Curated playlist

Princeton University alumni

F. Scott FitzgeraldF. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing his work was forgotten. The Great Gatsby later sold millions.
Andrew Fleming WestA stranger's 1910 death left Princeton $800,000 for a graduate college. Andrew Fleming West had long fought for one.
Emi NakamuraEmi Nakamura found that many recorded price changes were just temporary sales.
Raymond L. GarthoffRaymond Garthoff rejected the 1976 Team B claim that Soviet doctrine saw nuclear war as winnable.
Woodrow WilsonWoodrow Wilson ordered his own supporters to vote against his League of Nations treaty.
David A. BellHistorian David A. Bell argues nationalism was built, not natural. He traces it in France from 1680 to 1800.
Eugene O'NeillPlaywright Eugene O'Neill was born in a hotel room and died in one. His last words were about that coincidence.
John Foster DullesJohn Foster Dulles ran U.S. foreign policy while his brother Allen ran the CIA.
Richard FeynmanRichard Feynman's last words, spoken after a long coma, were "This dying is boring." The remark suited an American theoretical physicist who never lost his taste for blunt, irreverent honesty. He was a man who treated authority, ceremony…
Allen NewellAllen Newell helped build what is widely regarded as the first true AI program, the Logic Theorist.
Thích Nhất HạnhMartin Luther King Jr. nominated a Vietnamese monk for the Nobel Peace Prize. His name was Thich Nhat Hanh.
Edmund WilsonCritic Edmund Wilson mailed strangers a postcard listing over two dozen things he would not do.
Marvin MinskyIn 1951, Marvin Minsky built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine. He called it SNARC.
Mark GranovetterSociologist Mark Granovetter argued that casual acquaintances carry more new information than close friends do.
James BakerJames Baker's father forbade him from ever entering politics. He became a chief of staff and secretary of state anyway.
Robert MuellerRobert Mueller was the sixth director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Senate confirmed him on the 2nd of August 2001, by a vote of 98-0. Not one senator opposed him. That kind of agreement was no accident of timing. Four…
Pete HegsethOn the 24th of January 2025, the United States Senate divided evenly on whether Pete Hegseth should lead the Department of Defense. Vice President JD Vance broke the tie, and the confirmation passed 51-50. Only one earlier Cabinet nominee,…
John Forbes Nash Jr.John Forbes Nash Jr., an American mathematician, once mailed letters to embassies in Washington, D.C., announcing that he was founding a government. He signed them John Nash, Emperor of Antarctica, a title he believed he was in line to…
Alan TuringAlan Turing once chained his tea mug to a radiator pipe at Bletchley Park so it could not be stolen.
Jerry FodorPhilosopher Jerry Fodor argued that thinking works like a language inside the brain. He called it Mentalese.
Oliver Hart (economist)Economist Oliver Hart was called as a government expert witness in two tax cases.
Michael E. BrownMichael E. Brown found Eris, the distant world that cost Pluto its planet status.
Dario AmodeiOpenAI's board once asked Dario Amodei to replace Sam Altman as its chief executive. He turned it down.
Gary BeckerEconomist Gary Becker argued that criminals are not irrational. He said they weigh the risks and rewards of a crime.
James HeckmanAre people who join a program different from those who don't? James Heckman won a Nobel Prize for fixing that problem.
George F. KennanGeorge Kennan spent decades disowning the Cold War policy he made famous. Containment, he said, was not military.
John RawlsJohn Rawls, an American philosopher, wrote a book of roughly 600 pages that protesters held up in front of government officials at Tiananmen Square in 1989. It was a dense academic treatise called A Theory of Justice. More than 300,000…
Cornel WestYale punished Cornel West for a protest arrest by canceling his 1987 spring leave. He then commuted to Paris to teach.
John McCarthy (computer scientist)John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in the summer of 1956. He also created the language Lisp.
Gilbert PlassGilbert Plass was a Canadian physicist who warned a magazine audience about a warming planet in 1953. He told Time that "for centuries to come, if man's industrial growth continues, the earth's climate will continue to grow warmer." Plass…
George NolfiGeorge Nolfi quit a political science PhD after a three-studio bidding war over his script.
James BurnhamJames Burnham's 1941 book The Managerial Revolution helped inspire Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Clifford AndoHow did Rome keep far-off provinces loyal without armies alone? Clifford Ando points to law and shared symbols.
Charles RosenPianist Charles Rosen wrote his first book because a record sleeve note embarrassed him. It won a National Book Award.
Terence TaoTerence Tao scored 760 on the math section of the SAT when he was only eight years old. Only two other children in the Johns Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent program have ever reached 700 or more at that age. That boy grew up to be an…
Jeffrey R. MacDonaldAt 3:42 in the morning on the 17th of February 1970, a dispatcher at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, picked up a call from Jeffrey R. MacDonald, an Army physician with the Special Forces. His voice was faint. "Help! Five forty-four Castle…
Kip ThorneKip Thorne is an American astrophysicist whose life's work converged on a single announcement. On the 11th of February 2016, four physicists speaking for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration said that their instrument had recorded two black…