Curated playlist
Princeton University alumni
- F. Scott FitzgeraldF. Scott Fitzgerald sold fewer than 23,000 copies of The Great Gatsby in its first year, and the novel posted tepid sales for the rest of his life. He died in 1940 believing his life was a failure and his work forgotten. The few critics…
- Andrew Fleming WestAndrew Fleming West spent much of his life fighting for something Princeton did not yet have: a residential home for its graduate students. The breakthrough came only after a stranger to the university, Isaac C. Wyman, died in 1910 and…
- Emi NakamuraEmi Nakamura's grandfather, Guy Orcutt, was an economist. Her parents, Alice Nakamura and Masao Nakamura, were economists too. By the time she enrolled at Princeton University in the late 1990s, economics was a language her family had…
- Raymond L. GarthoffRaymond Leonard Garthoff spent nearly eight decades inside the machinery of American foreign policy, trying to understand what the Soviet Union actually intended. Born on the 26th of March, 1929, he died on the 7th of December, 2024, at…
- Woodrow WilsonWoodrow Wilson was three years old when he heard a man outside the Augusta parsonage announce in disgust that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war was coming. That earliest memory shaped everything: a boy growing up in the…
- David A. BellDavid Avrom Bell was born in New York City in 1961, into a family that thought seriously about ideas for a living. His father was the sociologist Daniel Bell. His mother, Pearl Kazin Bell, was a literary critic and the sister of the…
- Eugene O'NeillEugene O'Neill died the same way he was born: in a hotel room. As he whispered his last words at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston on the 27th of November 1953, he said, "I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room and died in a hotel room." It…
- John Foster DullesJohn Foster Dulles died on the 24th of May, 1959, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, having resigned as Secretary of State just weeks earlier as bone metastasis consumed what remained of his health. He was 71. Funeral services were held…
- Allen NewellAllen Newell was born on the 19th of March 1927, and by the time he died on the 19th of July 1992, he had helped build the intellectual foundations of an entirely new science. What that science would eventually become is something most…
- Thích Nhất HạnhThich Nhat Hanh was born Nguyen Xuan Bao on the 11th of October 1926, in the ancient capital of Hue in central Vietnam. He died there too, on the 22nd of January 2022, at the age of 95, at the same temple where he had first entered…
- Edmund WilsonEdmund Wilson Jr. sent a postcard. Not to a friend, not to an editor, but to strangers who wrote asking for his time. The card listed, in exhaustive detail, every request he would not honor: reading manuscripts, delivering lectures,…
- 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…
- Mark GranovetterMark Granovetter submitted the paper that would define his career to the American Sociological Review in 1969, and the editors rejected it. When the American Journal of Sociology published it in 1973, "The Strength of Weak Ties" began…
- James BakerJames Addison Baker III was born on the 28th of April 1930 at 1216 Bissonnet Street in Houston, Texas, into a family that had shaped the city's legal landscape for generations. His great-grandfather founded the law firm Baker Botts in…
- Alan TuringAlan Turing once chained his tea mug to a radiator pipe at Bletchley Park so it could not be stolen. In the first week of every June he cycled to the office in a service gas mask, fending off hay fever pollen. His bicycle chain slipped at…
- Jerry FodorJerry Fodor walked into philosophy at a moment when the mind was considered either a black box of behavioral inputs and outputs, or a tangle of neurons best left to biologists. He disagreed with both camps. Born in New York City on the…
- Oliver Hart (economist)Oliver Hart walked into a courtroom not to give testimony about a crime, but to explain what it means to truly own something. The question sounds philosophical. In his hands, it became a legal weapon against two of America's largest…
- Michael E. BrownMichael E. Brown grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, in the shadow of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and went on to become the astronomer who dismantled one of the most beloved facts in science education. For decades, every schoolchild…
- Dario AmodeiIn November 2023, the board of directors of OpenAI called Dario Amodei with an extraordinary offer. They wanted him to replace Sam Altman as the company's chief executive. Then they raised a second proposal: a potential merger between…
- Gary BeckerGary Stanley Becker was born on the 2nd of December 1930 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and by the time he died in Chicago on the 3rd of May 2014, he had done something that few economists ever manage: he had changed the questions his field…
- James HeckmanJames Joseph Heckman was born on the 19th of April 1944, and he would go on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000 for a statistical technique so fundamental that it now bears his name. The question at the heart of…
- George F. KennanGeorge Frost Kennan sent a telegram from Moscow on the 22nd of February, 1946, that would reshape American foreign policy for the rest of the twentieth century. It ran to 5,363 words. The Treasury Department had asked the State Department…
- Cornel WestCornel Ronald West was born on the 2nd of June 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the same city where his grandfather Clifton L. West, Sr. served as pastor of the Tulsa Metropolitan Baptist Church. By the time West was a teenager in Sacramento,…
- 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…
- Gilbert PlassGilbert Norman Plass stood at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago in 1942. He worked as an associate physicist during those critical war years until 1945. The Manhattan District project demanded his expertise in…
- George NolfiGeorge Nolfi was finishing his PhD dissertation at UCLA in 1997 when he sold his first speculative script, Pathfinder, in a three-studio bidding war. That sale changed everything. A man who had spent years studying public policy at…
- James BurnhamJames Burnham was born in Chicago on the 22nd of November 1905, the son of an English railroad executive, and he died on the 28th of July 1987 in Kent, Connecticut, having spent the intervening decades confounding nearly every political…
- Clifford AndoClifford Ando was born in 1969, and by the time he reached Princeton University as an undergraduate, he was already drawn to a world two millennia removed from his own. What kept pulling him back was a deceptively simple question: how does…
- Charles RosenCharles Welles Rosen was born on the 5th of May, 1927, in New York City, the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant architect and a semiprofessional actress who also played piano. He began musical studies at age four. By age six he was enrolled…