Curated playlist
Columbia University faculty
- Emi NakamuraEmi Nakamura's grandfather, Guy Orcutt, was an economist. Her parents, Alice Nakamura and Masao Nakamura, were economists too. By the time she enrolled at Princeton University in the late 1990s, economics was a language her family had…
- Al GoreAl Gore won more votes than his opponent on Election Day 2000, yet still lost the presidency. That outcome, decided by a Supreme Court ruling of 5-4 in Bush v. Gore, placed him among only five presidential candidates in American history to…
- Edward ThorndikeEdward Lee Thorndike built one of the most influential theories in the history of psychology by watching cats try to escape from wooden boxes. Born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts in 1874, Thorndike would spend nearly his entire career at…
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi paced off the distance that strips of paper were blown by a blast wave on the 16th of July 1945, and from that simple measurement he calculated the yield of the first nuclear bomb explosion. He estimated ten kilotons of TNT.…
- Béla BartókBéla Bartók died in a New York City hospital on the 26th of September 1945, and only ten people attended his funeral. For a man later ranked among Hungary's greatest composers alongside Franz Liszt, the smallness of that gathering says…
- Joseph StiglitzJoseph Stiglitz grew up in Gary, Indiana, a steel town whose economic fortunes would later give shape to many of the questions he spent a career trying to answer. His mother Charlotte was a schoolteacher. His father Nathaniel sold…
- Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was born on the 19th of July, 1898, in Berlin, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family well integrated into German society. Few thinkers of the twentieth century managed to shape radical politics from inside a government…
- Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky wrote his first article at the age of 10, absorbed by the fall of Barcelona and the destruction of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement. That detail carries a kind of compressed prophecy: here was a child in Philadelphia,…
- 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…
- John A. GarratyJohn Arthur Garraty was born on the 4th of July, 1920, a date that would seem almost too on-the-nose for a man who spent his career writing American history. He died on the 19th of December, 2007, having shaped how several generations of…
- Thích Nhất HạnhThich Nhat Hanh was born Nguyen Xuan Bao on the 11th of October 1926, in the ancient capital of Hue in central Vietnam. He died there too, on the 22nd of January 2022, at the age of 95, at the same temple where he had first entered…
- 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…
- Joseph SchumpeterJoseph Alois Schumpeter was born on the 8th of February, 1883, in Triesch, a small town in Habsburg Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. He died in his home in Taconic, Connecticut, on the night of the 8th of January, 1950. In…
- Alfred EinsteinAlfred Einstein was born in Munich on the 30th of December 1880, and he would spend his life navigating two worlds: the careful, evidence-bound discipline of musicology and the sweeping ambition of popular history. He died on the 13th of…
- Franco ModiglianiFranco Modigliani was born on the 18th of June 1918 in Rome, into a Jewish family headed by a pediatrician father. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2003, still teaching at MIT in the final months of his life, aged 85. Between those…
- 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…
- James HeckmanJames Joseph Heckman was born on the 19th of April 1944, and he would go on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000 for a statistical technique so fundamental that it now bears his name. The question at the heart of…
- Allan NevinsAllan Nevins grew up on a farm in Camp Point, Illinois, the son of a stern Presbyterian farmer of Scottish descent and a German-heritage mother named Emma. He would go on to publish more than 50 books, supervise over 100 doctoral…
- Erich FrommErich Fromm was born on the 23rd of March 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Rosa and Naphtali Fromm, and he would spend the next eight decades asking a question that unsettled everyone who heard it: why do people choose their…
- James S. ShapiroJames S. Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he specializes in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period. In 2023, one of his earliest books, 1599: A Year in the Life of William…
- D. T. SuzukiD. T. Suzuki was born Teitarō Suzuki in Honda-machi, Kanazawa, the fourth son of a physician, and he would spend the better part of a century dismantling the wall between Eastern and Western thought. His Buddhist name, Daisetsu, was given…
- 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…
- Frank KermodeFrank Kermode was born on the 29th of November 1919 on the Isle of Man, the only son of a delivery truck driver and a former waitress, in a family he later described as of "extremely modest means." He died in Cambridge on the 17th of…
- 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…
- Oskar HaleckiOskar Halecki was born in Vienna on the 26th of May 1891, the son of a Polish officer serving in the Austrian Army. His father, Oscar Chalecki-Halecki, rose to the rank of lieutenant field-marshal. That military pedigree shaped none of the…
- Lorenzo Da PonteLorenzo Da Ponte was born Emanuele Conegliano on the 10th of March 1749, the Jewish eldest son of a widower in Ceneda, a small town in the Republic of Venice. By the time he died in New York City on the 17th of August 1838, he had…
- Theodosius DobzhanskyTheodosius Dobzhansky was born on the 25th of January 1900 in Nemirov, a small town in what was then the Russian Empire, to a mathematics teacher and his wife who had prayed to St. Theodosius of Chernigov for a child. That unusual name…