Curated playlist
Writers from Boston
- John F. KennedyJohn F. Kennedy spent hours in the water towing a burned crewman after a destroyer cut his boat in half.
- Matt DamonMatt Damon once turned down 10 percent of the profits from Avatar, a film that went on to become the most successful of all time. Director James Cameron made the offer while Damon was still working on the Bourne films, and Damon did not…
- Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe's executor used forged letters to paint him as a drunken madman.
- Robert F. KennedyRobert F. Kennedy won the California Democratic primary on the 5th of June 1968, and around midnight a gunman shot him. Kennedy died 25 hours later. The shooter was Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian who acted in retaliation for…
- Malcolm XMalcolm X left the Nation of Islam in 1964 and flew to Mecca. There he saw Muslims of all colors treated as equals.
- Ted KennedyEdward Moore Kennedy had just lost the fight for his party's presidential nomination. On the 12th of August 1980 he stepped to the podium at Madison Square Garden. His closing words stayed with the hall: "the work goes on, the cause…
- Benjamin FranklinIn 1728, a 22-year-old printer named Benjamin Franklin sat down and wrote his own epitaph. He pictured his body as the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and its lettering and gilding stripped away. It would lie in the earth as…
- Ralph Waldo EmersonRalph Waldo Emerson put a plain question to Henry David Thoreau in the fall of 1837. "Do you keep a journal?" he asked. The question became a lifelong inspiration for Thoreau. Emerson had his own answer to it. His journal was eventually…
- Ram Dass"I didn't have one whiff of God until I took psychedelics." That is how Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert, described his early self to a writer for Tufts Magazine in 2006. He said he had been inured to religion. This is a striking thing to…
- Michael BloombergMichael Bloomberg was on the ballot in New York City's Republican mayoral primary when voting opened on the morning of the 11th of September 2001. Later that day, officials postponed the primary because of the attacks on the city. The…
- Ben AffleckBen Affleck directed Argo, and for it he collected the Golden Globe, the Directors Guild Award and the BAFTA for Best Director without ever being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. No director had done that before him. The…
- 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…
- Francis Amasa WalkerCivil War officer Francis Amasa Walker nearly drowned swimming a river to escape, and was recaptured.
- George NolfiGeorge Nolfi quit a political science PhD after a three-studio bidding war over his script.