Curated playlist
Harvard University faculty
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers. "It was cool there," he said. "When we came up the city was gone... They burnt the whole damn town…
- Alvin HansenAlvin Harvey Hansen was born on the 23rd of August 1887 in Viborg, South Dakota, the son of a farmer. He died in 1975 having done more to shape American economic policy than perhaps any other economist of his century. Paul McCracken,…
- Carl SaganCarl Sagan grew up in a modest Bensonhurst apartment with parents who, by his own account, "knew almost nothing about science." Yet it was precisely those parents who set him on a path that would eventually lead hundreds of millions of…
- Henry Wadsworth LongfellowHenry Wadsworth Longfellow published his first poem at age 13 in the Portland Gazette on the 17th of November, 1820. It was a patriotic four-stanza piece called "The Battle of Lovell's Pond", and almost nobody noticed. What followed across…
- James Wood (critic)James Douglas Graham Wood was born on the 1st of November 1965 in Durham, England, and by his mid-twenties he had made himself into one of the most argued-about literary critics writing in English. His father, Dennis William Wood, was 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…
- 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…
- Jaan PuhvelJaan Puhvel was born in Tallinn, Estonia, on the 24th of January 1932, into a country that would not stay his home for long. His father managed forests for the Estonian government. His mother's family name was Paern. Nothing about that…
- David LandesDavid Saul Landes spent decades at Harvard asking a question that made many scholars uncomfortable: why did some nations grow rich while others stayed poor? Born on the 29th of April 1924, he lived long enough to watch that question travel…
- 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. The daughter of a doctor and a schoolteacher who gave up her career to raise children,…
- Walter BurkertWalter Burkert was born on the 2nd of February 1931 in Neuendettelsau, Germany, and over the course of a long career he changed how the modern world thinks about Greek religion. By the time he died in Zurich on the 11th of March 2015, he…
- 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…
- 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…
- George SartonGeorge Sarton buried his life's work in a garden in Belgium. It was August 1914, and German soldiers were advancing on Ghent. Sarton, a young scholar who had spent years compiling notes for a sweeping history of science, wrapped his Civil…
- Edwin MuirEdwin Muir was born on the 15th of May 1887 at the farm of Folly in Deerness, a parish in Orkney, and in his own words he arrived in Glasgow in 1901 feeling as though a hundred and fifty years had been burned away in a two-day journey.…
- Joseph WeizenbaumJoseph Weizenbaum built one of the most unsettling programs in the history of computing, and it unsettled him most of all. In 1966, he released a simple chatbot called ELIZA, named after the ingenue in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. He…
- Olivier BlanchardOlivier Blanchard arrived at the International Monetary Fund as its chief economist in September 2008. He started the job two weeks before Lehman Brothers collapsed, and with it the global financial system. Few economists have ever stepped…
- Joseph HenrichJoseph Henrich began his adult life not in a university laboratory but in an aerospace engineering role at General Electric Aerospace in Springfield, Virginia. He had just finished a double undergraduate degree at the University of Notre…
- Stephen GreenblattStephen Greenblatt once recalled the moment he realized the term "New Historicism" had taken on a life of its own. When he heard that American universities were advertising academic positions specifically requesting experts in the field,…
- Gerald HoltonGerald Holton was 16 years old when he and his younger brother Edgar were granted places on the British Quakers' Kindertransport. It was 1938, and Austria had just been annexed by Germany. The nationwide pogrom of November 8-9 had removed…
- 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…
- Annemarie SchimmelAnnemarie Schimmel was born in Erfurt, Germany, on the 7th of April 1922, the daughter of a postal worker named Paul and his wife Anna. She later described her father as, in her own words, a wonderful playmate, full of fun. By 17 she had…
- Cynthia DworkCynthia Dwork holds a black belt in taekwondo, and it turns out that discipline maps neatly onto her scientific career. Born on the 27th of June, 1958, Dwork became one of the most consequential figures in modern computer science by…
- 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.…
- Paul HindemithPaul Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, on the 16th of November 1895, and within two decades he would be playing concertmaster at the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra. He was a composer, yes, but also a theorist, a teacher, a violist, a…
- Daniel Patrick MoynihanDaniel Patrick Moynihan shined shoes at Pennsylvania Station as a boy during the Great Depression, in the same building he would later spend decades fighting to restore as a United States Senator. That arc, from the floors of Hell's…
- Erwin PanofskyErwin Panofsky looked at a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a man and a woman in a dim room and saw something no one else had seen: a legal contract. The year was 1934, and the painting was Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait. Panofsky…
- 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…
- George SteinerFrancis George Steiner was born on the 23rd of April 1929 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. His right arm withered from birth yet his mother insisted he use it as an able-bodied person would. She believed self-pity was nauseating and…
- Charles RosenCharles Welles Rosen was born on the 5th of May, 1927, in New York City, the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant architect and a semiprofessional actress who also played piano. He began musical studies at age four. By age six he was enrolled…