Curated category
21st-century atheists
- Keira KnightleyKeira Knightley stood on a plank for two days during filming and refused the offer of a stunt double to jump off. She was twenty years old, earning a global…
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers.
- Roman PolanskiRoman Polanski was born on the 18th of August 1933 in interbellum Paris, the child of two agnostics from very different worlds.
- Emma ThompsonEmma Thompson holds a distinction that no one else in Hollywood history has matched: she has won Academy Awards for both acting and writing.
- Salman RushdieSalman Rushdie was born on the 19th of June 1947 in Bombay, in British India, into a world on the verge of shattering and remaking itself.
- Xi JinpingXi Jinping was born on the 15th of June 1953 in Beijing, the son of a Communist Party revolutionary who would later be imprisoned by the very system he had…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy…
- Claude ShannonClaude Elwood Shannon was born on the 30th of April 1916, in a hospital in Petoskey, Michigan, and by the time he died on the 24th of February 2001, he had…
- Stephen HawkingStephen Hawking spent his final years communicating at roughly one word per minute, twitching a single cheek muscle to select letters from a screen.
- Richard B. SpencerRichard Bertrand Spencer was born on the 11th of May, 1978, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of an ophthalmologist and an heiress to Louisiana cotton farms.