Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman, with Ivy League credentials (if thats supposed to automatically give credit to one's work!!), is a Professor of Economics and International Affairs @Princeton. He is one of the founders of the new trade theory (which is about the consequences of increasing returns and imperfect competition for international trade) and the 1991 John Bates Clark Medal winner. He comes across as more of an in-the-face type of economist and is popular due to
his *understandable by laymen* op-ed column for the NYT.
To me - he is the short and fast-speaking economist who came on Jon Stewart's Daily Show, a student of Bhagwati @MIT, the person who defined Bushies' policy as '..they dont make policies to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they wanted to do anyway', ex-Enron advisor, free trade proponent, and the pundit who ranks second overall in the total partisanship index in Lyinginponds.com.
Most of his articles can be found here.

The first two articles of his that I read are..

'Does Third World Growth Hurt First World Poverty?', 1994 - This article published in the HBR (the magazine I first subscribed when I landed in the States) asks a very fundamental question more appropriate to the politics behind the power struggle among the governments of developed and developing countries at present (keywords: offshoring, nuclear threat, technological skills, etc).

'Ricardo's Difficult Idea' - An article thats helped me understand the idea behind Ricardo's Law of Comparitive Advantage. This read basically aroused an interest in me to explore the pros n cons/ different adaptations/ etc of the Law.