Curated playlist
Columbia College, Columbia University alumni
- Jay RasuloDisney once swapped its parks chairman and its CFO in December 2009. Jay Rasulo traded jobs with Thomas O. Staggs.
- Barack ObamaObama rejected a plan to bomb a compound in Pakistan and sent Navy SEALs instead. The 2011 raid killed Osama bin Laden.
- Jack KerouacJack Kerouac typed On the Road on a 120-foot roll of taped tracing paper. He finished the final draft in 20 days.
- Alexander HamiltonAlexander Hamilton was still a teenager in 1771 when the owner of Beekman and Cruger, an import-export firm on the island of Saint Croix, sailed away and left him running the place for five months. The young man had been born out of…
- Ed HarrisOn the 21st of March 1999, at the 71st Academy Awards, the actor Ed Harris remained in his seat and did not applaud. The honoree was the director Elia Kazan, who was receiving an Academy Honorary Award. Harris and his wife, the actress Amy…
- Maggie GyllenhaalMaggie Gyllenhaal did not learn her own legal first name until 2013. The name on her birth certificate is Margalit, a Hebrew word that means pearl. She found this out when she took on her husband's surname, which turned the full name into…
- Jake GyllenhaalJake Gyllenhaal, the American actor born on the 19th of December 1980, came close to playing two of the best-known superheroes in film. In 2003 he auditioned for Batman Begins and nearly won the part, which went to Christian Bale. A year…
- Amanda PeetAmanda Peet's first screen performance was a television commercial for Skittles. From that small start she built a long list of films and series, and eventually moved into writing and producing her own work. She also graduated from…
- Bari WeissBari Weiss, an American political commentator born in 1984, has collected an unusually long list of labels. Vanity Fair called her a provocateur. In a 2019 interview with Joe Rogan, she described herself as a left-leaning centrist. At…
- Joseph CampbellGeorge Lucas said Joseph Campbell's book helped shape Star Wars. They met only in 1984.
- Roy CohnThe AIDS Memorial Quilt panel made for Roy Cohn is plain white, and it carries four words. His name is lettered in black. Bully is red, Coward is yellow, and Victim is blue. His tombstone in Union Field Cemetery in Queens, New York, offers…
- Jerry FodorPhilosopher Jerry Fodor argued that thinking works like a language inside the brain. He called it Mentalese.
- George Templeton StrongGeorge Templeton Strong was fifteen years old on the 5th of October 1835, when he began a diary in New York City. He kept it going almost every day for nearly forty years. The finished work runs to 2,250 pages. Its author was a lawyer and…
- Sean LennonSteve Jobs once brought Sean Lennon an early Macintosh for his ninth birthday.
- James S. ShapiroJames S. Shapiro wrote Contested Will to debunk the Oxfordian theory of who wrote Shakespeare's plays.
- William Ordway PartridgeWilliam Ordway Partridge wrote a sonnet for the unveiling of one of his own statues. The sculpture was a bronze William Shakespeare in Lincoln Park, Chicago. It was dedicated on the 23rd of April 1894, the Bard's 330th birthday. A sculptor…
- Richard G. Salomon (professor of Asian studies)Why did Gandhāran Buddhists bury their manuscripts? Scholar Richard G. Salomon asked this in a later essay.
- Beau WillimonBeau Willimon says he was the worst student in his Columbia playwriting class. He later created House of Cards.
- Eric FonerHistorian Eric Foner started college as a physics major. A Civil War seminar at Columbia changed his path.
- Nicholas Murray ButlerA 1939 poem in Poetry secretly spelled out an insult to Nicholas Murray Butler. The magazine later apologized.
- Timothée ChalametDirector Paul King cast Timothée Chalamet as Willy Wonka without an audition. King had watched Chalamet's high school performances on YouTube and decided that they proved his singing and dancing. Chalamet is an American and French actor…