Born in 1954 in New York City, where his parents lived while graduate students at Yale University, Kuran spent his early childhood in Ankara, where his father taught at the Middle East Technical Unive…
Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. Didion's career began in the 1950…
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet, with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, a…
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philol…
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) bro…
Ralph Ellison was a scholar and writer. He was born Ralph Waldo Ellison in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ellison was best known for his novel Invisible Man, w…
James C. Scott was an American political scientist and anthropologist specializing in comparative politics. He was a comparative scholar of agrarian and non-state societies, subaltern politics, and an…
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus (often referred to as "the wise") was Emperor of the Roman Empire from 161 to his death in 180. He was the last of the "Five Good Emperors", and is also considered o…
Babitz was born in Hollywood, California, the daughter of Mae, an artist, and Sol, a classical violinist on contract with 20th Century Fox.Her father was of Russian Jewish descent and her mother had C…
Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fictio…
Larry Witham is an author, editor, journalist, and artist. His new novel, The Haunted Artist (2025) is the fourth in the Julian Peale Art-Crime Investigator Series. Witham is the author of nineteen bo…
Alan Palmer was Head of the History Department at Highgate School from 1953 to 1969, when he gave up his post to concentrate on historical writing and research.
Shahab Ahmed was a Pakistani-American scholar of Islam at Harvard University. Professor Elias Muhanna of Brown University described Ahmed's posthumous work, What Is Islam?, as "a strange and brilliant…
James David Vance (born James Donald Bowman) is an American politician, lawyer, veteran, and a New York Times bestselling author, who served as the junior United States senator from Ohio from 2023 to …
Amanda Montell is a writer, linguist, and podcast host living in Los Angeles. She is the author of three nonfiction books, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Bac…
Sam White is a professor of history at the Ohio State University, where he teaches courses on climate and society, environmental change, and Big History. He has written numerous articles and chapters …
Born and raised in Iowa with brief sojourns in Tallahassee, FL, and Ostfriesland, Germany. PhD from the University of Notre Dame, and now I reside in Grand Rapids, MI. I have 3 kids, 1 dog, and I writ…
