Curated playlist
University of California, Berkeley faculty
- Leonard H. LeskoLeonard H. Lesko has spent decades reading the words of ancient Egyptians - words carved into coffins, inscribed on papyrus, and spoken by scribes who lived more than three thousand years ago. He was born in 1938 and went on to become one…
- J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer stood in a control bunker near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the early morning hours of the 16th of July, 1945, holding a post to steady himself. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell watched him grow tenser as the final…
- Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault was born on the 15th of October 1926 in Poitiers, France, into a family where a surgeon father expected his son to follow in his footsteps. That son became one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century instead.…
- Janet YellenJanet Yellen grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in a row house where her father Julius, a family physician, ran his practice out of the ground floor. The daughter of a doctor and a schoolteacher who gave up her career to raise children,…
- Edward TellerEdward Teller watched the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945 while almost everyone else lay face-down on the ground with their backs turned. He stood and looked. He later described the flash as being like pulling open the curtain in a dark…
- Timothy LearyTimothy Francis Leary was arrested 36 times between the 1960s and 1970s, a record that tells you something about how seriously the American establishment took him. President Richard Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America".…
- George GamowGeorge Gamow once loaded a kayak with supplies for a 250-kilometer crossing of the Black Sea. The year was 1932. He and his wife Lyubov were trying to paddle from Soviet territory to Turkey. Poor weather foiled the attempt, and the…
- Stephen GreenblattStephen Greenblatt once recalled the moment he realized the term "New Historicism" had taken on a life of its own. When he heard that American universities were advertising academic positions specifically requesting experts in the field,…
- John Guy (historian)John Alexander Guy was born on the 16th of January 1949 in Warragul, Victoria, Australia, and went on to become one of Britain's most celebrated historians of the Tudor period. His journey began at the other end of the world, in a country…
- Stuart J. RussellStuart Jonathan Russell was born in England in 1962, and has spent his career at the center of artificial intelligence research. In a January 2025 Newsweek article, he wrote that the AGI race is, in his own words, 'a race towards the edge…
- Otto SternOtto Stern, born on the 17th of February 1888 in Sohrau, in the German province of Silesia, became one of the most influential experimental physicists of the twentieth century. He earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1943, yet his path to…