William Burroughs: The Writer Who Shot His Wife and Chased the Ugly Spirit
William Burroughs killed his wife Joan Vollmer in a drunken game of William Tell in Mexico City in 1951. He spent the rest of his life writing some of the most transgressive literature in the English ...
17 Jun 21min
Jules Verne: Why the Father of Science Fiction Was Not a Prophet
Jules Verne wrote about submarines, space travel, and circumnavigating the globe decades before any of it was possible. He is often called a prophet of technology. He was nothing of the sort. His geni...
17 Jun 20min
Tom Wolfe: The Man in the White Suit Who Rewrote American Journalism
Tom Wolfe wore white suits, picked fights with the literary establishment, and invented a style of journalism that read like fiction. From The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to The Bonfire of the Vanitie...
17 Jun 20min
Stefan Zweig: The Writer Who Inspired The Grand Budapest Hotel
Stefan Zweig was the most translated author in the world during the 1930s. When the Nazis rose to power, he lost his homeland, his audience, and his reason to live. He and his wife took their own live...
17 Jun 19min
John Stuart Mill: The Boy Raised as a Thinking Machine
John Stuart Mill began studying Greek at three, Latin at eight, and had read most of the classical canon before he turned twelve. His father designed a radical education meant to produce a perfect rat...
17 Jun 25min
Frederick Sanger: The Quiet Man Who Sequenced Our DNA
Frederick Sanger won two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, a feat matched by almost no one in history. He sequenced the amino acids of insulin and then developed the method that made DNA sequencing possible....
17 Jun 19min
Federico García Lorca: The Unsolved Murder of Spain's Greatest Poet
Federico García Lorca was arrested by Nationalist forces in Granada in August 1936, taken to a hillside, and shot. His body has never been found. The killing of Spain's most celebrated poet became one...
17 Jun 18min
Rosalind Franklin: The Third Man of the Double Helix
Rosalind Franklin produced the X-ray crystallography image that revealed the structure of DNA. Watson and Crick used her data without her knowledge. She died of ovarian cancer at 37, four years before...
17 Jun 21min
