority on determining the behavior of human ancestors by how Americans behave.

9. Thomas Friedman is a leading authority on Islamic history and thought.

10. Paul Ryan doesn’t have a degree in social science, but he has somehow figured out why black people are poor without relying on theoretical frameworks like structural racism.

11. Ted Cruz is a fountain of knowledge and insight on women’s bodies, sexuality, and gender studies and uses that wisdom for the good of his constituents.

(Edit 04.01.2014 @ 09:01EST: I’ve added some links to each person’s monumental achievements on behalf of anthropology.)