Curated playlist
Jewish agnostics
- Albert EinsteinGerman-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955)
- 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…
- Gustav MahlerGustav Mahler was born on the 7th of July 1860 in a village in Bohemia, the second son of a coachman-turned-innkeeper who had clawed his way up from nothing. By the time Mahler died on the 18th of May 1911, he had run the greatest opera…
- Neil GaimanNeil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman was born on the 10th of November 1960 in Portchester, Hampshire, into a family whose name had been changed from Chaiman to Gaiman by his grandfather after settling in Portsmouth. By the time Gaiman was seven…
- Aaron CoplandAaron Copland grew up above a Brooklyn shop at 628 Washington Avenue, in a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who had traveled through Scotland just to afford the boat fare to America. His father had no interest in music. His mother…
- Arthur MillerArthur Miller died on the evening of the 10th of February 2005 - the fifty-sixth anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman. The symmetry was almost too neat for a man who wrote plays about men crushed by the weight of their…
- 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…
- Émile DurkheimÉmile Durkheim was born on the 15th of April 1858 in Épinal, Lorraine, France, the son of a rabbi and the grandson of a rabbi, and the great-grandson of one too. His family's rabbinical lineage stretched back eight generations. Nobody…
- Stan LeeStan Lee signed off his monthly column with a single word: "Excelsior!" It is also the New York state motto, which suited a man born Stanley Martin Lieber on the 28th of December 1922, in Manhattan. He started his working life filling…
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman died on the 16th of November 2006, and his last column ran in The Wall Street Journal the very next day. He was still a working economist at 94. That detail alone tells you something about the man. Born in Brooklyn on the…
- Joseph HellerJoseph Heller was born on the 1st of May, 1923, in Coney Island, Brooklyn, to poor Jewish immigrant parents from Russia. By the time he died in December 1999, the title of his first novel had entered the English language itself. Not as a…
- 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. He stood and looked. He later described the flash as being like pulling open the curtain in a dark…
- Rosalind FranklinRosalind Franklin died on the 16th of April 1958, at age 37, one day before the world's fair in Brussels opened its doors to reveal a five-foot model of a virus she had built from table tennis balls and plastic bicycle handlebar grips. She…
- Ray KurzweilRay Kurzweil was born on the 12th of February 1948 in Queens, New York City, to parents who had fled Austria just before World War II. By the time he was twelve years old, he had already taught himself to work with computers at a moment…
- Wilhelm ReichWilhelm Reich was born on the 24th of March 1897 in Dobzau, Galicia, a corner of Austria-Hungary that is now part of Ukraine, and he died on the 3rd of November 1957 in a federal prison in Pennsylvania. Between those two dates he published…