Curated playlist
Naturalized citizens of the United States
- Albert EinsteinGerman-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955)
- Alfred HitchcockAlfred Hitchcock was born on the 13th of August 1899 above a greengrocer's shop at 517 High Road in Leytonstone, Essex. By the time he died in 1980, his films had collected 46 Academy Award nominations and his name had become an adjective…
- Simon KinbergSimon Kinberg has a small cameo in one of his own scripts. In Mr. & Mrs. Smith, he plays the banker who chats with John Smith at a dinner party. He had started the screenplay years earlier, as his thesis project in film school. That scene…
- Rupert MurdochRupert Murdoch kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford. The young man from Melbourne who would one day own hundreds of newspapers, television channels, and publishing houses across more than fifty countries arrived at Worcester College…
- Nikola TeslaNikola Tesla was born on the 10th of July 1856 in Smiljan, a village then in the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire and now in Croatia. His father wanted him to become a priest. Instead, this son of an Eastern Orthodox clergyman…
- Elon MuskElon Reeve Musk sold a video game he wrote himself at age twelve for approximately $500. The game was called Blastar, built in BASIC, and sold to a magazine called PC and Office Technology. That small transaction points toward something…
- Joel EmbiidJoel Embiid scored 70 points on the 22nd of January 2024, breaking a franchise record that had stood since Wilt Chamberlain set it in 1967. He did it in a regular-season game against the San Antonio Spurs, finishing with 70 points, 18…
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi paced off the distance that strips of paper were blown by a blast wave on the 16th of July 1945, and from that simple measurement he calculated the yield of the first nuclear bomb explosion. He estimated ten kilotons of TNT.…
- Marcel DuchampMarcel Duchamp walked into a New York exhibition hall in 1917 and submitted a urinal for display. He had signed it with a pseudonym, "R. Mutt", and titled it Fountain. The show committee declared it was not art and turned it away. Duchamp…
- Saul BellowSaul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows on the 10th of June, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, to parents who had fled Saint Petersburg two years earlier, carrying with them the memory of a life that had already collapsed. His mother could not stop…
- Patrick EwingPatrick Aloysius Ewing Sr. was born on the 5th of August, 1962, in Kingston, Jamaica, one day before his home country declared independence. He would go on to become one of the most recognizable and dominant big men in the history of…
- Salman RushdieSalman Rushdie was born on the 19th of June 1947 in Bombay, in British India, into a world on the verge of shattering and remaking itself. Two months later, the British Raj ended, India gained independence, and the subcontinent was…
- Hakeem OlajuwonHakeem Abdul Olajuwon did not pick up a basketball until the age of 15. He was a soccer goalkeeper in Lagos, Nigeria, a city he would later describe as "very cosmopolitan" with "all different types of people." His first real exposure to…
- Ryan ReynoldsRyan Rodney Reynolds chose not to get paid for Deadpool to make sure the film would actually get made. That detail, small as it sounds, tells you almost everything about how Reynolds built one of the most unlikely careers in Hollywood.…
- W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died on the 29th of September 1973 in a Vienna hotel room, a few hours after reading his poems aloud at the Palais Pálffy. He had planned to return to Oxford the following morning. Instead, he was buried five days later in the…
- 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…
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann once told a colleague that the second incompleteness theorem had struck a harder blow to mathematics than even its discoverer believed. He was born in Budapest in 1903 and died at age 53 in 1957, and in those years he…
- Ewan McGregorEwan Gordon McGregor was born on the 31st of March 1971 in Perth, Scotland, and grew up in the nearby town of Crieff. He left school at 16 to work as a stagehand at Perth Theatre. A few years later, still a student at the Guildhall School…
- Helena BlavatskyHelena Blavatsky preferred to be known by three letters: HPB. The sobriquet came from her friend Henry Steel Olcott, and it stuck to a woman who spoke Russian, Georgian, English, French, Italian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. She wore loose robes…
- Igor KokoškovIgor Kokoškov was 24 years old when he became the youngest coach in Yugoslavian basketball history. That milestone alone would be remarkable. What makes it extraordinary is what came before it: a near-fatal car crash in 1990 that shattered…
- Vladimir NabokovVladimir Nabokov arrived in the United States in May 1940 aboard the SS Champlain, a Russian exile who spoke three languages and had already written nine novels that almost nobody in America had read. He was forty years old, nearly broke,…
- Arnold SchwarzeneggerArnold Alois Schwarzenegger arrived in the United States in October 1968 at age 21, speaking little English and carrying little money. He had already won the Mr. Universe title once, and he would go on to win it three more times. What…
- Shawn LevyShawn Levy was born on the 23rd of July 1968. By the time his directing career reached its current scale, his films had grossed a collective $3.5 billion worldwide. Along the way he built his own production company, 21 Laps Entertainment.…
- Eugene WignerEugene Paul Wigner once quipped that he never expected to see his name in the newspapers "without doing something wicked" - yet in 1963, the Nobel Committee put it there for contributions that had reshaped physics over three decades. Born…
- Lupita Nyong'oLupita Amondi Nyong'o was born on the 1st of March 1983 in Mexico City, the daughter of a Kenyan political science lecturer and a woman who would one day lead the Africa Cancer Foundation. Her family had fled Kenya three years earlier…
- Junot DíazJunot Díaz was born on the last day of 1968, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, to Rafael and Virtudes Díaz. He was the third of seven children. For most of his early years, his father was absent, working in the United States while Díaz…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Lorne MichaelsLorne Michaels once offered The Beatles $3,000 to reunite on live television. He made the offer in front of a studio audience, on a brand-new NBC show, during the first season of Saturday Night Live. John Lennon and Paul McCartney happened…
- Dikembe MutomboDikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1987 speaking almost no English. He had grown up in Kinshasa, attended Boboto College to prepare for a medical career, and spoke French, Spanish,…
- Toni KukočToni Kukoč was born on the 18th of September, 1968, in Split, Croatia, and he grew up playing table tennis well enough to win youth category titles in the sport. Basketball was not even his first serious game. His father had spent years as…
- Franco ModiglianiFranco Modigliani was born on the 18th of June 1918 in Rome, into a Jewish family headed by a pediatrician father. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2003, still teaching at MIT in the final months of his life, aged 85. Between those…
- Roland EmmerichRoland Emmerich's films have earned more than $3 billion at the worldwide box office. That makes him the 17th-highest-grossing Hollywood director of all time. The movie industry calls him a "master of disaster," a label that suits a…
- Jürgen KlinsmannJürgen Klinsmann scored sixteen goals in a single football match at the age of eight. He was playing for an amateur club in the small town of Gingen an der Fils. Football was still years away from becoming his profession. That boy from…
- Kurt GödelKurt Friedrich Gödel, born on the 28th of April 1906 in Brünn, Austria-Hungary, died in Princeton Hospital on the 14th of January 1978, weighing so little that his death certificate listed the cause as "malnutrition and inanition caused by…
- Heinrich SchliemannHeinrich Schliemann claimed that at the age of seven he had announced he would one day excavate the city of Troy. The boast came from a poor pastor's son in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a child who left grammar school after three months because…
- Wernher von BraunWernher von Braun helped carry humanity to the Moon, yet more people died building his most famous weapon than were ever killed by it. Born on the 23rd of March 1912 in the small Prussian town of Wirsitz, he grew into a man whose…
- Lorenzo Da PonteLorenzo Da Ponte was born Emanuele Conegliano on the 10th of March 1749, the Jewish eldest son of a widower in Ceneda, a small town in the Republic of Venice. By the time he died in New York City on the 17th of August 1838, he had…
- Vlade DivacVlade Divac arrived at the Los Angeles Lakers in 1989 speaking no English, carrying a style of play that most American fans had never seen from a seven-foot center. He could pass like a point guard. He could fake a fall with the subtlety…