A modest office on the seventh floor of a glass tower at Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Light snow is falling. Picture windows look east over Central Park. Enter Anderson Cooper, 40, silver-haired scourge of slow-moving FEMA bureaucrats and host of CNN's wide-ranging nightly newscast Anderson Cooper 360°. Cooper took the show prime-time in 2005, just after his emotional, outraged reporting from Hurricane Katrina made him a star; since then he's risen to the top in his time-slot ratings while filing dispatches from complex conflicts in the Third World. Telling hard stories has been Cooper's passion since 1992, when he traded his Yale degree for a Hi-8 camera, a fake press pass, and a plane ticket to meet Myanmar's Karen rebels, freelancing his way into jobs at the in-school network Channel One, ABC, and ultimately CNN. Now, back from a week in the Democratic Republic of Congo, part of his moonlighting work for 60 Minutes, Cooper is eager to go to lunch, but I force him to pause. At home, I have a shrine filled with artifacts from 20 years of reporting in the Third World, but Cooper's trophy shelf is vast and jealousy-inducing, with snapshots from around the world vying for space with his Kevlar helmet, handmade toys, and local art.

OUTSIDE: Sweet painting!
COOPER: I love this. It's a restaurant sign from Goma, in eastern Congo. I don't know why it says CHICAGO BULLS. I collect hand-painted stuff like this. Mostly I give it away.
And this sign, for Avenue Joseph Mobutu?
That's also from eastern Congo. The rebels had just taken over that town, so I went out there one night with a screwdriver and liberated it before they could trash it. I like it because it shows the old Zairean flag. I was obsessed with that flag when I was a kid. I always tell people Outside changed my life. When I was—
Wait. You can't tell that until we're sitting down.