Curated playlist
American libertarians
- Rupert MurdochRupert Murdoch kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford. The young man from Melbourne who would one day own hundreds of newspapers, television channels, and publishing houses across more than fifty countries arrived at Worcester College…
- David LynchDavid Lynch was born on the 20th of January 1946 at St. Patrick's Hospital in Missoula, Montana, the son of a USDA research scientist and an English-language tutor. He died on the 16th of January 2025, four days before what would have been…
- Ron PaulRon Paul delivered babies for decades in Brazoria County, Texas, and one of those deliveries was famous Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla. That detail captures something essential about the man: a doctor who never quite left medicine…
- Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson died on the 4th of July, 1826 , the same day as John Adams, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Adams's last words, spoken without knowing Jefferson had already died a few hours earlier, were:…
- Clint EastwoodClinton Eastwood Jr. entered the world at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco on the 31st of May, 1930, weighing 11 pounds 6 ounces. The nurses at the hospital nicknamed him "Samson." Nobody in that delivery room could have…
- Eliezer YudkowskyEliezer Yudkowsky was born on the 11th of September, 1979, the grandson of agricultural geneticist Morris Soller. He never attended high school or college. Raised as a Modern Orthodox Jew, he is now secular. A 2023 op-ed he wrote for Time…
- Hunter S. ThompsonHunter S. Thompson once wrote a line he repeated for the rest of his life. "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." That sentence, equal parts confession and dare, fits the man…
- Poul AndersonPoul William Anderson was born on the 25th of November 1926 in Bristol, Pennsylvania, to Danish parents who would soon uproot the family and carry it across half a continent. By the time he died on the 31st of July 2001, he had won seven…
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman died on the 16th of November 2006, and his last column ran in The Wall Street Journal the very next day. He was still a working economist at 94. That detail alone tells you something about the man. Born in Brooklyn on the…
- Ludwig von MisesLudwig von Mises was born on the 29th of September 1881 in Lemberg, then the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time he died on the 10th of October 1973, he had outlasted two world…
- Alan GreenspanAlan Greenspan stood before the United States Senate in February 1997 and told the assembled lawmakers that growing worker insecurity was, in his view, a significant factor keeping inflation low. The man who said that was not a minor…
- Frank ZappaFrank Vincent Zappa was born on the 21st of December, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland, into a household where Italian was spoken by his grandparents and gas masks hung by the door. His father, a chemist and mathematician who worked in the…
- James M. BuchananJames McGill Buchanan Jr. was born on the 3rd of October 1919 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in a farmhouse with no indoor plumbing and no electricity. The family had borrowed heavily to mechanize their farm, then lost nearly everything in…
- Robert E. HowardRobert E. Howard died on the morning of the 11th of June 1936 at age thirty, having first asked a nurse whether his mother would ever wake from her coma. When she told him no, he walked to his car in the driveway, retrieved a .380 Colt…
- Jonathan DavisJonathan Davis was five years old when a severe asthma attack stopped his heart. Afterward he said, "My heart stopped, and I didn't see no damn light or hear any music." That flat, unflinching honesty would later define him as the frontman…
- Gary BeckerGary Stanley Becker was born on the 2nd of December 1930 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and by the time he died in Chicago on the 3rd of May 2014, he had done something that few economists ever manage: he had changed the questions his field…
- Julian SimonJulian Lincoln Simon stood at the podium on Earth Day 1970 in Urbana, Illinois, and told a crowd that population growth was not a disaster. It was, he said, a triumph for mankind. The room included Planned Parenthood president Alan Frank…
- Roger VerRoger Keith Ver bought his first Bitcoin in early 2011, when a single coin cost around one dollar. Within a few years, people were calling him "Bitcoin Jesus" for the intensity of his early evangelism. Long before that nickname existed, he…