Curated playlist
Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
- 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…
- Joseph HellerJoseph Heller was born on the 1st of May, 1923, in Coney Island, Brooklyn, to poor Jewish immigrant parents from Russia. By the time he died in December 1999, the title of his first novel had entered the English language itself. Not as a…
- 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…
- Charles A. BeardCharles Austin Beard was born on the 27th of November 1874 in Knightstown, Indiana, and by the time he died in 1948, he had become the most controversial historian in America. His biographer Ellen Nore and his critics agreed on at least…
- Lynn ThorndikeLynn Thorndike coined a phrase that historians still use every day, and he did it almost in passing. In A Short History of Civilization, published in 1926, he became the first historian to propose the term "early modern" for the stretch of…
- Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books, and on top of that he sent an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. He once said the only thing about himself severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment was his compulsion to…
- E. L. DoctorowEdgar Lawrence Doctorow was born on the 6th of January 1931 in the Bronx, named after Edgar Allan Poe by parents who ran a small music shop and dreamed in the shadow of great American literature. He died on the 21st of July 2015, and when…
- Roger ZelaznyRoger Zelazny spent his evenings writing science fiction while working a day job at the U.S. Social Security Administration. For seven years, from 1962 to 1969, he clocked in at government offices in Cleveland and Baltimore, then came home…
- Joan KellyJoan Kelly asked a simple question in 1976, and the field of history has never been quite the same. That question was: Did women have a Renaissance? The answer she gave was no. And in making that argument, Kelly did something that…
- Naomi ZackNaomi Zack was born in 1944 in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish mother and a father who was Black and Native American. That combination of identities placed her at the intersection of multiple worlds from the very start of her life. How…
- Anna SchwartzAnna Jacobson Schwartz spent more than seven decades at one address in the world of ideas: the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City. She arrived there in 1941 and never left. By the time she died in 2012, at the age of 96,…
- Eric FonerEric Foner, born on the 7th of February 1943 in New York City, is the historian that college professors reach for most often. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Foner is the single most frequently cited author on college syllabi for…
- Nicholas Murray ButlerNicholas Murray Butler ran Columbia University for 43 years, the longest presidency in that institution's history. He won the Nobel Peace Prize. He shook hands with presidents and persuaded Andrew Carnegie to fund one of the world's great…