Curated playlist
Harvard College alumni
- John F. KennedyJohn Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas on the 22nd of November 1963, while riding in a presidential motorcade. He was 46 years old, and had served as the 35th president of the United States for less than three years. The man…
- Franklin D. RooseveltFranklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency four times, the only person in American history to serve more than two terms. He took office on the 4th of March 1933, when a quarter of the workforce had no job and 32 of the 48 states had shut…
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot wrote the opening of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when he was twenty-two years old. The lines compared an evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table". Critics called the image shocking and offensive. Georgian…
- Theodore RooseveltTheodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest on the 14th of October 1912, while on his way to give a campaign speech in Milwaukee. The bullet passed through his eyeglass case and a 50-page folded copy of his speech before lodging in his chest…
- J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer stood in a control bunker near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the early morning hours of the 16th of July, 1945, holding a post to steady himself. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell watched him grow tenser as the final…
- Amy FinkelsteinAmy Finkelstein wanted to know whether health insurance actually made people healthier. It sounds like an obvious question. But for decades, economists could not answer it with rigor. The data was tangled, the variables were uncontrolled,…
- 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…
- David A. BellDavid Avrom Bell was born in New York City in 1961, into a family that thought seriously about ideas for a living. His father was the sociologist Daniel Bell. His mother, Pearl Kazin Bell, was a literary critic and the sister of the…
- 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 whole enterprise without a degree after a dispute with his advisor. He translated a…
- Henry KissingerHenry Kissinger arrived in New York City on the 5th of September, 1938, a 15-year-old Jewish refugee who had fled Germany with his family just weeks before. He had grown up in Fürth, Bavaria, watched Hitler Youth gangs beat him and his…
- Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky once described intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. That idea alone reshaped how scientists and engineers think about minds, both human and machine. But the man who proposed it was…
- Caspar WeinbergerCaspar Weinberger spent six years and ten months as Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan, longer than anyone except Robert McNamara and, more recently, Donald Rumsfeld. That tenure placed him at the center of one of the most…
- W. E. B. Du BoisW. E. B. Du Bois died on the 27th of August 1963 in Accra, Ghana, at the age of 95. The very next day, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered in Washington for the March on Washington. The man who had spent nearly a century fighting…
- Michael CrichtonMichael Crichton stood 6 feet 9 inches tall, and he spent much of his life feeling out of place because of it. That restlessness never left him. It pushed him through Harvard's English department and into biological anthropology, through…
- Alexander Wheelock ThayerIn the winter of 1838, 1839, Alexander Wheelock Thayer taught at the Westfield School in Dedham, Massachusetts. He earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws from Harvard University before working as a librarian there. His early…
- Thomas BulfinchThomas Bulfinch entered the world on the 15th of July 1796 in Newton, Massachusetts. He grew up within a merchant family that valued education despite having modest means. His father was Charles Bulfinch, a prominent architect who designed…
- Michael K. FrithMichael Kingsbury Frith was born on the 8th of July 1941 in Bermuda, and before most people had ever heard the names Kermit or Fozzie or Fraggle, he was quietly sketching the faces that would become some of the most recognizable characters…
- Richard Taylor (Confederate general)Richard Taylor died on the 12th of April, 1879, exactly eighteen years to the day after the Battle of Fort Sumter opened the Civil War he had fought so fiercely. That symmetry is almost too neat for history. He died in New York City,…
- Elliot ForbesElliot Forbes entered the world on the 20th of August 1917, into a family that defined Boston's cultural elite. His father Edward Forbes directed Harvard's Fogg Art Museum while his mother was Margaret Laighton. This lineage placed him at…
- Richard D. WolffRichard D. Wolff grew up in New Rochelle, New York, the son of refugees from Nazi Germany. His father had been a lawyer in Cologne, Germany. In America, that credential was worthless; the man found work in a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio.…
- Cornel WestCornel Ronald West was born on the 2nd of June 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the same city where his grandfather Clifton L. West, Sr. served as pastor of the Tulsa Metropolitan Baptist Church. By the time West was a teenager in Sacramento,…
- Melissa DellMelissa Dell set a state record in the 3000-meter race in high school, despite eyesight so poor it made completing races a challenge. She grew up in Enid, Oklahoma, where her parents worked as civilian contractors at Vance Air Force Base.…
- Graham E. FullerGraham E. Fuller spent 27 years inside the American intelligence and diplomatic apparatus, rising to vice-chairman of the National Intelligence Council before his name became attached to one of the most controversial foreign-policy…
- James GleickJames Gleick was born on the 1st of August 1954 in New York City, and he would go on to become what the Wall Street Journal called a master of three skills that most writers can only claim one of: crafting historical narrative, elucidating…