The Smartest Guy in the Room  

In a fascinating piece at BusinessWeek, Susan Berfield profiles BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen, a “folk hero and Hollywood villain.” Cohen, Berfield writes, has Asperger’s syndrome, “a condition that keeps him rooted in the world of objects and patterns, puzzles and computers, but leaves him floating, disoriented, in the everyday swirl of human interactions.” His free file-sharing technology now generates about half of all traffic on the Internet and has drawn the ire of the movie industry, whose pirated products are by far the most popular files that change hands.