Charlie Munger is part of the duo that has turned Berkshire Hathaway from a near-bankrupt New England textile operation into one of the world’s most valuable companies. As Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Munger is occasionally described as “Warren Buffett’s right-hand man”…
American businessman Travis Kalanick is best known as the Co-Founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Uber, the ride-hailing firm that exploded into one of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies. Born in 1976, Kalanick learned to code in middle school…
Tom Perez, a lawyer and the 26th U.S. Secretary of Labor, is a reminder that the American dream is alive and well. Born in Buffalo, New York, Perez came from humble beginnings. His parents were immigrants from the Dominican Republic, and he put himself through college with Pell Grants and by working on the back of a garbage truck…
Few have had a larger place in American literary criticism than Harold Bloom, a best-selling author, longtime Yale professor, and staunch supporter of the Western canon—the body of great works that represents the triumphant best of western culture. Born in 1930, Bloom was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University…
As one of the youngest self-made billionaires in recent years, Evan Spiegel seems to be living the dream. Raised in Los Angeles, the 31-year-old entrepreneur is married to a supermodel, hobnobs with celebrities, and boasts a staggering net worth of $13.8 billion…
Known as “the father of information theory,” Claude Shannon laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age when he published his landmark paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in 1948. In that paper, Shannon theorized that the content of a message simply consists of the number of 1s and 0s it takes to transmit it…
One of the most acclaimed American writers of the 20th century, Kurt Vonnegut left a deep literary influence by creating truly unique novels that eschewed genre conventions in favor of blending disparate categories such as science fiction with humor, social commentary with absurdity, and so on…
Born in the Russian Empire in 1903, Mark Rothko would not only become one of America’s most celebrated abstract painters, but also a preeminent figure in 20th century art. Although Rothko did not personally subscribe to any one school, he is best known for the color field paintings he produced from 1949 to 1970…
Janice Voss (1956-2012) decided her career path at age six after reading Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” a book featuring a woman scientist and adventurer. Voss would go on to become one of NASA’s most accomplished astronauts. Selected for training in 1990 as the first female astronaut from MIT, during the course of her career Voss logged almost 49 days in space…
Cara Mund won the 2018 Miss America pageant, making her not only the first contestant from North Dakota to win the title, but also the first Ivy League alumna to win the contest in the last 64 years. Mund, who began participating in pageantry as a child, has also been a philanthropist since her early teens, and is actively involved with the Make-a-Wish Foundation…
