Ben Rubenstein

Ben Rubenstein owes a lot to two baseball players, former teammates on the Oakland Athletics teams of the early 1990s (of which he was regrettably a fan before wising up and focusing solely on the Red Sox). From Mark McGwire, the disgraced home-run hero, he learned that you should always be willing to talk about the past. Ben does this liberally in his column, "Mixtape Confessions". This sometimes gets him into trouble with his parents, who don't really need to know everything he's done over the years. When he's not explaining himself to them, he's defending his decision to remain in the Midwest after graduating from Northwestern University in 2004 (with a slightly used BS in Social Policy). He can't return home just yet; it'd be hard to help run CenterstageChicago.com, Chicago's oldest online city guide, from Boston. He does occasionally rethink this stance, especially during baseball season. (The other influential player? Rickey Henderson, who taught Ben to talk about himself in the third person.)