John le Carre: The Spy Who Reinvented the Spy Novel
Imagine your entire intelligence career destroyed not by an enemy soldier, but by one of history's most infamous double agents sitting a few desks over. David Cornwell endured that betrayal and used t...
23 Jun 18min
Aldo Leopold: The Wolf That Changed Conservation
A young forester shoots a wolf, walks up to the dying animal, and watches a 'fierce green fire' fade in her eyes. In that single quiet moment on a mountain in the American Southwest, his entire worldv...
23 Jun 21min
Andrea Mantegna: The Renaissance Master of Optical Illusion
You lean back to stare at a palace ceiling and see a round opening to the bright blue sky, with people peering down and a potted plant teetering on the ledge. Your brain screams at you to step back. B...
23 Jun 21min
Andy Kaufman: The Comedian Who Hated Jokes
On November 20th, 1982, Saturday Night Live held a live phone poll asking the national audience to vote on whether to ban one of its most talked-about guests forever. By a margin of tens of thousands ...
23 Jun 23min
Andrew Lloyd Webber: Megamusicals, Hits, and Spectacular Flops
In 2007 his pet cat Otto jumped onto a digital piano and deleted the entire score for the Phantom of the Opera sequel. The irony is almost too perfect for the man who composed Cats, who later hated th...
23 Jun 18min
Anne Meara: The Comedy Legend Who Walked Away
Imagine being half of the most famous married comedy duo in America, performing on national TV dozens of times a year, releasing hit records, and never having wanted to do comedy in the first place. T...
23 Jun 19min
Attila the Hun: The Truth Behind the Scourge of God
We picture the great conquerors going out in a blaze of glory, sword in hand. But the man known as the Scourge of God, after surviving decades of brutal ancient warfare, died in bed on his wedding nig...
23 Jun 23min
August Wilson: The High School Dropout Who Won Two Pulitzers
At 15, a brilliant student turns in a 20-page paper on Napoleon. His teacher refuses to believe he wrote it, accuses him of plagiarism, and fails him. Rather than plead with a system that has already ...
23 Jun 22min
