Curated category
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Martin ScorseseMartin Scorsese had asthma as a boy and could not play sports or join in games with the other children. So his parents and his older brother took him to the…
- Woody AllenWoody Allen has made 50 feature films. That single fact sits at the center of a career so long and so productive it resists easy summary.
- James M. McPhersonJames Munro McPherson arrived in the world on the 11th of October 1936. His birthplace was Valley City, North Dakota. This small town shaped his early years…
- Quentin TarantinoQuentin Tarantino was born on the 27th of March 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee, to a mother who let him watch R-rated films as a child and a father he never…
- George LucasGeorge Lucas was nearly killed before he ever made a film. On the 12th of June 1962, a few days before his high school graduation in Modesto, California…
- Meryl StreepMeryl Streep walked into a casting meeting with Dino De Laurentiis in 1976, hoping to audition for his King Kong remake.
- Emi NakamuraEmi Nakamura graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 2001. Her senior thesis carried the title An Economy with Monetary Business Cycles.
- 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.
- Duke EllingtonDuke Ellington wrote his first composition in the summer of 1914, working as a soda jerk at the Poodle Dog Cafe in Washington, D.C.
- Jean-Paul SartreJean-Paul Sartre was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, and he refused it. He said a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an…
- Karl BarthKarl Barth appeared on the cover of Time magazine on the 20th of April 1962 - a Swiss theologian whose arguments about God had somehow broken out of…
- Robert Lucas Jr.Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. was born on the 15th of September 1937 in Yakima, Washington, the eldest child of a family that ran an ice creamery.
- Amy FinkelsteinAmy Nadya Finkelstein was born on the 2nd of November 1973 in New York City. Her parents were both biologists who earned doctorates at The Rockefeller…
- Paul McCartneyPaul McCartney wrote his first song, "I Lost My Little Girl", on a £15 Framus Zenith acoustic guitar he had traded for a nickel-plated trumpet his father…
- 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.
- James Prescott JouleJames Prescott Joule was born on the 24th of December 1818, the son of a wealthy brewer, in Salford. The unit of energy that powers every calculation in…
- Saul BellowSaul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows on the 10th of June, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, to parents who had fled Saint Petersburg two years earlier, carrying with…
- Woodrow WilsonWoodrow Wilson was three years old when he heard a man outside the Augusta parsonage announce in disgust that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war…
- John CageJohn Milton Cage Jr. spent his entire life asking a single question: what is music? He was born on the 5th of September, 1912, in Los Angeles, and for nearly…
- Terrence MalickTerrence Malick graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude in 1965, won a Rhodes Scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford, then walked away from the…
- Elizabeth WarrenElizabeth Ann Herring was born in Oklahoma City on the 22nd of June 1949. Her family lived near the ragged edge of the middle class during her childhood…
- Roger SessionsRoger Huntington Sessions entered the world on the 28th of December 1896 in Brooklyn, New York. His family lineage traced back to Samuel Huntington, a…
- Francis Ford CoppolaFrancis Ford Coppola illegally hired a grave robber to supply real human corpses as props, and oversaw the ritualistic killing of a water buffalo.
- Bob IgerBob Iger started his career earning $150 a week doing menial labor on television sets. Decades later, he would oversee a company whose market capitalization…
- Leonhard EulerPierre-Simon Laplace told his colleagues to read Leonhard Euler, calling him the master of us all. The man he was describing was a Swiss polymath born in…
- Ingmar BergmanAt the age of nine, Ingmar Bergman traded a set of tin soldiers for a magic lantern. Within a year, the boy had built a private world he never wanted to…
- Joseph PriestleyJoseph Priestley was born on the 24th of March 1733 in Birstall, near Batley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, into a family of English Dissenters who…
- Kathleen Kennedy (producer)Kathleen Kennedy was born on the 5th of June 1953 in Berkeley, California. Her father Donald R. Kennedy served as a judge and attorney while her mother Dione…
- Ken BurnsKen Burns sat at a family dinner table in Newark, Delaware, in the summer of 1962. He was almost nine years old. The day was hot and sweltering, and when he…
- Kenneth PomeranzKenneth Pomeranz asked a question that historians had been avoiding for centuries: why did industrialization happen in Europe, and not in China?
- Akira KurosawaAkira Kurosawa directed 30 feature films across six decades, and yet the moment that first made the world notice him came about almost by accident.
- Thomas CarlyleThomas Carlyle arrived at the University of Edinburgh in November 1809 by walking one hundred miles from his home village in Dumfriesshire.
- John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill was reading Greek at the age of three. By eight he had worked through Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, the whole of Herodotus, and six…
- George AkerlofGeorge Akerlof walked into a used car lot and saw the entire economy differently. The year was 1970, and the article he published that year, "The Market for…
- Abraham ReesAbraham Rees spent the last eighteen years of his life finishing a project that had consumed decades of his energy: a cyclopaedia in forty-five volumes that…
- Daniel Day-LewisDaniel Day-Lewis was born on the 29th of April 1957 in Kensington, London, to a poet and an actress. Before most people had ever heard his name, he was…
- Samuel BeckettSamuel Beckett once described his own method as "impoverishment" - as taking away rather than adding, subtracting rather than building.
- Esther DufloEsther Duflo was born on the 25th of October 1972 in Paris, and by the age of 46 she had become the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in…
- Paul KrugmanPaul Krugman grew up in Merrick, a hamlet on Long Island, and traces his interest in economics not to a professor or a recession, but to science fiction.
- Walter CronkiteWalter Cronkite took off his glasses, glanced at the clock, and told a watching nation that President Kennedy had died at 1 p.m.
- Marc Isambard BrunelMarc Isambard Brunel arrived into the world on the 25th of April 1769. He was born on a family farm in Hacqueville, Normandy.
- Carl Friedrich GaussJohann Carl Friedrich Gauss was nineteen years old when he solved a problem the Ancient Greeks had left open for more than two thousand years.
- Jacob GrimmJacob Ludwig Karl Grimm was born on the 4th of January 1785, in Hanau in Hesse-Kassel, and he spent nearly eight decades building what may be the most…
- Janet YellenJanet Yellen grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in a row house where her father Julius, a family physician, ran his practice out of the ground floor.
- Joan RobinsonJoan Robinson coined a word that the United States Supreme Court would still be using nearly nine decades after she invented it.
- Mark GranovetterMark Granovetter stood at the front of Henry Snyder High School in Jersey City, New Jersey, on a day in January 1961. He was the valedictorian of his class…
- Alexander von HumboldtAlexander von Humboldt stood at the top of the volcano Chimborazo in Ecuador in 1802 at 19,286 feet above sea level, higher than any Westerner had ever…
- James BakerJames Addison Baker III was born on the 28th of April 1930 at 1216 Bissonnet Street in Houston, Texas, into a family that had shaped the city's legal…
- Edward TellerEdward Teller watched the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945 while almost everyone else lay face-down on the ground with their backs turned.
- Eric Allin CornellEric Allin Cornell was born on the 19th of December, 1961, in Palo Alto, California, to parents who were finishing graduate degrees at Stanford University.