Maxim Gorky: The Writer Trapped in Stalin's Gilded Cage
Maxim Gorky rose from homelessness to become the most celebrated writer in Russia. He championed the Bolshevik revolution, then watched it devour his friends. Stalin courted him, caged him in luxury, ...
17 Jun 22min
Jack Kerouac: The Beat Icon Who Hated the Hippies He Inspired
Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road and became the reluctant godfather of the counterculture. By the 1960s, he was a conservative Catholic who despised the hippies, loathed the antiwar movement, and drank ...
17 Jun 17min
Epictetus: How a Slave Became the Freest Mind in Rome
Epictetus was born into slavery in the Roman Empire and became one of the most influential Stoic philosophers in history. He never wrote a word. Everything we know of his teachings comes from notes ta...
17 Jun 20min
Lucky Luciano: The Gangster Who Built the Corporate Mafia
Charles Lucky Luciano dismantled the old Sicilian Mafia hierarchy and replaced it with a corporate structure. He created the Commission, organized the Five Families, and turned American organized crim...
17 Jun 23min
John Dillinger: The Bank Robber Who Built the Modern FBI
John Dillinger robbed banks across the Midwest during the Great Depression and became America's first celebrity criminal. His exploits forced J. Edgar Hoover to transform the FBI from a small bureaucr...
17 Jun 22min
Boethius: The Prisoner Who Saved Logic for the Western World
Boethius translated Aristotle's logical works into Latin, preserving them for the medieval West. Then the Ostrogothic king Theodoric accused him of treason and threw him in prison, where he wrote The ...
17 Jun 16min
Bertolt Brecht: The Playwright Who Staged His Own Survival
Bertolt Brecht wrote The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage while dodging Nazis, outwitting the House Un-American Activities Committee, and navigating life as a Marxist celebrity. His survival instin...
17 Jun 20min
Baruch Spinoza: The Lens Grinder Who Redefined God
Baruch Spinoza argued that God and Nature were the same thing, and the Amsterdam synagogue expelled him for it. His Ethics, published after his death, proposed a universe governed entirely by necessit...
17 Jun 24min
