Curated playlist

Harvard College alumni

John F. KennedyJohn F. Kennedy spent hours in the water towing a burned crewman after a destroyer cut his boat in half.
Franklin D. RooseveltFranklin D. Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down, and he was careful never to be seen in his wheelchair.
T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot compared an evening sky to a patient on a surgical table.
Theodore RooseveltTheodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest, then gave a 90-minute speech. It happened in Milwaukee in October 1912.
Robert F. KennedyRobert F. Kennedy won the California Democratic primary on the 5th of June 1968, and around midnight a gunman shot him. Kennedy died 25 hours later. The shooter was Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian who acted in retaliation for…
Chuck SchumerBob Dole once joked that the most dangerous place in Washington was between Charles Schumer and a television camera. Schumer, a Democrat from Brooklyn, has been a United States senator from New York since 1999. Along the way he has led his…
J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer gripped a post to steady himself as the first nuclear bomb went off.
Amy FinkelsteinOregon held a Medicaid lottery in 2008, and economist Amy Finkelstein turned it into an experiment.
Al GoreAl Gore won the 2000 popular vote but lost the presidency by 537 Florida votes.
David A. BellHistorian David A. Bell argues nationalism was built, not natural. He traces it in France from 1680 to 1800.
Terrence MalickAfter Days of Heaven, director Terrence Malick moved to Paris and stayed out of public view for roughly two decades.
John AdamsJohn Adams died on the 4th of July 1826. Exactly fifty years earlier, Congress had approved the Declaration of Independence, and Adams had been among those who made that vote happen. He was the second president of the United States,…
Henry KissingerHenry Kissinger made a secret trip to China in July 1971. It helped end 23 years of diplomatic isolation.
Ben BernankeBen Bernanke, an American economist, used the alias Edward Quince during the 2008 financial crisis. One email from Mr. Quince reads: "We think they are days from failure. They think it is a temporary problem. This disconnect is dangerous."…
Aga Khan IVAga Khan IV, born Shah Karim al-Husseini, never appeared in gossip columns. Yet in 2013 Vanity Fair estimated his fortune at over US$13.3 billion. Forbes placed him among the world's fifteen richest royals, even though he held no political…
Ted KennedyEdward Moore Kennedy had just lost the fight for his party's presidential nomination. On the 12th of August 1980 he stepped to the podium at Madison Square Garden. His closing words stayed with the hall: "the work goes on, the cause…
Ralph Waldo EmersonRalph Waldo Emerson put a plain question to Henry David Thoreau in the fall of 1837. "Do you keep a journal?" he asked. The question became a lifelong inspiration for Thoreau. Emerson had his own answer to it. His journal was eventually…
Marvin MinskyIn 1951, Marvin Minsky built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine. He called it SNARC.
Caspar WeinbergerBudget cutter Caspar Weinberger became "Cap the Ladle" once he ran the Pentagon.
Rashida JonesRashida Jones was still a teenager in 1994 when she answered one of the best-known rappers in America in print. Tupac Shakur had made scathing remarks in The Source about her parents' interracial marriage. Her open letter in reply drew…
W. E. B. Du BoisW. E. B. Du Bois died in Ghana the day before the March on Washington. He was 95 and had renounced his U.S. citizenship.
Michael CrichtonMichael Crichton once submitted a George Orwell essay as his own and got a B-minus.
Alexander Wheelock ThayerHarvard-trained Alexander Wheelock Thayer went to Europe in 1849 to research Beethoven.
Ted KaczynskiTed Kaczynski wrote a letter to The New York Times in 1995 and attached a promise to it. If the Times or The Washington Post printed his essay in full, he would "desist from terrorism." The essay ran to roughly 35,000 words and carried the…
Thomas BulfinchThomas Bulfinch hoped his book would become "a Classical Dictionary for the parlor." The American author was born on the 15th of July 1796 and died on the 27th of May 1867. He never saw the volume that carries his name today. Bulfinch's…
Michael K. FrithMichael K. Frith designed Muppets, then used puppets to teach Afghan children about land mines.
Richard Taylor (Confederate general)Richard Taylor became a Confederate lieutenant general without ever attending a military academy.
Elliot ForbesElliot Forbes, known to those around him as "El", was an American conductor and musicologist who lived from the 20th of August 1917 to the 9th of January 2006. Late in life, he made a habit of turning up at undergraduate performances.…
Richard D. WolffRichard D. Wolff's father was a lawyer in Cologne, but his degree was worthless in America.
Neil deGrasse TysonNeil deGrasse Tyson was nine years old when he visited the sky theater of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. He grew up to be an American astrophysicist, author and science communicator, born on the 5th of October 1958. Looking back, he…
Mark CarneyMark Carney won the leadership of Canada's Liberal Party on the 9th of March 2025, taking over 85.9 percent of the vote on the first ballot. He carried all 343 electoral districts. That result beat the margin Justin Trudeau had posted in…
Cornel WestYale punished Cornel West for a protest arrest by canceling his 1987 spring leave. He then commuted to Paris to teach.
Melissa DellMelissa Dell compared Peruvian communities on either side of an old forced-labor boundary. Gaps lasted centuries.
Graham E. FullerA 1985 CIA study by Graham E. Fuller was later cited in the Iran-Contra affair.
James GleickJames Gleick helped inspire Ian Malcolm, a character in Jurassic Park.
Jeffrey SachsIn 1993, the New York Times called Jeffrey Sachs "probably the most important economist in the world." That reputation has carried him a long way. Sachs is an American economist and public policy analyst. He has advised governments from…