Bertrand Russell: The Philosopher Who Never Stopped Changing His Mind
Bertrand Russell lived to ninety-seven and managed to be spectacularly wrong about almost as many things as he was right about — which is exactly what made him one of the twentieth century's most impo...
14 Jun 20min
Garry Kasparov: Chess Grandmaster vs. Deep Blue and Vladimir Putin
Garry Kasparov dominated chess for twenty years, then fought a computer and lost — and then turned his ferocious competitive intelligence against Vladimir Putin in one of the most dangerous political ...
14 Jun 20min
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Journalist Who Invented Magical Realism and Redefined Latin American Literature
Gabriel Garcia Marquez spent years as a struggling journalist before writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel that invented an entire literary genre and earned him the Nobel Prize. Magical reali...
14 Jun 21min
Frida Kahlo: The Radical Life Behind the Icon Everyone Thinks They Know
Frida Kahlo has become one of the most commodified images in art history — her face on tote bags, refrigerator magnets, and Halloween costumes. But the real Kahlo was far more dangerous than the merch...
14 Jun 19min
Arthur Schopenhauer: The Poodle-Loving Pessimist Who Declared Life a Cosmic Mistake
Arthur Schopenhauer spent most of his career ignored by the philosophical establishment, living alone in Frankfurt with a succession of beloved poodles he named Atma — "world soul" in Sanskrit. His ce...
14 Jun 22min
David Hume: The Scottish Philosopher Who Demolished the Foundations of Human Reason
David Hume attacked the foundations of human knowledge so thoroughly that Immanuel Kant said he was awakened from his "dogmatic slumber." Hume argued that causation is a habit of the mind, that reason...
14 Jun 18min
Werner Heisenberg: The Physicist Who Could Have Given Hitler the Atomic Bomb
Werner Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle, helped build quantum mechanics, and then led Nazi Germany's nuclear weapons program during World War II. Whether he deliberately sabotaged the G...
14 Jun 20min
Plato: The Aristocratic Wrestler Who Redefined What Reality Means
Before Plato became the most influential philosopher in Western history, he was a wealthy Athenian wrestler — his very name may derive from the Greek for "broad," a reference to his powerful build. Th...
14 Jun 20min
