Curated playlist
501(c)(3) organizations
- Columbia UniversityColumbia University received its first royal charter on the 31st of October 1754, when George II of Great Britain signed King's College into existence on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhattan. That founding made it the fifth-oldest…
- University of ChicagoThe University of Chicago was born twice. The first institution, chartered in 1857 with land from Senator Stephen A. Douglas, collapsed under the weight of debt, a great fire, and a financial panic, and closed in 1886. Four years later, a…
- Nonprofit organizationNonprofit organizations collectively represent more than 1.5 million registered entities in the United States alone, a number large enough to dwarf the populations of most cities. They run hospitals, schools, churches, political campaigns,…
- Internet ArchiveThe Internet Archive holds more than one trillion web pages, a number its founder Brewster Kahle called a civilization-scale milestone when it was reached in October 2025. That single figure raises a question worth sitting with: how does a…
- OpenAIOpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT drew more than a million signups in its first five days after its free preview launched in November 2022. The company behind it is an American artificial intelligence research organization headquartered in San…
- American Political Science AssociationThe American Political Science Association was born in the Tilton Memorial Library of Tulane University in New Orleans in 1903, at a moment when political science was still staking its claim as a serious academic discipline. The questions…
- Freedom HouseFreedom House operates as a nonprofit out of Washington, D.C. For more than eight decades, it has weighed in on democracy, political freedom, and human rights worldwide. It was founded in October 1941, with Wendell Willkie and Eleanor…
- ProPublicaProPublica made history in 2010 by becoming the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize. The winning story followed the exhausted doctors of a New Orleans hospital as they made urgent life-and-death decisions while floodwaters…
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersThe Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, known worldwide as the IEEE, traces its founding to 1884, when electrical engineering was barely a discipline at all. Today, more than 486,000 STEM professionals across the globe hold…
- Union of Concerned ScientistsThe Union of Concerned Scientists put up two billboards in August 2008. One stood near the airport in Denver, Colorado, and the other near the airport in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota. Both cities were about to host a presidential…
- Atlantic CouncilThe Atlantic Council began with a handshake between two former American statesmen. Christian Herter, once Secretary of State, and William L. Clayton, a trade diplomat who had helped shape the postwar economic order, co-founded the…
- National Security ArchiveThe National Security Archive holds the distinction of being the largest repository of declassified U.S. government documents outside the federal government itself. It sits on the campus of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.,…
- The Planetary SocietyThe Planetary Society was founded in 1980 by three people who believed ordinary citizens could shape the future of space exploration: Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman. That belief, planted in the first year of a new decade, has…