Curated playlist
Naturalized citizens of France
- Eugène IonescoEugène Ionesco sat down at age 40 to learn English from a textbook, and what came out of that exercise was not a language skill but a theatrical revolution. The Assimil method asked him to copy whole sentences and memorize them. When he…
- Igor StravinskyIgor Stravinsky once received a score back from his mentor in the mail, returned with a note reading: "Not delivered on account of death of addressee." That mentor was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the most powerful figure in Russian music, and…
- Joseph-Louis LagrangeJoseph-Louis Lagrange was born Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia in Turin on the 25th of January 1736, the firstborn of eleven children. At seventeen, he stumbled across a paper by Edmond Halley from 1693 and was immediately seized by…
- Le CorbusierLe Corbusier insisted that "a house is a machine to live in," a maxim that would unsettle architects for a century. The man who wrote it was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, a watchmaker's son with no formal training as an architect. He…
- Marc ChagallMarc Chagall spent nearly a century alive on earth, and almost every one of those years was spent either fleeing something or painting it. Born Moishe Shagal in 1887 in a Jewish family near Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, he died in 1985…
- Marie CurieMarie Curie carried test tubes of radioactive isotopes loose in her pocket and stored them in her desk drawer, charmed by the faint light they gave off in the dark. She did not know the substances were slowly killing her. Today her papers…
- Jacques OffenbachJacques Offenbach died on the 5th of October 1880, just months before the premiere of the opera he had spent years trying to finish. He was heard saying to his dog, Kleinzach, "I would give everything I have to be at the premiere." He…
- Wassily KandinskyWassily Kandinsky stood in his studio one day and stared at a painting on the wall for a long moment before realising it was his own work, hanging upside down. That disorienting pause, according to some art historians, cracked something…
- Christopher TolkienChristopher Tolkien spent 45 years editing his father's unpublished writings, and in doing so became something more than a keeper of manuscripts. He was born on the 21st of November 1924 in Leeds, the youngest son of J. R. R. Tolkien. By…
- Natalia GoncharovaNatalia Goncharova was born on the 3rd of July 1881, the same year as Picasso and Fernand Leger, in the small village of Nagaevo in what is now the Chernsky District of Tula Oblast. That coincidence of birth years was no accident of fate.…
- Joakim NoahJoakim Simon Noah was born in New York on the 25th of February, 1985. He played professional basketball for more than a decade. Though most of his career unfolded in the United States, he wore the colors of the France national team. At the…