pplpod

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 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 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 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 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

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

Niccolo Machiavelli is remembered as the godfather of political cynicism — the man who taught rulers that it is better to be feared than loved. But The Prince was written by a desperate, unemployed re...

14 Jun 23min

Joan of Arc was a seventeen-year-old illiterate peasant girl who convinced the French court she heard the voices of saints, took command of a demoralized army, broke the English siege of Orleans, and ...

14 Jun 24min