pplpod

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 Juni 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 Juni 24min

Friedrich Nietzsche spent his final decade in madness, unable to protect his own work. His sister Elisabeth seized control of his manuscripts, edited them to suit her agenda, forged letters, and syste...

14 Juni 22min

Paul Dirac was so quiet that his Cambridge colleagues invented a unit of measurement — the "dirac," defined as one word per hour. But behind that legendary silence was one of the most powerful minds i...

14 Juni 22min

Louis Pasteur is revered as one of the greatest scientists in history — the father of germ theory, the inventor of pasteurization, the creator of vaccines for rabies and anthrax. But when historians f...

14 Juni 23min

Charles Darwin dropped out of medical school because the sight of blood made him faint, nearly became a country parson, and spent five years on HMS Beagle vomiting over the rail from chronic seasickne...

14 Juni 23min

Robert Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, then watched it destroy two Japanese cities and spent the rest of his life haunted by what he had created. When he opposed the ...

14 Juni 24min

Epicurus is remembered as the philosopher of pleasure — and almost everything the modern world thinks it knows about his philosophy is wrong. He did not advocate luxury, gluttony, or hedonistic excess...

14 Juni 22min