Curated playlist
Jewish American atheists
- Marilyn MonroeMarilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson on the 1st of June 1926, in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, at a city hospital. She died thirty-six years later in that same city, in her own home, with empty medicine bottles…
- Leon FestingerLeon Festinger spent months living a lie among people who believed the world would end on the 21st of December 1954. A suburban housewife named Dorothy Martin had told them she was receiving messages from beings called the Guardians, on a…
- 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…
- Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books, and on top of that he sent an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. He once said the only thing about himself severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment was his compulsion to…
- Herbert A. SimonHerbert Alexander Simon was born on the 15th of June 1916 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of an electrical engineer who had crossed the Atlantic from Germany and a mother who was an accomplished pianist. He died on the 9th of February…
- George SorosGeorge Soros was born György Schwartz on the 12th of August 1930 in Budapest, into a prosperous Jewish family that would spend the next decade and a half outrunning history. His father Tivadar was a lawyer, an Esperanto author, and a…
- Amos TverskyAmos Nathan Tversky was born on the 16th of March 1937 in Haifa, British Palestine, and by the time he died in 1996, he had helped overturn one of the most confident assumptions in modern economics: that human beings, when making…
- John McCarthy (computer scientist)John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in the summer of 1956, and spent the rest of his life trying to build exactly what that phrase promised. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 4th of September 1927, to an Irish…
- Robert EttingerRobert Chester Wilson Ettinger was shot in Germany during World War II, left for dead in the field, and spent several years recovering in a Michigan hospital. He survived. And then, for the rest of his life, he could not stop thinking…
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and philosopher, born in Tel Aviv on the 4th of September, 1936. In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery gave Pearl the Turing Award, computing's highest…
- Richard LesterRichard Lester Liebman arrived at the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 15, already a graduate of a Quaker school in Philadelphia, studying clinical psychology rather than film. No one watching that prodigy walk across campus in the…