Curated playlist
English emigrants to the United States
- Alfred HitchcockAlfred Hitchcock was born on the 13th of August 1899 above a greengrocer's shop at 517 High Road in Leytonstone, Essex. By the time he died in 1980, his films had collected 46 Academy Award nominations and his name had become an adjective…
- Simon KinbergSimon Kinberg has a small cameo in one of his own scripts. In Mr. & Mrs. Smith, he plays the banker who chats with John Smith at a dinner party. He had started the screenplay years earlier, as his thesis project in film school. That scene…
- John LennonAt approximately 5:00 p.m. on the 8th of December 1980, John Lennon autographed a copy of his new album for a man named Mark David Chapman outside his New York apartment building, The Dakota. Just under six hours later, the same man shot…
- Christopher NolanChristopher Nolan does not own a smartphone, and he has no email address. He hand-delivers his scripts to the actors he wants, and his wife handles the rest of the outreach. This is a filmmaker whose movies have earned over $6 billion…
- Ian BryceIan Bryce was born on the 30th of November, 1956, in Bristol, England, and he would grow up to become one of the most commercially successful film producers in Hollywood history. His films have collectively grossed seven billion dollars…
- W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died on the 29th of September 1973 in a Vienna hotel room, a few hours after reading his poems aloud at the Palais Pálffy. He had planned to return to Oxford the following morning. Instead, he was buried five days later in the…
- Aldous HuxleyAldous Huxley died at 5:20 pm Pacific Standard Time on the 22nd of November 1963 - and almost nobody noticed. His death was overshadowed by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which happened less than seven hours later that same day. The…
- Paul DiracPaul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on the 8th of August 1902 in Bristol, England, and died on the 20th of October 1984 in Tallahassee, Florida. In the eighty-two years between those dates, he wrote an equation that predicted the existence…
- Oliver Hart (economist)Oliver Hart walked into a courtroom not to give testimony about a crime, but to explain what it means to truly own something. The question sounds philosophical. In his hands, it became a legal weapon against two of America's largest…
- Boston CorbettBoston Corbett vanished from Kansas on the 26th of May 1888. No one ever saw him again. He had just escaped from the Topeka Asylum for the Insane, riding off on horseback. He made his way to the town of Neodesha, where he stayed briefly…
- Samuel SlaterSamuel Slater made a promise that could have ended his career before it began. Standing before Rhode Island merchant Moses Brown, the young Englishman said that if he could not make yarn as good as what they made in England, he would throw…
- I. J. GoodI. J. Good walked into Hut 8 at Bletchley Park on the 27th of May 1941, fresh from completing his doctorate at Cambridge, on the very day that Britain's Royal Navy destroyed the German battleship Bismarck. He had no idea that his own…
- Stuart J. RussellStuart Jonathan Russell was born in England in 1962, and has spent his career at the center of artificial intelligence research. In a January 2025 Newsweek article, he wrote that the AGI race is, in his own words, 'a race towards the edge…
- Gary WhittaGary Leslie Whitta was born on the 21st of July 1972 in England. His professional journey began within the pages of ACE magazine, a publication dedicated to video game coverage during the early 1990s. When that specific magazine ceased…
- Alan WattsAlan Wilson Watts was born on the 6th of January 1915 in Chislehurst, Kent, into a middle-class household at Rowan Tree Cottage, 3 Holbrook Lane, where his father worked as a representative for the London office of the Michelin tyre…