Curated playlist
21st-century atheists
- Keira KnightleyKeira Knightley stood on a plank for two days and refused a stunt double.
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the bombing of Dresden by hiding in an underground meat locker.
- Roman PolanskiRoman Polanski survived the Holocaust by pretending to be Catholic. As a boy in Poland, he memorized prayers to hide.
- Emma ThompsonEmma Thompson is the only person to win Oscars for both acting and screenwriting.
- Salman RushdieA fatwa ordering Salman Rushdie's execution was broadcast on Radio Tehran on Valentine's Day 1989.
- Xi JinpingXi Jinping's father was imprisoned by the party he helped build. Xi later became China's most powerful leader since Mao.
- Roger WatersThe Dark Side of the Moon, with lyrics written entirely by Roger Waters, spent 736 consecutive weeks on the Billboard 200 chart, a run that lasted until July 1988. Waters is an English singer-songwriter, musician and political activist,…
- Billy JoelWilliam Martin Joel, better known as Billy Joel, left Hicksville High School in 1967 without a diploma. He had missed a crucial English exam after playing a late-night gig at a piano bar, where he earned money to help support his mother…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died in 2009, and for four days the world did not know.
- Elizabeth OlsenElizabeth Olsen is an American actress who once considered dropping her surname. Her middle name, Chase, was the alternative she had in mind. The reason was simple. Her older sisters, the twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, were already…
- Jared Lee LoughnerAt 2:05 on the morning of the 8th of January 2011, Jared Lee Loughner left a voicemail for a friend. "Hey man, it's Jared. Me and you had good times. Peace out. Later." The message was short and casual. Within hours, a shooting in the…
- Claude ShannonClaude Shannon built a mechanical mouse that learned its way through a maze. He named the 1950 machine Theseus.
- Stephen HawkingDoctors gave Stephen Hawking two years to live at age 21, but he died at 76.
- Amber HeardAmber Heard is an American actress, and by the time her 2022 trial in Virginia began, an online petition to remove her from a superhero sequel had gathered 2 million signatures. Few working actors have drawn that kind of attention. Her…
- Christopher HitchensOn the 8th of October 2011, Christopher Hitchens collected the Richard Dawkins Award at the Texas Freethought Convention. It was his final public appearance. Christopher Eric Hitchens, a British and American author and journalist, had been…
- John RawlsJohn Rawls, an American philosopher, wrote a book of roughly 600 pages that protesters held up in front of government officials at Tiananmen Square in 1989. It was a dense academic treatise called A Theory of Justice. More than 300,000…
- Richard B. SpencerRichard B. Spencer led a torch-lit march in Charlottesville in May 2017.
- Slavoj ŽižekSlavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher whom one admirer called the Elvis of cultural theory and whom another label dubbed the most dangerous philosopher in the West. He was born on the 21st of March 1949 and has written over 50 books. He…
- Steve WozniakSteve Wozniak, nicknamed Woz, built his first computer in June 1971. A newspaper reporter destroyed it by stepping on the power supply cable. He had built the machine with his friend Bill Fernandez as a self-taught engineering project. It…