pplpod

Before Mao Zedong became the most powerful man in China, he was a lowly library assistant at Peking University — an outsider from rural Hunan whom the intellectual elite barely acknowledged. That expe...

14 Jun 20min

Charlemagne could barely write his own name, yet he built an empire that unified most of Western Europe for the first time since Rome, launched a cultural renaissance, and created the political framew...

14 Jun 25min

Confucius spent most of his life as a political failure. He wandered from state to state in ancient China seeking a ruler who would implement his vision of moral governance, and none of them did. He d...

14 Jun 22min

Jonas Salk developed the first successful polio vaccine and then refused to patent it, giving up what would have been billions of dollars in royalties. When Edward R. Murrow asked him who owned the pa...

14 Jun 19min

Rene Descartes gave Western philosophy its most famous sentence — "I think, therefore I am" — and laid the foundations for modern rationalism. But after his death in Stockholm, his remains became the ...

14 Jun 25min

Pierre Curie was a brilliant physicist in his own right — a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, and radioactivity research — before he became known primarily as Marie Curie's husband. Together they...

14 Jun 22min

Niels Bohr revolutionized physics with his model of the atom, built the Copenhagen institute that became the world capital of quantum mechanics, and then fled Nazi-occupied Denmark in a fishing boat w...

14 Jun 24min

John Locke wrote the philosophical foundations of liberal democracy — natural rights, government by consent, the right of revolution — ideas that directly shaped the American and French revolutions. B...

14 Jun 20min