Curated playlist
Jewish agnostics
- Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein once spent his days examining patents for gravel sorters.
- J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer gripped a post to steady himself as the first nuclear bomb went off.
- Gustav MahlerGustav Mahler had to convert to Catholicism to run the Vienna Court Opera. The post was barred to Jewish applicants.
- Neil GaimanNeil Gaiman is the first author to win both the Carnegie Medal and the Newbery Medal for the same book.
- Aaron CoplandComposer Aaron Copland planned one year of study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger but stayed three.
- Arthur MillerArthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in less than six weeks. He finished the first act in less than a day.
- Carl SaganCarl Sagan once asked a librarian for a book on stars and got one about movie stars.
- Émile DurkheimÉmile Durkheim came from eight generations of rabbis, yet argued religion was social, not divine.
- Stan LeeStan Lee used a pen name because comic books embarrassed him. He wanted his real name saved for a novel he never wrote.
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman argued the Federal Reserve let the money supply shrink by one-third between 1929 and 1933.
- Joseph HellerJoseph Heller's novel Catch-22 was first called Catch-18. It was renamed to avoid confusion with Mila 18.
- Edward TellerEdward Teller stood and watched the Trinity test while nearly everyone else lay face-down.
- Rosalind FranklinRosalind Franklin died one day before her virus model went on show at the Brussels world's fair.
- Daniel RadcliffeDaniel Radcliffe, an English actor born on the 23rd of July 1989, played Harry Potter in all eight films of the series between 2001 and 2011. When he was around 14 or 15, he and his co-stars Emma Watson and Rupert Grint were offered the…
- Ray KurzweilRay Kurzweil's team built a machine that read printed pages aloud for blind people. It was unveiled in January 1976.
- Wilhelm ReichIn 1956, a United States court ordered six tons of Wilhelm Reich's books and papers burned.
- Paul ErdősPaul Erdős, the Hungarian mathematician born in 1913, spent most of his adult life living out of a suitcase. Time magazine called him "The Oddball's Oddball". His biographer Paul Hoffman went further and described him as "probably the most…