Baratunde.com (Baratunde Thurston)

"I was born to live right now," Baratunde Thurston says, his wit and charm hovering above a glass of Chardonnay at a SoHo bar. It's 2010 and Thurston, 32, has arrived. "I've had fantasies about living in the '60s or the '70s -- almost every black person with a twinge of revolutionary attitude does -- but now is really a great time for me, for my nature." Raised by his single mother, Arnita, in Washington D.C., Thurston was clearly beamed in from Planet Y to ramp up the tenor of this multi-app, thumb-fidgeting, gadget-loving online generation. He has a pleasingly smart blog (baratunde.com), an intriguing TV show (Pop Science's Future Of on the Science channel), is a co-founder of the badass bougie site that black people love, Jack & Jill Politics, and he does stand-up comedy on the side (recent appearances include shows at SXSW). Oh, and he's also the web and politics editor for a little satirical news organization called The Onion.

On his blog, Thurston describes himself as being "at the intersection of comedy, politics and technology." He tweets like a freaking mad metaman ("I tweet hard"), and Thurston is for sure an appreciably natural multitasker. But what is most striking is how organic his relationship is to something as ostensibly non-organic as technology and the machinery of social media. "Twitter is a constantly hot mic and a great testing ground for my ideas," he says. "I reside in Brooklyn, but I live in Twitter."

Arnita, who died from colon cancer in 2005, made sure that Thurston experienced a diverse childhood that included attending a Saturday program run by black nationalists as well as Sidwell Friends, the elite Quaker private school. Thurston went on to Harvard, where he started an email newsletter called Newsphlash, a sort of precursor to The Onion before he even knew what The Onion was. The 2004 elections ("very painful") prompted Thurston to take up "blogging religiously." Three years later, he landed the gig at The Onion, the perfect outlet for him to espouse his social media truths. "Every institution is dying -- political, financial, media -- and through social networking, the world is slowly discovering that black people are people." REBECCA CARROLL