Branches of Mathematics

Pure mathematics

• Algebra
• Calculus
• Geometry
• Topology
• Trignometry
• Combinatorics
• Logic
• Number theory

Applied mathematics

• Dynamical systems and differential equations
• Mathematical physics
• Computing
• Information theory and signal processing
• Probability and statistics
• Game theory
• Operations research

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• 
  

• Crown Heights riot
  The Crown Heights Riot was a three-day riot that occurred August 19–21, 1991 in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. At the time of the riot, Crown Heights was and remains predominantly an African-American and Jewish neighborhood. It is the home of the Lubavitch sect of Orthodox Jewish Hasidim. The riots began on August 19, 1991, after the child of Guyanese immigrants was accidentally struck and killed by an automobile in the motorcade of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
  The riot unleashed simmering tensions of the Crown Heights' black community against the Jewish community. In its wake, several Jews were seriously injured; one Jew, Yankel Rosenbaum, was killed; and a non-Jewish man, allegedly mistaken by rioters for a Jew, was killed by a group of African-American men. Lemrick Nelson was ultimately convicted in federal court for civil rights violations related to Rosenbaum's death. A second defendant, Charles Price, was also charged with conspiring to violate Rosenbaum's civil rights; he pleaded guilty. Nelson and Price were the only two Crown Heights rioters tried for their actions.
  
  wn.com/Crown_Heights_riot
• 
  Manhattan
  Manhattan (/mænˈhætən/) is the most densely populated and the oldest of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the U.S. state of New York. The borough and county consist of Manhattan Island and several small adjacent islands: Roosevelt Island, Randall's Island, Wards Island, Governors Island, Liberty Island, part of Ellis Island,Mill Rock, and U Thant Island; as well as Marble Hill, a very small area on the mainland bordering the Bronx. The original city of New York began at the southern end of Manhattan, expanded northward, and then between 1874 and 1898, annexed land from surrounding counties.
  The New York County is the most densely populated county in the United States, and one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with a 2010 population of 1,585,873 living in a land area of 22.96 square miles (59.5 km²), or 69,464 residents per square mile (26,924/km²), more dense than any individual American city. It is also one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, with a 2005 per capita income above $100,000. Manhattan is the third-largest of New York's five boroughs in population, and its smallest borough in land area.
  
  wn.com/Manhattan
• 
  Nebraska
  Nebraska (ⁱ/nəˈbræskə/) is a state on the Great Plains of the Midwestern United States. Its state capital is Lincoln and its largest city is Omaha, on the Missouri River.
  The state is crossed by many historic trails, but it was the California Gold Rush that first brought large numbers here, and it became a state in 1867. Certain landmarks still compete for the notional distinction 'Where the West Begins'.
  There are wide variations between winter and summer temperatures, and violent thunderstorms and tornadoes are common. The state is characterized by treeless prairie, ideal for cattle-grazing, and it is a major producer of beef, as well as pork, maize and soybeans. Nebraska is overwhelmingly rural, as the 8th least-densely populated state of the United States.
  Ethnically, the largest group are German-Americans, and the state has the biggest Czech-American population per head. During the Great Migration, many African Americans came to Omaha, and they continue to campaign for improved conditions. More recently, Native American activism has increased, with a drive for self-determination in a climate of co-operation with state officials on regional issues. It is traditionally a Republican-voting state.
  
  wn.com/Nebraska
• 
  New Jersey
  New Jersey (ⁱ/nuː ˈdʒɜrzi/) is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the U.S. state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania, and on the southwest by Delaware. New Jersey is the 4th least extensive, but the 11th most populous and the most densely populated of the 50 United States. New Jersey lies mostly within the sprawling metropolitan areas of New York City and Philadelphia. It is also the third wealthiest by 2009–2010 median household income.
  The area was inhabited by Native Americans for more than 2,800 years, with historical tribes such as the Lenape along the coast. In the early 17th century, the Dutch and the Swedes made the first European settlements. The British later seized control of the region, naming it the Province of New Jersey. It was granted as a colony to Sir George Carteret and John Berkeley, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton. At this time, it was named after the largest of the British Channel Islands, Jersey, Carteret's birthplace. New Jersey was the site of several decisive battles during the American Revolutionary War.
  
  wn.com/New_Jersey
• 
  New York City
  New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. The city is referred to as New York City or The City of New York to distinguish it from the State of New York, of which it is a part. As a global power city, New York exerts a significant impact upon commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and entertainment. The home of the United Nations Headquarters, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has been described as the cultural capital of the world.
  Located on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of which comprises a state county. The five boroughs—The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island—were consolidated into a single city in 1898. With a Census-estimated 2011 population of 8,244,910 distributed over a land area of just 305 square miles (790 km²), New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. The New York City Metropolitan Area's population is the United States' largest, with 18.9 million people distributed over 6,720 square miles (17,400 km²), and is also part of the most populous combined statistical area in the United States, containing 22.1 million people as of the 2010 Census.
  
  wn.com/New_York_City
• 
  Oval Office
  The Oval Office, located in the West Wing of the White House, is the official office of the President of the United States.
  The room features three large south-facing windows behind the president's desk, and a fireplace at the north end. It has four doors: the east door opens to the Rose Garden; the west door leads to a private smaller study and dining room; the northwest door opens onto the main corridor of the West Wing; and the northeast door opens to the office of the president's secretary.
  Presidents generally change the office to suit their personal taste, choosing new furniture, new drapery, and designing their own oval-shaped carpet to take up most of the floor. Paintings are selected from the White House’s own collection, or borrowed from other museums for the president’s term in office.
  The Oval Office has become associated in Americans' minds with the presidency itself through memorable images, such as a young John F. Kennedy, Jr. peering through the front panel of his father's desk, President Richard Nixon speaking by telephone with the Apollo 11 astronauts during their moonwalk, and daughter Amy Carter bringing her Siamese cat Misty Malarky Ying Yang to brighten President Jimmy Carter's day.
  
  wn.com/Oval_Office
• 
  Sargasso Sea
  The Sargasso Sea is a region in the gyre in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. It is bounded on the west by the Gulf Stream; on the north, by the North Atlantic Current; on the east, by the Canary Current; and on the south, by the North Atlantic Equatorial Current. This system of ocean currents forms the North Atlantic Gyre. All the currents deposit the marine plants and garbage they carry into this sea.
  The Sargasso Sea is 700 statute miles wide and 2,000 statute miles long (1,100 km wide and 3,200 km long). It stretches from roughly 70 degrees west to 40 degrees west, and from 20 degrees north to 35 degrees north. Bermuda is near the western fringes of the sea. The Sargasso Sea is the only "sea" without shores. The ocean water in the Sargasso Sea is distinctive for its deep blue color and exceptional clarity, with underwater visibility of up to 200 feet (61 m).
  Portuguese sailors were among the first to discover this region in the 15th century, naming it after the Sargassum seaweed growing there (sargaço / sargasso in Portuguese). However, the sea may have been known to earlier mariners, as a poem by the late 4th century AD author, Rufus Festus Avienus, describes a portion of the Atlantic as being covered with seaweed, citing a now-lost account by the 5th-century BC Carthaginian explorer Himilco the Navigator. Christopher Columbus and his men also noted the Saragasso Sea, and brought reports of the masses of seaweed on the surface.
  
  wn.com/Sargasso_Sea
• 
  Texas
  Texas (ⁱ/ˈtɛksəs/) (Alibamu: Teksi ) is the second most populous and the second most extensive of the 50 United States, and the most extensive state of the 48 contiguous United States. The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in East Texas. Located in the South Central United States, Texas shares an international border with the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas to the south, and borders the US states of New Mexico to the west, Oklahoma to the north, Arkansas to the northeast, and Louisiana to the east. Texas has an area of 268,820 square miles (696,200 km²), and a growing population of 25.7 million residents.
  During the Spanish colonial rule, the area was officially known as the Nuevo Reino de Filipinas: La Provincia de Texas. Antonio Margil de Jesús was known to be the first person to use the name in a letter to the Viceroy of Mexico in July 20, 1716. The name was not popularly used in daily speech but often appeared in legal documents until the end of the 1800s.
  
  wn.com/Texas
• 
  The Hillsboro Argus
  The Hillsboro Argus is the twice weekly newspaper for the city of Hillsboro, Oregon. Published on Tuesdays and Fridays, the Argus has a circulation of 9,532 copies distributed in Washington County, Oregon, United States. First published in 1873, the award-winning paper was owned by the McKinney family for more than 90 years when it was sold to Advance Publications in 1999.
  The Argus newspaper traces its history back to 1873. In 1873, the Forest Grove Independent newspaper was founded as the first newspaper in Washington County, Oregon. By December the paper had moved to Hillsboro and named itself the Washington Independent.Albert E. Tozier owned the paper with a partner from 1885 to 1887.Daniel Gault owned the Independent from 1892 to 1902.
  In March 1894, R. H. Mitchell and C. W. Clow founded a new paper in Hillsboro, the Argus. On March 28, 1894, the first Hillsboro Argus was printed which included a front page advertisement for Hillsboro lawyer and later Congressman Thomas H. Tongue. Other news of the day concerned a battle over the county seat of Lincoln County, Oregon. At that time it was a weekly paper of only six pages and was located on Second Street between Main and Washington streets.
  
  wn.com/The_Hillsboro_Argus
• 
  The Plain Dealer
  The Plain Dealer is the major daily newspaper of Cleveland, Ohio, United States. It has the largest circulation of any Ohio newspaper and was a top 20 newspaper for circulation in the United States as of September 2009. As of 31 March 2011 (2011 -03-31)^[update], for the preceding six-month period, the newspaper reported an average daily paid circulation of 254,372 and a Sunday paid circulation of 403,001.
  As of May 2006^[update], The Plain Dealer had more than 785,000 readers on weekdays and 1 million readers on Sunday.The Plain Dealer's media market, Greater Cleveland, is ranked #1 in the country for Sunday newspaper readership percentage (75.4% of total adults) and #2 in daily newspaper readership percentage (62.6% of total adults), second only to The New York Times in the weekday editions.
  The newspaper was established in 1842, less than 50 years after Moses Cleaveland landed on the banks of the Cuyahoga River in The Flats, and is currently owned by Advance Publications (Newhouse Newspapers).The Plain Dealer is under the direction of Terrance C.Z. Egger, who serves as President and Publisher, Robert M. Long, Executive Vice President, as well as Debra Adams Simmons, who serves as Editor, replacing Susan Goldberg. The paper employs over 1,500 people.
  
  wn.com/The_Plain_Dealer
• 
  Utah
  Utah (/ˈjuːtɔː/ or ⁱ/ˈjuːtɑː/) (Arapaho: Wo'tééneihí' ) is a state in the Western United States. It became the 45th state admitted to the Union on January 4, 1896. Utah is the 13th-most extensive, the 34th-most populous, and the 10th-least-densely populated of the 50 United States. Approximately 80% of Utah's 2,817,222 people live along the Wasatch Front, centering on Salt Lake City. This leaves vast expanses of the state nearly uninhabited, making the population the sixth most urbanized in the U.S. The name "Utah" is derived from the name of the Ute tribe and means "people of the mountains" in the Ute language. Utah is bordered by Arizona on the south, Colorado on the east, Wyoming on the northeast, Idaho on the north and Nevada on the west. It also touches a corner of New Mexico.
  Utah is the most religiously homogeneous state in the Union. It is home to the Salt Lake Temple, and approximately 60% of Utahns are reported to be members of LDS Church which greatly influences Utah culture and daily life.
  
  wn.com/Utah
• 
  World Trade Center
  The original World Trade Center was a complex with seven buildings featuring landmark twin towers in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. The complex opened on April 4, 1973, and was destroyed in 2001 in the September 11 attacks. The site is being rebuilt with five new skyscrapers and a memorial to the casualties of the attacks. As of November 2011^[update], only one skyscraper has been completed; the other four are expected to be completed before 2020. One World Trade Center will be the lead building for the new complex, reaching more than 100 stories at its completion. It became the tallest building in New York City on April 30, 2012, and is expected to be finished by 2013. A sixth tower is awaiting confirmation.
  At the time of their completion, the original 1 World Trade Center (the North Tower) and 2 World Trade Center (the South Tower), known collectively as the Twin Towers, were the tallest buildings in the world. The other buildings included 3 WTC (the Marriott World Trade Center), 4 WTC, 5 WTC, 6 WTC (which housed United States Customs), and 7 WTC. All of these buildings were built between 1975 and 1985.
  
  wn.com/World_Trade_Center

• Ad Reinhardt
  Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt ("Ad" Reinhardt) (December 24, 1913 – August 30, 1967) was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism. He was also a founding member of the Artist's Club. He wrote and lectured extensively on art and was a major influence on conceptual, minimal art and monochrome painting. Most famous for his "black" or "ultimate" paintings, he claimed to be painting the "last paintings" that anyone can paint. He believed in a philosophy of art he called Art-as-Art and used his writing and satirical cartoons to advocate for abstract art and against what he described as "the disreputable practices of artists-as-artists".
  Reinhardt was born in Buffalo, New York, and lived with his family in the Riverside section along the Niagara River. His cousin Otto and he were close, as well as the extended family, but work took his father to New York City. He later studied art history at Columbia University, where he was a close friend of Robert Lax and Thomas Merton. The three developed similar concepts of simplicity in different directions. Reinhardt considered himself a painter from a very early age and began winning prizes for painting in grade school and high school. Feeling that he had already acquired all the technical skills in high school he turned down scholarships at art schools and accepted a full scholarship at Columbia University which he attended from 1931 to 1935. He took painting classes as an undergraduate at Columbia's Teachers College and after graduation began to study painting with Carl Holty and Francis Criss at the American Artists School, while simultaneously studying portraiture at the National Academy of Design under Karl Anderson.
  
  wn.com/Ad_Reinhardt
• Alice Munro
  Alice Ann Munro (née Laidlaw; born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian short-story writer, the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction, and a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize. Generally regarded as one of the world's foremost writers of fiction, Munro writes about the human condition and relationships seen through the lens of daily life. While the locus of Munro’s fiction is her native Southwestern Ontario, her reputation as a short-story writer is international. Her "accessible, moving stories" explore human complexities in a seemingly effortless style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov."
  Munro was born in the town of Wingham, Ontario, into a family of fox and poultry farmers. Her father was Robert Eric Laidlaw and her mother, a schoolteacher, was Anne Clarke Laidlaw (née Chamney). She began writing as a teenager and published her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," in 1950 while a student at the University of Western Ontario. During this period she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker and a library clerk. In 1951, she left the university, where she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry James Munro and move to Vancouver, British Columbia. Her daughters Sheila, Catherine, and Jenny were born in 1953, 1955, and 1957 respectively; Catherine died 15 hours after birth. In 1963, the Munros moved to Victoria where they opened Munro's Books, a popular bookstore still in business. In 1966, their daughter Andrea was born. Alice and James Munro were divorced in 1972. She returned to Ontario to become Writer-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario. In 1976 she married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer. The couple moved to a farm outside Clinton, Ontario. They have since moved from the farm to a house in the town of Clinton.
  
  wn.com/Alice_Munro
• 
  Ann Beattie
  Ann Beattie (born September 8, 1947) is an American short story writer and novelist. She has received an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a PEN/Bernard Malamud Award for excellence in the short story form. Her work has been compared to that of Alice Adams, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, and John Updike. She holds an undergraduate degree from American University and a masters degree from the University of Connecticut.
  Born in Washington, D.C., Beattie grew up in Chevy Chase, Washington, D.C.. She gained attention in the early 1970s with short stories published in The Western Humanities Review, Ninth Letter, the Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. Critics have praised her writing for its keen observations and dry, matter-of-fact irony which chronicle disillusionments of the upper-middle-class generation that grew up in the 1960s. In 1976, she published her first book of short stories, Distortions, and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, later made into a film. Beattie's style has evolved over the years. In 1998, she published Park City, a collection of old and new short stories, about which Christopher Lehman-Haupt wrote in the New York Times:
  
  wn.com/Ann_Beattie
• 
  Art Spiegelman
  Art Spiegelman (born February 15, 1948) is an American cartoonist, editor and comics advocate, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been highly influential, and he spent a decade as contributing editor of The New Yorker starting in 1992, where he also made a number of high-profile and sometimes controversial covers. He is married to Françoise Mouly.
  Spiegelman's work first gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s. His work in this period was short and formally experimental, and often included autobiographical elements. A selection of these strips appeared in the collection Breakdowns in 1977. After Breakdowns, Spiegelman wanted to work on a "very long comic book". He settled on the theme of his father's experiences during as a Holocaust survivor. The book, Maus, would take thirteen years to complete. It drew both praise and criticism for depicting Nazis as cats and Jews as mice. The book won a number of prizes, most prominently a special Pulitzer Prize. It has come to be viewed as a pivotal work in comics, responsible for bringing serious scholarly attention to the medium.
  
  wn.com/Art_Spiegelman
• 
  Barack Obama
  
  
  Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.
  Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.
  Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.
  
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  Ben Yagoda
  Ben Yagoda (born 22 February 1954) is a writer and educator. He is a professor of journalism and English at the University of Delaware.
  Born in New York City to Louis Yagoda and the former Harriet Lewis, he grew up in New Rochelle, New York. He entered Yale University to study English in 1971.
  He became a freelance journalist for publications such as The New Leader, The New York Times, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone. He has published a number of books including About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made.
  Besides his work as a journalism and English professor at the University of Delaware, Yagoda also writes occasionally for a New York Times blog about the English language.
  Yagoda resides in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania with his wife. They have two daughters.
  
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• Brendan Gill
  Brendan Gill (October 4, 1914 – December 27, 1997) wrote for The New Yorker for more than 60 years. He also contributed film criticism for Film Comment and wrote a popular book about his time at the New Yorker magazine.
  Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Gill was graduated in 1936 from Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. He was a long-time resident of Bronxville, New York and Norfolk, Connecticut.
  In 1936 The New Yorker editor St. Clair McKelway hired Gill as a writer. Gill wrote the long running "Skyline" column for the magazine.
  A champion of architectural preservation and other visual arts, he chaired the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and authored 15 books, including Here at The New Yorker and the iconoclastic Frank Lloyd Wright biography Many Masks.
  In September 1989, two years after the death of Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), a professor and writer on the subject of comparative mythology and comparative religion and author of the four volume work The Masks of God (1959–1968) and subject of the hugely popular 1988 PBS series and companion book The Power of Myth (1988) hosted by Bill Moyers, Gill wrote the controversial article "The Faces of Joseph Campbell" for the New York Review of Books where he charged Campbell with anti-Semitism (for no good reason) as well as "Satanism" (because Campbell looked so healthy in his eighties). The title of Gills article was a play upon the title of Campbells book The Masks of God (1959) and, oddly enough, Gill's own 1987 book: Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright (1987). Gill offered no evidence to support his accusations other than that Gill was acquainted with Campbell through the Century Club. After his article, many people and from various walks of life who knew Campbell personally, vigorously and specifically disproved the unsupported accusations levied by Gill.
  
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  Brian De Palma
  Brian Russell De Palma (born September 11, 1940) is an American film director and writer. In a career spanning over 40 years, he is probably best known for his suspense and crime thriller films, including such box office successes as the horror film Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Scarface, The Untouchables, and Mission: Impossible.
  Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, De Palma worked repeatedly with actors Jennifer Salt, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen (his wife from 1979 to 1983), Gary Sinise, John Lithgow, William Finley, Charles Durning, Gerrit Graham, cinematographers Stephen H. Burum and Vilmos Zsigmond (see List of noted film director and cinematographer collaborations), set designer Jack Fisk, and composers Bernard Herrmann, John Williams and Pino Donaggio. De Palma is credited^{[by whom?]} with fostering the careers of or outright discovering Robert De Niro, Jill Clayburgh, John C. Reilly, John Leguizamo, Andy Garcia and Margot Kidder.
  De Palma, whose background is Italian Roman Catholic, was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Vivienne (née Muti) and Anthony Federico De Palma, an orthopedic surgeon. He was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire in various Protestant and Quaker schools, eventually graduating from Friends' Central School. He won a regional science-fair prize for a project titled "An Analog Computer to Solve Differential Equations".
  
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  Burt Lancaster
  Burton Stephen "Burt" Lancaster (November 2, 1913 – October 20, 1994) was an American film actor noted for his athletic physique and distinctive smile (which he called "The Grin"). After initially building his career on "tough guy" roles Lancaster abandoned his "all-American" image in the late 1950s in favor of more complex and challenging roles, and came to be regarded as one of the best actors of his generation as a result.
  Lancaster was nominated four times for Academy Awards and won once — for his work in Elmer Gantry in 1960. He also won a Golden Globe for that performance and BAFTA Awards for The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and Atlantic City (1980). His production company, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, was the most successful and innovative star-driven independent production company in Hollywood of the 1950s, making movies such as Marty (1955), Trapeze (1956), and Sweet Smell of Success (1957).
  In 1999, the American Film Institute named Lancaster 19th among the greatest male stars of all time.
  
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• Carl Rose
  Carl Rose (1903 – 1971) was an American cartoonist whose work appeared in The New Yorker, Popular Science, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. He received the National Cartoonists Society's Advertising and Illustration Award for 1958.
  Rose created one of the most famous New Yorker cartoons, published December 8, 1928, with a caption by E. B. White. In the cartoon, a mother at dinner says to her young daughter, "It's broccoli, dear." Her daughter answers, "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it." (Later, in 1932, there was a popular Broadway revue called "Face The Music" which in the song "I Say It's Spinach" used the line "I Say It's Spinach, so the hell with it".)
  Rose illustrated Bennett Cerf's best-selling book Try and Stop Me and its sequel Shake Well Before Using. Rose also illustrated Have Tux, Will Travel, the supposed autobiography of actor Bob Hope (actually ghost-written by journalist Pete Martin).
  
  
  
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• Charles Addams
  Charles Samuel "Chaz" Addams (January 7, 1912 – September 29, 1988) was an American cartoonist known for his darkly humorous and macabre characters. Some of the recurring characters, who became known as the Addams Family, became the basis for two live-action television series, two animated TV series, three motion pictures and a Broadway musical.
  Charles Samuel Addams was born in Westfield, New Jersey, the son of Grace M. (née Spears) and Charles Huy Addams, a piano-company executive who had studied to be an architect. He was known as "something of a rascal around the neighborhood" as childhood friends recalled. Addams was distantly related to U.S. presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, despite the different spellings of their last names, and was a first cousin twice removed to noted social reformer Jane Addams.
  A house on Elm Street, and another on Dudley Avenue that police once caught him breaking into, are said to be the inspiration for the Addams Family mansion in his cartoons. College Hall, the oldest building on the current campus of the University of Pennsylvania, where Addams studied, was also an inspiration for the mansion. He was fond of visiting the Presbyterian Cemetery on Mountain Avenue. One friend said of him, "His sense of humor was a little different from everybody else's." He was also artistically inclined, "drawing with a happy vengeance" according to a biographer.
  
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• Charles Barsotti
  Charles Barsotti (born 1933) is an American cartoonist who has contributed gag cartoons to major magazines.
  Born in San Marcos, Texas, Barsotti grew up in San Antonio and graduated from Texas State University in 1955. He has been the cartoon editor of The Saturday Evening Post and has been a staff cartoonist at The New Yorker since 1970. His work has also appeared in Playboy and Fast Company, among other publications. A signature artist whose rounded, elegant, sparsely detailed style evokes both the traditional world of a James Thurber and the contemporary sensibility of a Roz Chast.
  Barsotti's work features a simple repertory including a nameless, lovable pooch and a monarch whose kingdom consists of a guard and a telephone.
  His work in comic strips includes:
  In 1992, his dog character was adopted as a logo by the office supplies company Niceday Ltd, which was taken over the French company Guilbert, leading to the nickname "Niceday pup" in the United Kingdom. On 26 February 1996, the pup also appeared on one of three United Kingdom postage stamps featuring Barsotti's cartoons.
  
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• Charles Saxon
  Charles David Saxon (November 13, 1920-December 6, 1988) was an American cartoonist.
  Born in Brooklyn, he graduated from Columbia University in 1940. He worked as an editor at Dell Publishing and served as a bomber pilot in the Army Air Corps during World War II, flying 40 missions over Germany. After the war he rejoined Dell and edited Modern Screen. He also began drawing cartoons on weekends, selling them to The Saturday Evening Post. Then starting in 1956, he became a cartoonist for The New Yorker and is best remembered for his work for the magazine, which included 92 covers and more than 700 cartoons. Many of his cartoons can be found in three collections: Oh, Happy, Happy, Happy! (1960), One Man's Fancy (1970), and Honesty Is One of the "Better" Policies: Saxon's World of Business (1984). He also drew numerous ads for American Airlines, Bankers Trust, I.B.M., Xerox and other companies. As his New York Times obituary noted, "So ubiquitous was his advertising work in the late 1970s that one edition of The Wall Street Journal featured ads by Mr. Saxon for three different companies."
  
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  Charlie Kaufman
  Charles Stuart "Charlie" Kaufman (born November 19, 1958) is an American screenwriter, producer, and director. His film work includes Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation., Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
  Between 1983 and 1984, Kaufman wrote comedic articles and spoofs on spec for National Lampoon, along with colleague and friend Paul Proch. His work included parodies of Kurt Vonnegut and the X-Men. After moving to Los Angeles, Kaufman got his start in television by writing two episodes for Chris Elliott's Get a Life during the 1991-92 season. During the 1993-94 season, Kaufman worked on Fox's sketch comedy show The Edge. He later worked as a writer for Ned and Stacey and The Dana Carvey Show.
  He first came to mainstream notice as the writer of Being John Malkovich (directed by Spike Jonze), earning an Oscar nomination for his effort and winning a BAFTA. He also wrote Human Nature, which was directed by Michel Gondry, and then worked with Jonze again as the screenwriter for Adaptation., which earned him another Oscar nomination and his second BAFTA. Adaptation. featured a "Charlie Kaufman" character who is a heavily fictionalized version of the screenwriter and who has an "identical twin brother", Donald, a sell-out screenwriter reflecting Kaufman's anxieties about Hollywood. The DVD edition of Adaptation. contains a filmography which lists Donald Kaufman as having written the screenplay for the movie. The credits of the film close with the words "in loving memory of Donald Kaufman".
  
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• Chudnovsky brothers
  The Chudnovsky brothers (both born in Kiev; David Volfovich in 1947; Gregory Volfovich in 1952) are American mathematicians known for their wide mathematical ability, their home-built supercomputers, and their close working relationship.
  A 1992 article in The New Yorker quoted the opinion of several mathematicians that Gregory Chudnovsky is one of the world's best living mathematicians. David Chudnovsky works closely with and assists his brother Gregory, who has myasthenia gravis.
  The Chudnovsky brothers have held records, at different times, for computing π to the largest number of places, including two billion digits in the early 1990s on a supercomputer they built (dubbed "m-zero") in their apartment in Manhattan. In 1987, the Chudnovsky brothers developed the algorithm (now called the Chudnovsky algorithm) that they used to break several π computation records. Today, this algorithm is used by Mathematica to calculate π, and is continued to be used by others who have achieved world records in pi calculation.
  
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• Corey Ford
  Corey Ford (April 29, 1902-July 27, 1969) was an American humorist, author, outdoorsman, and screenwriter. He was also friendly with several members of the Algonquin Round Table and occasionally ate lunch there.
  Originally a member of the Class of 1923 at Columbia College of Columbia University, at which he wrote the Varsity Show "Half Moon Inn," he failed to graduate. Instead, he proceeded into a career as a freelance writer and humorist. In the 1930s he was noted for satirical sketches of books and authors penned under the name "John Riddell". Richard Wright's "Black Boy" was lampooned as "Hollywood Boy" contrasting the author's celebrity with the raw story portrayed in the book. Theodore Dreiser was shown adopting the guise of a common workman building his newest and biggest novel from bricks and mortar. A forgotten book, "Dead Lovers are Good Lovers," was reviewed as "Dead Novelists are Good Novelists." Ford's series of "Impossible Interviews" for Vanity Fair magazine featured ill-assorted celebrities: Stalin vs John D. Rockefeller, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes vs Al Capone, Sigmund Freud vs Jean Harlow, Sally Rand vs Martha Graham, Gertrude Stein vs Gracie Allen, Adolf Hitler vs Huey Long.
  
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  Cornel West
  Cornel Ronald West (born June 2, 1953) is an American philosopher, author, critic, actor, civil rights activist and prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
  West is a 1973 graduate of Harvard University and a doctoral graduate of Princeton University. He is currently a professor of African American studies at Princeton and of Religious philosophy and Christian studies at the Union Theological Seminary in New York.
  West is known for his combination of political and moral insight and criticism and his contribution to the post-1960s civil rights movement.^{[citation needed]} The bulk of his work focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their "radical conditionedness." West draws intellectual contributions from such diverse traditions as the African American Baptist Church, pragmatism and transcendentalism.
  West was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and grew up in Sacramento, California, where he graduated from John F. Kennedy High School. His father was a general contractor for the Defense Department, and his mother was a teacher and a principal. Irene B. West Elementary School in Elk Grove, California, is named for her.
  
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• Creflo Dollar
  Creflo Augustus Dollar, Jr. is an American Bible teacher, pastor, and the founder of the non-denominational World Changers Church International based in Fulton County, Georgia. Creflo Dollar Ministerial Association (formerly called International Covenant Ministries), Creflo Dollar Ministries, and Arrow Records. Each of these enterprises is overseen by Dollar and his wife, Taffi Dollar.
  In 1984, Dollar received a Bachelor of Science degree in education from West Georgia College in Carrollton, Georgia. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity from Oral Roberts University in 1998.
  Dollar indicates that he received the vision for World Changers Ministries Christian Center in 1986. He held the church's first worship service in the cafeteria of Kathleen Mitchell Elementary School in College Park, Georgia, with only eight people in attendance and successfully receiving over $100 in contributions from those present. Over the years the ministry has grown rapidly and was renamed World Changers Church International (WCCI). As of 2007, the congregation has grown to 30,000 members with $69 million in revenue (gross cash collections) for 2006. The congregation moved from its original cafeteria location to a modest-sized chapel, adding a weekly radio broadcast and four services each Sunday. On December 24, 1995, WCCI moved into its present location, the 8,500-seat sanctuary known as the World Dome. At a cost of nearly $18 million, it is claimed that the World Dome was built without any bank financing.
  
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  David Remnick
  David Remnick (born October 29, 1958) is an American journalist, writer, and magazine editor. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He was named "Editor of the Year" by Advertising Age in 2000. Before joining The New Yorker, Remnick was a reporter and the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. He has also served on the New York Public Library's board of trustees. In 2010 he published his sixth book, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.
  Remnick was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, the son of a dentist and an art teacher. He was raised in Hillsdale, New Jersey, in a secular Jewish home with, he has said, "a lot of books around". He is also childhood friends with comedian Bill Maher. He graduated from Princeton University in 1981 with an A. B. in comparative literature; there, he met writer John McPhee and helped found The Nassau Weekly. Remnick has implied that after college he wanted to write novels, but due to his parents' illnesses, he needed a paying job—there was no trust fund to rely upon. Remnick wanted to be a writer, so he chose a career in journalism, taking a job at the Washington Post. He is married to reporter Esther Fein of The New York Times and has three children, Alex, Noah, and Natasha. He enjoys jazz music and classic cinema and is fluent in Russian.
  
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  Donald Barthelme
  Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 – July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of The University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
  Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia in 1931. His father and mother were fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania. The family moved to Texas two years later, where Barthelme's father became a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme would later study journalism.
  In 1951, as a student, he wrote his first articles for the Houston Post. Two years later, Barthelme was drafted into the U.S. Army, arriving in Korea on July 27, 1953, the day of the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement, which ended the Korean War. He served briefly as the editor of an Army newspaper before returning to the U.S. and his job at the Houston Post. Once back, he continued his studies at the University of Houston, studying philosophy. Although he continued to take classes until 1957, he never received a degree. He spent much of his free time in Houston’s Black jazz clubs, listening to musical innovators such as Lionel Hampton and Peck Kelly, an experience that influenced his later writing.
  
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  Dorothy Parker
  Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th century urban foibles.
  From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left-wing politics led to a place on the Hollywood blacklist.
  Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker." Nevertheless, her literary output and reputation for her sharp wit have endured.
  
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• Ed Koren
  Edward Benjamin "Ed" Koren (born 1935) is a writer and illustrator of children's books and political cartoons, most notably in The New Yorker.
  Edward Benjamin Koren was born in New York City and attended the private Horace Mann School and Columbia University. He did graduate work in etching and engraving with S. W. Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris, France and received an M.F.A. degree from Pratt Institute. He currently resides with his family in Vermont where he is a captain of the Brookfield Volunteer Fire Department.
  Koren began his cartooning career at Columbia while drawing for the college’s humor magazine. After college, he went on to teach art at Brown University.
  His first love was cartooning. Well known for his very hairy, very lovable characters, he got his artistic break in May 1962 when The New Yorker accepted one of his cartoons. It featured a sloppy-looking writer, cigarette dangling from his lips, sitting before a typewriter. Printed on his sweatshirt is one word: ‘’Shakespeare.’’
  
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  Edmund Gwenn
  Edmund Gwenn (26 September 1877 – 6 September 1959) was an Englishtheatre and film actor.
  Born Edmund John Kellaway in Wandsworth, London and educated at St. Olave's School and later at King's College London, Gwenn began his acting career in the theatre in 1895. Playwright George Bernard Shaw was impressed with his acting, casting him in the first production of Man and Superman, and subsequently in five more of his plays. Gwenn's career was interrupted by his military service during World War I; however, after the war, he began appearing in films in London. (Cecil Kellaway was his cousin and Arthur Chesney was his brother.)
  Gwenn appeared in more than eighty films during his career, including the Greer Garson/Laurence Olivier version of Pride and Prejudice (1940), Cheers for Miss Bishop, Of Human Bondage, and The Keys of the Kingdom. George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett (1935) marked his first appearance in a Hollywood film, as Katharine Hepburn's father; - his final British film, as a capitalist trying to take over a family brewery in Cheer Boys Cheer (1939) is credited with being the first authentic Ealing comedy. He settled in Hollywood in 1940 and became part of its British colony. He is perhaps best remembered for his role as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Upon receiving his Oscar, he said "Now I know there is a Santa Claus!" According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) he is the only person to win an acting Academy Award for playing the role of Santa Claus. He received a second nomination for his role in Mister 880 (1950). Near the end of his career he played one of the main roles in Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry (1955). He has a small but hugely memorable role as a Cockney assassin in another Hitchcock film, Foreign Correspondent (1940)
  
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  Ernest Hemingway
  Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections and two non-fiction works. Three novels, four collections of short stories and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of these are considered classics of American literature.
  Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school he reported for a few months for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the Italian front to enlist with the World War I ambulance drivers. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1922, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. The couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent, and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s "Lost Generation" expatriate community. The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's first novel, was published in 1926.
  
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  Eudora Welty
  Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mississippi, is a National Historic Landmark and open to the public as a museum.
  Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909, the daughter of Christian Webb Welty (1879–1931) and Mary Chestina (Andrews) Welty (1883–1966). She grew up with younger brothers Edward Jefferson and Walter Andrews. Eudora’s mother was a schoolteacher. Eudora soon developed a love of reading, reinforced by her mother who believed that "any room in our house, at any time in the day, was there to read in, or to be read to". Her father, who worked as an insurance executive, was intrigued by gadgets and machines and inspired in Eudora a love of all things mechanical. She later would use technology for symbolism in her stories and would also become an avid photographer, like her father.
  
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• Françoise Mouly
  Françoise Mouly (born October 24, 1955) is a Paris-born French artist and designer best known for her work with RAW, a showcase publication for cutting edge comic art, and as art editor of The New Yorker, a position she has held since 1993. In April 2008, comics critic Jeet Heer wrote on his blog, Sans Everything: "Is there anyone in the cartooning world who is more underrated than Françoise Mouly?" and went on to give an extensive list of Mouly's achievements.
  Mouly came to New York for the first time in 1974 as a 19-year-old architectural student. She soon settled in a loft in Soho and survived by doing a series of odd jobs: selling cigarettes in street kiosks, actress in a Richard Foreman play, model-maker in a Japanese architectural agency, plumber, electrician, and assistant to a plastic surgeon (her father). In 1976, she met Art Spiegelman (who would only later become the author of Maus, in which she makes brief appearances) and discovered her passion: graphic arts and book production. From 1972–1979 Mouly was a freelance colorist for Marvel Comics, where she worked on such comics as Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Marvel Two-in-One, and Tomb of Dracula, as well as doing individual fill-ins on numerous other titles.
  
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  Gahan Wilson
  Gahan Wilson (born February 18, 1930 in Evanston, Illinois) is an American author, cartoonist and illustrator known for his cartoons depicting horror-fantasy situations. Since 1966, he has been married to the author Nancy Winters (née Nancy Dee Midyette).
  Wilson's cartoons and illustrations are drawn in a playfully grotesque style and have a dark humor that is often compared to the work of The New Yorker cartoonist and Addams Family creator Charles Addams. But while both feature vampires, cemeteries and other traditional horror elements in their work, Addams' cartoons are gothic, reserved and old-fashioned, while Wilson's work is more contemporary, gross and confrontational, featuring atomic mutants, subway monsters and serial killers. It could be argued that Addams' work was probably meant to be funny without a lot of satirical intent, while Wilson often has a very specific point to make.
  Wilson was inspired by the irreverent work of the various satiric Mad and Punch cartoonists, as well as the science fiction monster films of the 1950s. His cartoons and prose fiction appeared regularly in Playboy, Collier's and The New Yorker for almost 50 years. In addition to his cartoons for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, he also wrote movie and book reviews for that publication. From 1992 through end of publication, he prepared all the front covers for the annual book Passport to World Band Radio. He has been a movie review columnist for The Twilight Zone Magazine and a book critic for Realms of Fantasy magazine.
  
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  Harold Ross
  Harold Wallace Ross (November 6, 1892 – December 6, 1951) was an American journalist and founder of The New Yorker magazine, which he edited from the magazine's inception in 1925 to his death.
  Born in Aspen, Colorado to George and Ida (Martin) Ross, he was the son of an Irish immigrant and a schoolteacher. When he was eight, the family left Aspen because of the collapse in the price of silver, moving to Redcliff and Silverton, Colorado, then to Salt Lake City, Utah. In Utah, he worked on the high school paper (The West High Red & Black) and was a stringer for The Salt Lake Tribune, the city's leading daily newspaper. The young Ross had journalism in the blood. He dropped out of school at thirteen and ran away to his uncle in Denver, where he worked for The Denver Post. Though he returned to his family, he did not return to school, instead getting a job at the Salt Lake Telegram, a smaller afternoon daily newspaper.
  By the time he was twenty-five he had worked for at least seven different papers, including the Marysville, California Appeal; the Sacramento Union; the Panama Star and Herald; the New Orleans Item; the Atlanta Journal, the Hudson Observer in Hoboken, New Jersey; the Brooklyn Eagle; and the San Francisco Call.
  
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  Haruki Murakami
  Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹, Murakami Haruki^?, born January 12, 1949) is a Japanese writer and translator. His works of fiction and non-fiction have garnered critical acclaim and numerous awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize and the Jerusalem Prize, among others.
  Murakami's fiction, often criticized by Japan's literary establishment, is humorous and surreal, focusing on themes of alienation and loneliness. He is considered an important figure in postmodern literature. The Guardian praised Murakami as "among the world's greatest living novelists" for his works and achievements.
  Murakami was born in Japan during the post–World War II baby boom. Although born in Kyoto, he spent his youth in Shukugawa (Nishinomiya), Ashiya and Kobe. His father was the son of a Buddhist priest, and his mother the daughter of an Osaka merchant. Both taught Japanese literature.
  Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. He grew up reading a wide range of works by American writers, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan. These Western influences often distinguish Murakami from other Japanese writers.
  
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  Henry Luce
  Henry Robinson Luce (April 3, 1898 – February 28, 1967), a magazine publisher, was called "the most influential private citizen in the America of his day." He launched and closely supervised a stable of magazines that transformed journalism and the reading habits of upscale Americans. Time summarized and interpreted the week's news; Life was a picture magazine of politics, culture and society that dominated American visual perceptions in the era before television; Fortune explored in depth the economy and the world of business, introducing to executives avant-garde ideas such as Keynesianism; and Sports Illustrated which probed beneath the surface of the game to explore the motivations and strategies of the teams and key players. Add in his radio projects and newsreels, and Luce created the first multimedia corporation. Luce, born in China to missionary parents, demonstrated a missionary zeal to make the nation worthy of dominating the world in what he called the "American Century."
  Luce, known to his friends as "Father Time," was born in Tengchow, China, on April 3, 1898, the son of Elizabeth Middleton and Henry Winters Luce, who was a Presbyterian missionary. He received his education in various Chinese and English boarding schools including the China Inland Mission Chefoo School. He was sent to the U.S. at the age of 15 to attend the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, followed by Yale College.
  
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• Irwin Shaw
  Irwin Shaw (February 27, 1913 – May 16, 1984) was a prolific American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and short-story author whose written works have sold more than 14 million copies. He is best known for his novel, The Young Lions (1948) about the fate of three soldiers during World War II that was made into a film starring Marlon Brando. Though Shaw's work received widespread critical acclaim, the success of his commercial fiction ultimately diminished his literary reputation.
  Shaw was born Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff in the South Bronx, New York City, to Russian-Jewish immigrants. His parents were Rose and Will. His younger brother, David Shaw (died 2007), became a noted Hollywood producer. Shortly after Irwin's birth, the Shamforoffs moved to Brooklyn. Irwin changed his surname upon entering college. He spent most of his youth in Brooklyn, where he graduated from Brooklyn College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1934. Shaw died in Davos, Switzerland on May 16, 1984, aged 71, after undergoing treatment for prostate cancer.
  
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• 
  James Thurber
  James Grover Thurber (December 8, 1894 – November 2, 1961) was an American author, cartoonist and celebrated wit. Thurber was best known for his cartoons and short stories, published mainly in The New Yorker magazine then collected in his numerous books. One of the most popular humorists of his time, Thurber celebrated the comic frustrations and eccentricities of ordinary people.
  Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio, to Charles L. Thurber and Mary Agnes (Mame) Fisher Thurber on December 8, 1894. Both of his parents greatly influenced his work. His father, a sporadically employed clerk and minor politician who dreamed of being a lawyer or an actor, is said to have been the inspiration for the small, timid protagonist typical of many of his stories. Thurber described his mother as a "born comedian" and "one of the finest comic talents I think I have ever known." She was a practical joker, on one occasion pretending to be crippled and attending a faith healer revival, only to jump up and proclaim herself healed.
  
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• Jane Grant
  Jane Grant (May 29, 1892 – March 16, 1972) was a New York City journalist who co-founded The New Yorker with her first husband, Harold Ross.
  She was born Jeanette Cole Grant in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up and went to school in Girard, Kansas. Grant originally trained to be a vocalist. She came to New York City at 16 to pursue singing, but fell into magazine writing, later joining the staff of The New York Times.
  Grant was close friends with critic Alexander Woollcott; it was through him that she joined the Algonquin Round Table. Another good friend was the writer Janet Flanner. Grant showed Ross her friend's letters from Paris; Ross liked them so much he tapped her to be one of The New Yorker 's greatest correspondents. Grant also helped on the business side of the magazine in its earliest days.
  In World War I, Grant, who was also a talented singer and dancer, talked her way onto a troopship to France. She joined the American Red Cross and entertained soldiers during shows in Paris and at camps. It was in France that she first met Ross and the future "Vicious Circle" members.
  
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• Janet Malcolm
  
  Janet Malcolm (born 1934) is an American writer and journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine. She is the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984) and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990).
  Craig Seligman wrote of her: "Like Sylvia Plath, whose not-niceness she has laid open with surgical skill, she discovered her vocation in not-niceness ... Malcolm's blade gleams with a razor edge. Her critics tend to go after her with broken bottles." The influential critic Harold Bloom has praised her "wonderful exuberance," writing that Malcolm's books, "transcend what they appear to be: superb reportage."
  Malcolm was born in Prague in 1934, one of two daughters—the other is author Marie Winn—of a psychiatrist father. She has resided in the United States since her family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1939. Malcolm was educated at the University of Michigan and lives in New York City. Her first husband, Donald Malcolm, reviewed books for The New Yorker in the 1950s and 1960s. Her second husband, whom she wed in 1975, was long-time New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford; Botsford died at age 87 in September, 2004.
  
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• Jennifer Jason Leigh
  Jennifer Jason Leigh (born February 5, 1962) is an American film and stage actress, best known for her roles in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Single White Female, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Georgia and Short Cuts. She is also the co-writer and co-director of the film The Anniversary Party, made with fellow actor Alan Cumming.
  Leigh is known for her emotionally raw and often sexually explicit portrayals of vulnerable and damaged women, and for her intensive method inspired research into her roles.
  Leigh was born on 5 February 1962 in Hollywood, California. She is the daughter of actor Vic Morrow and screenwriter Barbara Turner. Leigh's birth name was Jennifer Leigh Morrow. She changed her surname early in her acting career, taking the middle name Jason in honor of actor Jason Robards, a family friend. Leigh's parents were Jewish, of Russian descent on her father's side.
  Leigh has an older sister, Carrie Ann Morrow, who was credited as a "technical advisor" in Georgia, and on whom Leigh's character Sadie Flood was reputedly based. Leigh also has a half-sister, actress Mina Badie, from her mother's marriage, who acted alongside Leigh in The Anniversary Party. The director Reza Badiyi was her mother's second husband and was at the time her stepfather.
  
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• Jhumpa Lahiri
  Jhumpa Lahiri (Bengali: ঝুম্পা লাহিড়ী; born on July 11, 1967) is a Indian American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name. She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna, which she says are both "good names", but goes by her nickname Jhumpa. Lahiri is a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by U.S. President Barack Obama.
  Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Indian immigrants from the state of West Bengal. Her family moved to the United States when she was three; Lahiri considers herself an American, stating, "I wasn't born here, but I might as well have been." Lahiri grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father Amar Lahiri works as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island; he is the basis for the protagonist in "The Third and Final Continent," the closing story from Interpreter of Maladies. Lahiri's mother wanted her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta (now Kolkata).
  
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  John Cheever
  John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is "now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century." While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including "The Enormous Radio," "Goodbye, My Brother," "The Five-Forty-Eight," "The Country Husband," and "The Swimmer"), he also wrote a number of novels, such as The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958),The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park (1969), and Falconer (1977).
  His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both – light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia.
  
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  John Hersey
  John Richard Hersey (June 17, 1914 – March 24, 1993) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and journalist considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling devices of the novel are fused with non-fiction reportage. Hersey's account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, was adjudged the finest piece of journalism of the 20th century by a 36-member panel under the aegis of New York University's journalism department.
  Born in Tientsin, China, to missionaries Roscoe and Grace Baird Hersey, John Hersey learned to speak Chinese before he spoke English. Hersey's 1985 novel, The Call, is closely based on the lives of his parents and several other missionaries of their generation. He returned to the United States with his family when he was ten years old. Later Hersey attended the Hotchkiss School, followed by Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones Society.Hersey lettered in football at Yale, was coached by Ducky Pond, Greasy Neale and Gerald Ford, and was a teammate of Yale's two Heisman Trophy winners, Larry Kelley and Clint Frank. He subsequently was a graduate student at Cambridge as a Mellon Fellow. Following his time at Cambridge, Hersey got a summer job as private secretary and driver for author Sinclair Lewis in 1937, but he chafed at his duties, and that fall he began work at Time, where he was hired after writing an essay on the magazine's dismal quality. Two years later he was transferred to Time's Chongqing bureau.
  
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  John Kerry
  John Forbes Kerry (born December 11, 1943) is the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts, the 10th most senior United States Senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2004 presidential election, but lost to then President George W. Bush.
  The son of an Army Air Corps serviceman, Kerry was born in Aurora, Colorado. He attended boarding school in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and went on to graduate from Yale University class of 1966, where he majored in political science. He enlisted in the Naval Reserve in 1966 and, during 1968-1969, served a four-month tour of duty in South Vietnam as officer-in-charge (OIC) of a Swift Boat. For that service he was awarded several combat medals that include the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts. After returning to the United States, Kerry joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in which he served as a nationally recognized spokesperson and as an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam war. During that period, he appeared before the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs where he deemed United States war policy in Vietnam to be the cause of "war crimes".
  
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  John McCain
  John Sidney McCain III (born August 29, 1936) is the senior United States Senator from Arizona. He was the Republican presidential nominee in the 2008 United States election.
  McCain followed his father and grandfather, both four-star admirals, into the United States Navy, graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1958. He became a naval aviator, flying ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers. During the Vietnam War, he was almost killed in the 1967 USS Forrestal fire. In October 1967, while on a bombing mission over Hanoi, he was shot down, seriously injured, and captured by the North Vietnamese. He was a prisoner of war until 1973. McCain experienced episodes of torture, and refused an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer. His war wounds left him with lifelong physical limitations.
  He retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981 and moved to Arizona, where he entered politics. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982, he served two terms, and was then elected to the U.S. Senate in 1986, winning re-election easily four times, most recently in 2010. While generally adhering to conservative principles, McCain at times has had a media reputation as a "maverick" for his willingness to disagree with his party on certain issues. After being investigated and largely exonerated in a political influence scandal of the 1980s as a member of the Keating Five, he made campaign finance reform one of his signature concerns, which eventually led to the passage of the McCain-Feingold Act in 2002. He is also known for his work towards restoring diplomatic relations with Vietnam in the 1990s, and for his belief that the war in Iraq should be fought to a successful conclusion. McCain has chaired the Senate Commerce Committee, opposed spending that he considered to be pork barrel, and played a key role in alleviating a crisis over judicial nominations.
  
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• John McNulty
  John McNulty (1895–1956) was an American newspaperman and short story writer. Many of his stories deal with New York saloon life and its characters.
  McNulty was a lifelong friend, associate, and drinking companion of writer and humorist James Thurber. McNulty wrote at The New Yorker with Thurber, Joseph Mitchell, S.J. Perelman, E.B. White and others. They met at Costello's saloon on Third Avenue in New York City as members of the "square table" (in contrast with the literary wits who met at the Algonquin Round Table). Thurber eulogized McNulty in the New Yorker and wrote a long and extraordinarily affectionate foreword to a posthumous collection of his friend's stories.
  McNulty's works have been used in graduate literature courses at Columbia^{[dead link]}, Duke and University of Pittsburgh.^{[dead link]} McNulty's stories are collected in The World of John McNulty and This Place on Third Avenue
  
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• John Seabrook
  John Seabrook is an American journalist who writes about technology and popular culture. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993.
  Seabrook graduated from St. Andrew's School (DE) in 1976, Princeton University in 1981 and received an M.A. in English Literature from Oxford. He began his career writing about business and published in a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including Harper's, Vanity Fair, GQ, The Nation, The Village Voice, and the Christian Science Monitor. To date, he has published three books besides contributing numerous articles to The New Yorker. A feature film based on his 2008 book Flash of Genius was released on October 3, 2008.
  
  
  
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  John Updike
  John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.
  Updike's most famous work is his Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and the novella "Rabbit Remembered"), which chronicles Rabbit's life over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to his death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit At Rest (1990) received the Pulitzer Prize. Updike is one of only three authors (the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books.
  
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  Jon Stewart
  Jon Stewart (born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz; November 28, 1962) is an American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian. He is widely known as host of The Daily Show, a satirical news program that airs on Comedy Central.
  Stewart started as a stand-up comedian, but branched into television as host of Short Attention Span Theater for Comedy Central. He went on to host his own show on MTV, called The Jon Stewart Show, and then hosted another show on MTV called You Wrote It, You Watch It. He has also had several film roles as an actor. Stewart became the host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central in early 1999. He is also a writer and co-executive-producer of the show. After Stewart joined, The Daily Show steadily gained popularity and critical acclaim, resulting in his sixteen Emmy Awards.
  Stewart has gained acclaim as an acerbic, satirical critic of personality-driven media shows, in particular those of the US media networks such as CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. Critics say Stewart benefits from a double standard: he critiques other news shows from the safe, removed position of his "fake news" desk. Stewart agrees, saying that neither his show nor his channel purports to be anything other than satire and comedy. In spite of its self-professed entertainment mandate, The Daily Show has been nominated for news and journalism awards. Stewart hosted the 78th and 80th Academy Awards. He is the co-author of America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, which was one of the best-selling books in the U.S. in 2004 and Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race released in 2010.
  
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  Jonathan Safran Foer
  Jonathan Safran Foer is an American author best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). In 2009, he published a work of nonfiction titled Eating Animals.
  Jonathan Safran Foer was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Albert Foer, a lawyer and President of the American Antitrust Institute, and Esther Safran Foer, a child of Holocaust survivors who was born in Poland and is now the Director of the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue. Foer is the middle son in this tight-knit Jewish family; his older brother, Franklin, is the former editor of The New Republic and his younger brother Joshua is a freelance journalist. Foer was a "flamboyant" and sensitive child who, at the age of 8, was injured in a classroom chemical accident that resulted in "something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years," during which "he wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin."
  Foer attended Georgetown Day School and Princeton University. In 1995, while a freshman at Princeton, Safran Foer took an introductory writing course with author Joyce Carol Oates, who took an interest in his writing, telling him that he had "that most important of writerly qualities, energy." Foer later recalled that "she was the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way. And my life really changed after that." Oates served as the advisor to Safran Foer's senior thesis, an examination of the life of his maternal grandfather, the Holocaust survivor Louis Safran. For his thesis, Foer received Princeton's Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prize.
  
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• Julia Suits
  Julia Suits is a contributing cartoonist for The New Yorker and other publications.
  Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Suits received a BFA in painting from Beloit College and an MFA from Ohio State. Her editorial portraits, syndicated by Creators Syndicate from 1988 to 2008, appeared in newspapers worldwide, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post Weekly and the San Francisco Chronicle.
  Suits has illustrated scientific journals and textbooks. As a certified medical illustrator and forensic sculptor, she was the first person to reconstruct the head of an Egyptian mummy using CAT scan technology.
  She created art for a book of idioms, I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears by Jag Bhalla (National Geographic, 2009), and other books showcasing her work include The Rejection Collection II, edited by Matt Diffee (Gallery, 2007), and Sex and Sensibility, edited by Liza Donnelly (Twelve, 2008).
  She is the author of a non-fiction book, The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: The Curious World of the Demoulin Brothers and Their Fraternal Lodge Prank Machines from Human Centipedes and Revolving Goats to Electric Carpets and Smoking Camels (Perigee, 2011).
  
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• Kurt Vonnegut
  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ( /ˈvɒnɨɡət/; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical leftist intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.
  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to third-generation German-American parents, Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. and Edith Lieber. Both his father and his grandfather Bernard Vonnegut attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and were architects in the Indianapolis firm of Vonnegut & Bohn. His great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut, Sr. was the founder of the Vonnegut Hardware Company, an Indianapolis institution. Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in May 1940 and matriculated into Cornell University that fall. Though majoring in chemistry, he was Assistant Managing Editor and Associate Editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. He was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, as was his father. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army. The Army transferred him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.
  
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• Lee Lorenz
  Lee Lorenz (born 1933) is an American cartoonist, most notable for his work in The New Yorker.
  Lorenz is an alumnus of North Junior High School in Newburgh, NY, Carnegie Tech and Pratt Institute. His first published cartoon appeared in Colliers in 1956, and two years later he became a contract contributor to The New Yorker, which has published more than 1,600 of his drawings. He was The New Yorker's art editor for 25 years, from 1973 until 1993, continuing as cartoon editor until 1997.
  He is a musician who plays coronet with his own group, the Creole Cookin' Jazz Band.
  Lorenz has edited and written books on the art in The New Yorker, as well as the artists themselves, including The Art of The New Yorker (1995) and The World of William Steig (1998).
  He received the National Cartoonists Society's Gag Cartoon Award for 1995 for his work.
  Lorenz is seen drawing in Lyda Ely's documentary film Funny Business (2009) which visited the studios of 11 cartoonists for The New Yorker.
  
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• Leo Cullum
  Leo Aloysius Cullum (January 11, 1942 – October 23, 2010) was an American cartoonist, one of the more frequent contributors to The New Yorker with more than 800 gag cartoons published. He started his drawing career after having served as a pilot in the United States Marine Corps during the Vietnam War and flying planes commercially for Trans World Airlines and American Airlines.
  Born in Newark, New Jersey, Cullum was raised in North Bergen, New Jersey and earned his undergraduate degree in 1963 from the College of the Holy Cross, where he majored in English. He joined the United States Marine Corps after graduating from college, earning a commission as a second Lieutenant. Upon completion of his flight training in Pensacola, Florida, Cullum deployed to Vietnam, where he flew more than 200 missions, mostly ground attacks in support of the infantry in addition to attacks on the Viet Cong supply lines on the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. Though the missions over Laos were not officially acknowledged, Cullum was baffled by the need for secrecy, saying "the North Vietnamese certainly knew it wasn't the Swiss bombing them".
  
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  Maira Kalman
  Maira Kalman, born in 1949, is an American illustrator, author, artist, and designer. Born in Tel Aviv, Kalman came to New York City with her family at age 4. She attended the High School of Music and Art, now LaGuardia High School.
  Ms. Kalman has authored a series of children's books about Max Stravinsky, the poet-dog. She has done covers for The New Yorker, including one she did with Rick Meyerowitz called New Yorkistan. She created the sets for the Mark Morris Dance Group production of Four Saints in Three Acts, an opera by Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein.
  Kalman is also known for her illustrations for the 2005 edition of The Elements of Style, the popular guide to writing style, by William Strunk and E.B. White.
  Maira Kalman was married to the designer Tibor Kalman until his death in 1999. Together, the two ran the design company M&Co. The company remains successful today.
  Ms. Kalman wrote the monthly illustrated blog The Principles of Uncertainty for The New York Times for one year, ending in April 2007. The blog was published in a book of the same title, which was released in 2007 to critical acclaim. Kalman started a new illustrated blog in The New York Times called "And the Pursuit of Happiness" about American democracy on January 30, 2009. The first entry chronicled her visit to Washington, DC, for President Barack Obama's inauguration. Kalman's work is also featured on Rosenbach Museum and Library's 21st Century Abe project.
  
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  Marlon Brando
  Marlon Brando, Jr. (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004) was an American movie star and political activist. "Unchallenged as the most important actor in modern American Cinema" according to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Brando was one of only three professional actors, along with Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe, named by Time magazine as one of its 100 Persons of the Century in 1999.
  Brando had a significant impact on film acting, and was the foremost example of the "method" acting style. While he became notorious for his "mumbling" diction and exuding a raw animal magnetism, his mercurial performances were nonetheless highly regarded, and he is widely considered as one of the greatest and most influential actors of the 20th century. Director Martin Scorsese said of him, "He is the marker. There's 'before Brando' and 'after Brando'." Actor Jack Nicholson once said, "When Marlon dies, everybody moves up one." He was ranked by the American Film Institute as the fourth greatest screen legend among male movie stars.
  
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• Mary Petty
  Mary Petty (April 29, 1899 - March 6, 1976) was an illustrator of books and magazines best remembered for a series of covers done for The New Yorker featuring her invented Peabody family.
  In 1922, Petty graduated from the Horace Mann School in New York City, and five years later she and cartoonist Alan Dunn were married. Petty first sold work to The New Yorker in 1927 under the encouragement of her husband, who had already sold cartoons to the magazine. Her style was characterized by her "gentle satirization of New York City's Victorian era society."
  Petty was a naturally reticent person, and while her work began appearing in the lauded new magazine, Petty herself did not come to The New Yorker offices for some time and thus "for a long time nothing at all was known about her—except that she regularly submitted a new and distinctive kind of drawing." Even after becoming a part of the office scene, few knew her well. James Thurber said all he knew of her background was that she "was born in a brownstone house on West End Avenue. Her father was a professor. She did not have a particularly happy childhood. That's all, brother."
  
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  Michael Cunningham
  Michael Cunningham (born November 6, 1952) is an American writer, best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999.
  Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and grew up in Pasadena, California. He studied English literature at Stanford University where he earned his degree. Later, at the University of Iowa, he received a Michener Fellowship and was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. While studying at Iowa, he had short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Paris Review. His short story, "White Angel", was later used as a chapter in his novel A Home at the End of the World. It was included in "The Best American Short Stories, 1989," published by Houghton Mifflin.
  In 1993, Cunningham received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1998 a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 1995 he was awarded the Whiting Writers' Award. Cunningham has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and in the creative writing M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College. He is currently professor of creative writing at Yale University.
  
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• Michael Romanoff
  Michael Romanoff, born Hershel Geguzin, (February 20, 1890 – September 1, 1971) was a Hollywood restaurateur and actor born in Lithuania. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California, in 1971. He is perhaps best known as the owner of Romanoff's, a Beverly Hills restaurant popular with Hollywood stars in the 1940s and 1950s. The restaurant closed on New Year's Eve in 1962.
  According to U.S.A Confidential (Mortimer and Lait, 1952), while Romanoff pretended to be Russian royalty, he was actually a former Brooklyn pants presser once named Harry Gerguson.
  His Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com) biography states:
  Mike Romanoff, the former Harry F. Gerguson, was a successful "professional impostor". He accumulated an enormous fount of knowledge in his numerous travels and occupations around the world (and he attended, however briefly, several leading universities). When Hollywood filmmakers needed a technical adviser for a movie set in Europe, Romanoff claimed to be an expert and drew a comfortable salary. The genial Romanoff was a popular figure among the movie colony, and he opened a restaurant that was frequented by many film stars. Romanoff made few screen appearances, but he can be seen in all his fraudulent glory in Sing While You're Able (1937). David Niven was a close friend, and in his book Bring on the Empty Horses he devotes a chapter to the colorful Romanoff.
  
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  Michelle Obama
  Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (born January 17, 1964) is the wife of the 44th and incumbent President of the United States, Barack Obama, and is the first African-American First Lady of the United States. Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Obama attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School before returning to Chicago and to work at the law firm Sidley Austin, where she met her future husband. Subsequently, she worked as part of the staff of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, and for the University of Chicago Medical Center.
  Throughout 2007 and 2008, she helped campaign for her husband's presidential bid and delivered a keynote address at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. She is the mother of two daughters, Malia and Sasha, and is the sister of Craig Robinson, men's basketball coach at Oregon State University. As the wife of a Senator, and later the First Lady, she has become a fashion icon and role model for women, and an advocate for poverty awareness, nutrition and healthy eating.
  
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  Nicole Kidman
  Nicole Mary Kidman, AC (born 20 June 1967) is an Australian actress, singer, film producer, and humanitarian. Kidman began her career in 1983, starring in various Australian film and television productions until her breakthrough in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm. Following several films over the early 1990s, she came to worldwide recognition for her performances in Days of Thunder (1990), Far and Away (1992), and Batman Forever (1995). Kidman followed this with other successful films in the late 1990s. It was her performance in the musical, Moulin Rouge! (2001) which earned Kidman her second Golden Globe Award and first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Her performance as Virginia Woolf the following year in the drama film The Hours (2002) received critical acclaim and earned Kidman the Academy Award for Best Actress.
  Kidman's other notable films include To Die For (1995), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Cold Mountain (2003), The Interpreter (2005), and Australia (2008). Her performance in 2010's Rabbit Hole (which she also produced) earned Kidman further accolades including a subsequent Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Kidman has been a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF since 1994 and for UNIFEM since 2006. Kidman's work has earned her a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, three Golden Globe Awards, one BAFTA, and an Academy Award. In 2006, Kidman was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, Australia's highest civilian honor, and was also the highest-paid actress in the motion picture industry. As a result of being born to Australian parents in Hawaii, Kidman has dual citizenship in Australia and the United States.
  
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  Osama Bin Laden
  Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden ( /oʊˈsɑːmə bɪn moʊˈhɑːmɨd bɪn əˈwɑːd bɪn ˈlɑːdən/; Arabic: أسامة بن محمد بن عوض بن لادن‎, ʾUsāmah bin Muḥammad bin ʿAwaḍ bin Lādin; March 10, 1957 – May 2, 2011), was the founder of Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets. He was a member of the wealthy Saudi bin Laden family, and an ethnic Yemeni Kindite.
  Bin Laden was on the American Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) lists of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives and Most Wanted Terrorists for his involvement in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings. From 2001 to 2011, bin Laden was a major target of the War on Terror, with a US$25 million bounty by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. On May 2, 2011, bin Laden was shot and killed inside a private residential compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by U.S. Navy SEALs and CIA operatives in a covert operation ordered by United States President Barack Obama.
  
  wn.com/Osama_Bin_Laden
• Otto Soglow
  Otto Soglow (December 23, 1900 - April 3, 1975) was an American cartoonist best known for his comic strip The Little King.
  Born in Yorkville, Manhattan, Soglow grew up in New York City, where he held various jobs as a teenager and made an unsuccessful effort to become an actor. His first job was painting designs on baby rattles. While studying with John Sloan at the Art Students League of New York, his first cartoon was printed in 1919. Throughout the 1920s, his drawings were seen in numerous magazines.
  Soglow's artwork was published in the New York World, Collier's, The New Yorker, Judge and Life. He illustrated more than 35 books, and did five books of his own, including Wasn't the Depression Terrible? (1934).
  His character The Little King first appeared in The New Yorker in 1931. William Randolph Hearst lured Soglow away for his King Features Syndicate, but contractual obligations to The New Yorker prevented The Little King from appearing immediately. Soglow then produced a knock-off strip called The Ambassador from 1933 to 1934. After The Little King debuted on September 9, 1934, it ran until Soglow's death in 1975. It is still available today through King Features' email service, DailyINK.
  
  wn.com/Otto_Soglow
• Pat Byrnes
  Pat Byrnes is an American cartoonist best known for his work for The New Yorker. He created the comic strip Monkeyhouse, which ran for three years. He received the National Cartoonist Society Advertising and Illustration Award for 2001, with an additional nomination for 2000, and nominations for their Gag Cartoon Award for 1999 and 2000.
  Byrnes is married to the 41st Attorney General of Illinois, Lisa Madigan, and they have two daughters, Rebecca and Lucy.
  Byrnes is the author of the books What Would Satan Do? Cartoons About Right, Wrong, and Very, Very Wrong and "Because I'm the Child Here and I Said So." He also illustrated Lynn Truss's "Eats, Shoots and Leaves Illustrated Edition" and several other books.
  Byrnes is a 1981 graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a degree in Aerospace Engineering.
  
  
  
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  Peter Arno
  Peter Arno (January 8, 1904 – February 22, 1968) was a U.S. cartoonist. His cartoons were published in The New Yorker from 1925–1968.
  Born Curtis Arnoux Peters, Jr. in New York, New York, and educated at the Hotchkiss School and Yale University, his cartoons were published in The New Yorker from 1925–1968. They often depicted a cross-section of New York society from the 1920s through the 1960s. He married The New Yorker magazine columnist and fashion editor Lois Long and together they had one daughter, Patricia Arno, born September 18, 1928. Their marriage ended in 1930. He is interred at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.
  The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2004.
  Topliss, Iain. The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams, and Saul Steinberg. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
  A Comics Studies Reader. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.
  
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• Philip Roth
  Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933) is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. In 1969 he became a major celebrity with the publication of the controversial Portnoy's Complaint, the humorous and sexually explicit psychoanalytical monologue of "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor", filled with "intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language".
  Roth has been one of the most honored authors of his generation: his books have twice been awarded the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral, which featured one of his best-known characters, Nathan Zuckerman, the subject of many other of Roth's novels. His 2001 novel The Human Stain, another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. His fiction, set frequently in Newark, New Jersey, is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "supple, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity.
  
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  Rea Irvin
  Rea Irvin (August 26, 1881—May 28, 1972) was an American graphic artist. Although never formally credited as such, he served de facto as the first art editor of The New Yorker. He created the Eustace Tilley cover portrait and the New Yorker typeface. He first drew Tilley for the cover of the magazine's first issue on February 21, 1925. Tilley appeared annually on the magazine's cover every February until 1994. As one commentator has written, "a truly modern bon vivant, Irvin (1881–1972) was also a keen appreciator of the century of his birth. His high regard for both the careful artistry of the past and the gleam of the modern metropolis shines from the very first issue of the magazine..."
  Born in San Francisco, he studied at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute for six months, started his career as an unpaid cartoonist for The San Francisco Examiner. He also contributed to the San Francisco Evening Post. He also worked as an itinerant actor (for both stage and screen), newspaper illustrator, and piano player. In 1906 he moved to the East Coast. In the 1910s he contributed many illustrations to both Red Book magazine and its sister publication, Green Book.
  
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• Renata Adler
  Renata Adler (born October 19, 1938 in Milan, Italy) is an American author, journalist and film critic.
  Adler was born in Milan, Italy, and grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. (Her parents had fled Nazi Germany in 1933.) After gaining a B.A. in philosophy and German from Bryn Mawr, Adler studied for an M.A. in Comparative Literature at Harvard under I. A. Richards, before pursuing her interest in philosophy, linguistics and structuralism at the Sorbonne, where she gained a D.E.S. under the tutelage of Jean Wahl and Claude Lévi-Strauss. She later received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Georgetown University.
  In 1962, Adler became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker, and in 1968-69, she served as chief film critic for the New York Times. Her film reviews were collected in her book "A Year in the Dark." She then rejoined the staff of The New Yorker, where she remained for four decades. Her reporting and essays for The New Yorker on politics, war, and civil rights were reprinted in "Toward a Radical Middle."
  
  wn.com/Renata_Adler
• Richard Decker
  Richard Decker, (May 6, 1907 – November 1, 1988) a cartoonist and illustrator, studied at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art and became famous for his cartoons published in The New Yorker.
  He did illustrations for "Look" and the "Saturday Evening Post" and did a number of advertisements for the "Philadelphia Evening Bulletin".
  Ben Yagoda has called Decker, along with Robert J. Day, "underrecognized New Yorker masters."
  
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• Rick Meyerowitz
  Rick Meyerowitz (born November 29, 1943, The Bronx, NY) is an American artist. He started drawing during his childhood and attended art school at Boston University. Meyerowitz was a frequent contributor to National Lampoon magazine; his notable artwork for it included the 'Mona Gorilla' (the Mona Lisa as a gorilla) and the widely recognized poster for the movie Animal House.
  His book about National Lampoon artists and writers, called Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great, was published by Abrams in the fall of 2010.
  Meyerowitz has also worked as a commercial artist and as the author and artist of humorous books such as Return of the Nose Masks (1998; a book of punch-out masks to be worn on the nose) and Dodosaurs: The Dinosaurs That Didn't Make It (1983); he has also illustrated children's books (Rip Van Winkle, 2004, for example).
  Meyerowitz's recent collaborations with the artist Maira Kalman have produced New Yorkistan, a popular cover for The New Yorker magazine, as well as editorial and humor pieces for The New York Times. Coasters which they designed are on sale at the Museum of Modern Art store.
  
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  Ricky Jay
  Richard Jay Potash (born 1948), better known by the stage name Ricky Jay, is an American stage magician, actor, and writer. He is a sleight-of-hand expert and is notable for his card tricks, card throwing, memory feats, and stage patter.
  Jay was born in Brooklyn, New York to a middle class Jewish family. His grandfather, Max Katz, was a well-to-do certified public accountant and amateur magician who introduced Jay to the profession.
  At least three of his one-man shows, Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, On the Stem, and A Rogue's Gallery were directed by David Mamet, who has also cast Jay in a number of his films. Jay has appeared in productions by other directors, notably Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, and Magnolia, as well as Christopher Nolan's The Prestige.
  A collector and historian of note, he was a student and firm friend of the legendary Dai Vernon, who Jay states was: "the greatest living contributor to the magical art". An avid collector of rare books (he has spent over five thousand dollars on single books alone) and manuscripts, art, and other artifacts connected to the history of magic, gambling, unusual entertainments, and frauds and confidence games, he is also opposed to any public revelations of the techniques of magic.
  
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  Roald Dahl
  Roald Dahl ( /ˈroʊ.ɑːl ˈdɑːl/,Norwegian: [ˈɾuːɑl dɑl]; 13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter.
  Born in Wales to Norwegian parents, he served in the British Royal Air Force during the Second World War, in which he became a flying ace and intelligence officer, rising to the rank of Wing Commander. Dahl rose to prominence in the 1940s with works for both children and adults, and became one of the world's best-selling authors. He has been referred to as "one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century". In 2008 The Times placed Dahl 16th on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". His short stories are known for their unexpected endings, and his children's books for their unsentimental, often very dark humour.
  Some of his notable works include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Twits, George's Marvellous Medicine and The BFG.
  
  wn.com/Roald_Dahl
• Robert Gottlieb
  Robert Adams Gottlieb (born April 29, 1931, New York, New York), is an American writer and editor. From 1987 to 1992 he was the editor of The New Yorker.
  Robert Gottlieb was born in New York City in 1931 and grew up in Manhattan. He graduated from Columbia University in 1952, and spent two years at Cambridge University before joining Simon and Schuster in 1955 as an editorial assistant to Jack Goodman, the editor-in-chief.
  He is married to Maria Tucci, an actress whose father, the novelist Niccolò Tucci, was one of Gottlieb's writers. They have two children: Lizzie Gottlieb, a film director, and Niccolò (Nicky). Nicky has Asperger syndrome and is the subject of one of his sister's documentary films Today's Man.
  Gottlieb discovered and edited Catch-22 by the then-unknown Joseph Heller. He served as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf, which he left in 1987 to succeed William Shawn as editor of The New Yorker, staying in the position until 1992.
  Gottlieb has edited novels by John Cheever, Salman Rushdie, John Gardner, Len Deighton, John le Carre, Ray Bradbury, Elia Kazan, Margaret Drabble, Michael Crichton, Mordecai Richler and Toni Morrison, and non-fiction books by Barbara Tuchman, Jessica Mitford, Robert Caro, Antonia Fraser, Lauren Bacall, Liv Ullman, Sidney Poitier, John Lennon, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Bruno Bettelheim, Carl Schorske, and many others.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Gottlieb
• Robert Mankoff
  Robert Mankoff is the current cartoon editor for The New Yorker magazine. Before he succeeded Lee Lorenz as editor, Mankoff was a cartoonist for The New Yorker for 20 years.
  As a young man, Mankoff was a competitive athlete in basketball and track and field both, and he once ran an undocumented wind-aided 10.02 in the hundred meters.
  Mankoff founded the online Cartoon Bank.
  He compiled The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker, which has every cartoon published since the magazine was founded (in the book or in one of the two accompanying CDs). He is the author of The Naked Cartoonist: A Way to Enhance your Creativity.
  As a lecturer on the appreciation of humor, he is represented by the Leigh Bureau.
  He was mentioned in MC Paul Barman's song "Cock Mobster" on the album "Paullelujah!"
  
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• Roger Angell
  Roger Angell (born September 19, 1920) is an American essayist. He has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker and was its chief fiction editor for many years. He has written many essays on baseball as well as numerous fiction, non-fiction, and criticism pieces, and formerly wrote an annual Christmas poem for the magazine.
  Angell is the son of editor and author Katharine Sergeant Angell White and the stepson of renowned essayist E. B. White, but was raised for the most part by his father, Ernest Angell. He is a 1938 graduate of the Pomfret School and attended Harvard University. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.
  Angell's earliest published works were pieces of short fiction and personal narratives. Several of these pieces were collected in The Stone Arbor and Other Stories (1960) and A Day in the Life of Roger Angell (1970, ISBN 0-670-25916-0).
  He first wrote professionally about baseball in 1962, when William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker (for which his mother and stepfather worked from the 1920s through the 1970s), had him travel to Florida to write about spring training.
  
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  Roz Chast
  Rosalind "Roz" Chast (born November 26, 1954) is an American cartoonist and a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. She grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the only child of an assistant principal and a high school teacher who subscribed to The New Yorker. Her earliest cartoons were published in Christopher Street and The Village Voice. In 1978 The New Yorker accepted one of her cartoons and has since published more than 800. She also publishes cartoons in Scientific American and the Harvard Business Review.
  Chast's subjects often deal with domestic and family life. In a 2006 interview with comedian Steve Martin for the New Yorker Festival, Chast revealed that she enjoys drawing interior scenes — often involving lamps and accentuated wall paper — to serve as the backdrop for her comics. Her comics reflect a "conspiracy of inanimate objects," an expression she credits to her mother.
  Her first New Yorker cartoon showed a small collection of "Little Things," strangely named, oddly shaped small objects such as "chent," "spak," and "tiv". Chast's drawing style shuns conventional craft in her figure drawing, perspective, shading, etc.; this approach is similar to that of several other female cartoonists, notably Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Lynda Barry. A significant part of the humor in Chast's cartoons appears in the background and the corners of the frames.
  
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  Sally Benson
  Sally Benson (September 3, 1897, St. Louis, Missouri – July 19, 1972, Los Angeles, California) was an American screenwriter, who was also a prolific short story author, best known for her semi-autobiographical stories collected in Junior Miss and Meet Me in St. Louis.
  Benson, the daughter of Alonzo Redway and Anna Prophater Smith, moved with her family from St. Louis to New York, where she attended the Horace Mann School, studied dance and then started working when she was 17 years old. At age 19, she married Reynolds Benson. The couple had a daughter and later divorced.
  She began her career writing weekly interview articles and film reviews for the New York Morning Telegraph. Between 1929 and 1941, she published 99 stories in The New Yorker, including nine signed with her pseudonym Esther Evarts.
  Her stories "The Overcoat" and "Suite 2049" were selected as O. Henry prize stories for 1935 and 1936. Her collection, People are Fascinating (Covici Friede,1936) includes almost all the stories Benson had then published in The New Yorker, plus four from American Mercury. She followed with another collection, Emily (Covici Friede, 1938). Stories of the Gods and Heroes (Dial Press, 1940) was juvenile fiction adapted from Thomas Bulfinch's Age of Fable. Women and Children First was a collection published by Random House in 1943.
  
  wn.com/Sally_Benson
• Sam Cobean
  Sam Cobean (1913 – 1951) was a cartoonist, especially known for his work in The New Yorker in the 1940s and 1950s.
  His book of cartoons, The Naked Eye, has been published around the world. Likewise, the book published after his death, The Cartoons of Cobean has enjoyed worldwide popularity since its publication in 1952. Copies of his books are still actively traded by his fans.
  A close friend and co-worker with cartoonist Charles Addams (The Addams Family), Sam Cobean has influenced cartoons and cartoonists for several generations. His particular contribution to the art of cartooning was his "dream bubble" or "thought bubble," wherein he revealed what the characters in his cartoons were actually thinking, e.g. the man looking at a beautiful woman and seeing her in the nude.
  Cartoonist Sam Cobean created humor that truly transcends the barriers of language, culture, race and even time.
  
  
  
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• Sam Robards
  Sam Prideaux Robards (born December 16, 1961) is an American actor.
  Robards was born in New York City, the son of actors Jason Robards and Lauren Bacall. He began his acting career in 1980 in an off-Broadway production of Album, and made his feature film debut in director Paul Mazursky's 1982 film Tempest. He married fellow actor Suzy Amis in 1985. Their marriage produced a son, Jasper, and ended in divorce in 1993. In 1997, Robards married Danish model Sidsel Jensen, and they have two sons together. He is an alumnus of Sarah Lawrence College.
  Robards appeared alongside his father in 1988's Bright Lights, Big City, in their only film collaboration. (His father died in 2000.) He costarred with his mother in the 1993 Robert Altman film Prêt-à-Porter. He portrayed Harold Ross, first editor of The New Yorker, in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle in 1994 for writer-director Alan Rudolph. His film résumé also includes Fandango, Casualties of War, American Beauty, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, My Life as a House and The Other Side of the Tracks.
  
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• 
  Sarah Palin
  Sarah Louise Palin ⁱ/ˈpeɪlɨn/ (née Heath; born February 11, 1964) is an American politician, commentator and author. As the Republican Party nominee for Vice President in the 2008 presidential election, she was the first Alaskan on the national ticket of a major party and first Republican woman nominated for the vice presidency. Her book Going Rogue has sold more than two million copies. Since January 2010, she has provided political commentary for Fox News, and hosted a television show, Sarah Palin's Alaska. Five million viewers tuned in for the first episode, a record for The Learning Channel.
  She was elected to Wasilla City Council in 1992 and became mayor of Wasilla in 1996. In 2003, after an unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor, she was appointed Chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, responsible for overseeing the state's oil and gas fields for safety and efficiency. The youngest person and first woman to be elected Governor of Alaska, Palin held the office from December 2006 until her resignation in July 2009. She has since endorsed and campaigned for the Tea Party movement, as well as several candidates in the 2010 midterm elections. From the time of her Vice Presidential nomination in 2008, Palin was considered a potential candidate for the 2012 presidential election until she announced in October 2011 that she would not run.
  
  wn.com/Sarah_Palin
• Saul Steinberg
  Saul Steinberg (June 15, 1914 – May 12, 1999) was a Romanian-born American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his work for The New Yorker.
  Steinberg was born in Râmnicu Sărat, Romania. He studied philosophy for a year at the University of Bucharest, then later enrolled at the Politecnico di Milano, studying architecture and graduating in 1940. During his years in Milan he was actively involved in the satirical magazine Bertoldo.
  Steinberg left Italy after the introduction of anti-Semitic laws by the Fascist government. He spent a year in the Dominican Republic awaiting a U.S. visa; in the meantime, he submitted his cartoons to foreign publications. In 1942, The New Yorker magazine sponsored his entry into the United States, and thus began Steinberg's lifelong relationship with the publication. Through well over half a century working with The New Yorker, Steinberg created nearly 90 covers and more than 1,200 drawings.
  During World War II, he worked for military intelligence, stationed in China, North Africa, and Italy. After the war's end, he returned to work for American periodicals, merging an encyclopedic knowledge of European art with the popular American art form of the cartoon, to pioneer a uniquely urbane style of illustration. Although best remembered for his commercial work, Steinberg did exhibit his work throughout his career at fine art museums and galleries. He married Romanian born abstract expressionist painter Hedda Sterne in 1944. In 1946, Steinberg, along with artists such as Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Motherwell, was exhibited in the critically acclaimed "Fourteen Americans" show at The Museum of Modern Art. He has also enjoyed a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1978) and another posthumous one at the Institute for Modern Art in Valencia (IVAM), Spain (2002).
  
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• Shirley Jackson
  Shirley Hardie Jackson (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) was an American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Nigel Kneale and Richard Matheson.
  She is best known for the short story "The Lottery" (1948), which suggests a secret, sinister underside to bucolic small-town America. In her critical biography of Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when "The Lottery" was published in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received". Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse".
  In the July 22, 1948, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle Jackson offered the following in response to persistent queries from her readers about her intentions:
  Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.
  
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  Sigmund Freud
  Sigmund Freud (German pronunciation: [ˈziːkmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt]), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis. Freud's family and ancestry were Jewish. Freud always considered himself a Jew even though he rejected Judaism and had a critical view of religion. Freud's parents were poor, but ensured his education. Freud was an outstanding pupil in high school, and graduated the Matura with honors in 1873. Interested in philosophy as a student, Freud later turned away from it and became a neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, Aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy.
  Freud went on to develop theories about the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and established the field of verbal psychotherapy by creating psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or "analysand") and a psychoanalyst. Though psychoanalysis has declined as a therapeutic practice, it has helped inspire the development of many other forms of psychotherapy, some diverging from Freud's original ideas and approach. Freud postulated the existence of libido (an energy with which mental process and structures are invested), developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association (in which patients report their thoughts without reservation and make no attempt to concentrate while doing so), discovered the transference (the process by which patients displace on to their analysts feelings based on their experience of earlier figures in their lives) and established its central role in the analytic process, and proposed that dreams help to preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled wishes that would otherwise awake the dreamer. He was also a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the interpretation and critique of culture.
  
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  Stephen Colbert
  Stephen Tyrone Colbert ( /koʊlˈbɛər/ or /ˈkoʊlbərt/; born May 13, 1964) is an American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor. He is the host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, a satirical news show in which Colbert portrays a caricatured version of conservative political pundits.
  Colbert originally studied to be an actor, but became interested in improvisational theatre when he met famed Second City director Del Close while attending Northwestern University. He first performed professionally as an understudy for Steve Carell at Second City Chicago; among his troupe mates were comedians Paul Dinello and Amy Sedaris, with whom he developed the critically acclaimed sketch comedy series Exit 57.
  Colbert also wrote and performed on the short-lived Dana Carvey Show before collaborating with Sedaris and Dinello again on the cult television series Strangers with Candy. He gained considerable attention for his role on the latter as closeted gay history teacher Chuck Noblet. It was his work as a correspondent on Comedy Central's news-parody series The Daily Show, however, that first introduced him to a wide audience.
  
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  Susan Orlean
  Susan Orlean (born October 31, 1955) is an American journalist. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992, and has contributed articles to Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Outside.
  Susan Orlean is the author of several books, including The Orchid Thief, a profile of Florida orchid grower, breeder, and collector John Laroche. The book formed the basis of Charlie Kaufman's script for the Spike Jonze film Adaptation. Orlean (portrayed by Meryl Streep in an Oscar-nominated role) was, in effect, made into a fictional character; the movie portrayed her as becoming Laroche's lover and partner in a drug production operation, in which orchids were processed into a fictional psychoactive substance.
  She also wrote the Women's Outside article, "Life's Swell" (published 1998). The article, a feature on a group of young surfer girls in Maui, was the basis of the film Blue Crush.
  In 1999, she co-wrote "The Skinny: What Every Skinny Woman Knows About Dieting (And Won't Tell You!)" under her married name, Susan Sistrom. Her previously published magazine stories have been compiled in two collections, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People and My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere. She also served as editor for Best American Essays 2005 and Best American Travel Writing 2007. She contributed the Ohio chapter in State By State (2008). She recently published a biographical history about the dog actor Rin Tin Tin. She discussed the book on The Colbert Report on 17 November 2011.
  
  wn.com/Susan_Orlean
• Tad Friend
  Tad Friend is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His current focus of coverage is the entertainment industry, and he often writes the "Letter from California" for The New Yorker. His memoir, Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor, was published by Little, Brown in September 2009.
  Tad Friend's father, Theodore Friend, was president of Swarthmore College. Tad Friend is a graduate of The Shipley School, and Harvard College. He is married to Amanda Hesser, a food correspondent for the New York Times, and they live in Brooklyn Heights with their two children.
  In 2004, Friend contributed $500 to John Kerry.
  
  
  
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• The Weekly Standard
  The Weekly Standard is an American neoconservative opinion magazine published 48 times per year. Its founding publisher, News Corporation, debuted the title September 18, 1995. Currently edited by founder William Kristol and Fred Barnes, the Standard has been described as a "redoubt of neoconservatism" and as "the neo-con bible". Since it was founded in 1995, the Weekly Standard has never been profitable, and has remained in business through subsidies from wealthy conservative benefactors such as former owner Rupert Murdoch. Many of the magazine's articles are written by members of conservative think tanks located in Washington, D.C.: the American Enterprise Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Hudson Institute. Some individuals that have written for the magazine include Elliott Abrams, Peter Berkowitz, John R. Bolton, Ellen Bork, Ed Gillespie, Roger Kimball, Harvey Mansfield, Joe Queenan, Wesley J. Smith, David Brooks and John Yoo. The magazine's website blog, titled the "Daily Standard", is edited by John McCormack and Daniel Halper and produces daily articles and commentary.
  
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  Tina Brown
  Tina Brown, Lady Evans, CBE (born Christina Hambley Brown; November 21, 1953), is a journalist, magazine editor, columnist, talk-show host and author of The Diana Chronicles, a biography of Diana, Princess of Wales. Born a British citizen, she took United States citizenship in 2005 after emigrating in 1984 to edit Vanity Fair. Having been editor-in-chief of Tatler magazine at only 25 years of age, she rose to prominence in the American media industry as the editor of Vanity Fair from 1984 to 1992 and of The New Yorker from 1992 to 1998. In 2000 she was appointed a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for her services to overseas journalism, and in 2007 was inducted into the Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame. As an editor, she has also been honored with four George Polk Awards, five Overseas Press Club awards, and ten National Magazine Awards. In October 2008 she partnered with Barry Diller, chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp to found and edit The Daily Beast. Two years later, in November 2010, The Daily Beast announced that it will merge with the American weekly news magazine Newsweek in a joint venture to form The Newsweek Daily Beast Company. Brown will serve as Editor-in-Chief of both publications.
  
  wn.com/Tina_Brown
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  Tom Wolfe
  Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. (born March 2, 1931) is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
  Wolfe was born in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Louise (née Agnew), a landscape designer, and Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Sr., an agronomist.
  Wolfe was student council president, editor of the school newspaper and a star baseball player at St. Christopher's School, an Episcopalian all-boys school in Richmond, Virginia.
  Upon graduation in 1949, he turned down admission at Princeton University to attend Washington and Lee University, both all-male schools at the time. Wolfe majored in English and practiced his writing outside the classroom as well. He was sports editor of the college newspaper and helped found a literary magazine, Shenandoah. Of particular influence was his professor Marshall Fishwick, a teacher of American Studies educated at Yale. More in the tradition of anthropology than literary scholarship, Fishwick taught his classes to look at the whole of a culture, including those elements considered profane. The very title of Wolfe's undergraduate thesis, "A Zoo Full of Zebras: Anti-Intellectualism in America," evinced his fondness for words and aspirations toward cultural criticism. Wolfe graduated cum laude in 1951.
  
  wn.com/Tom_Wolfe
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  Truman Capote
  Truman Streckfus Persons (September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984), known as Truman Capote ( /ˈtruːmən kəˈpoʊtiː/), was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays.
  Capote rose above a childhood troubled by divorce, a long absence from his mother and multiple migrations. He had discovered his calling as a writer by the age of 11, and for the rest of his childhood he honed his writing ability. Capote began his professional career writing short stories. The critical success of one story, "Miriam" (1945), attracted the attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, resulting in a contract to write Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood (1966), a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home, a book Capote spent four years writing, with much help from Harper Lee, who wrote the famous To Kill a Mockingbird. A milestone in popular culture, In Cold Blood was the peak of his literary career, though it was not his final book. In the 1970s, he maintained his celebrity status by appearing on television talk shows.
  
  wn.com/Truman_Capote
• Ved Mehta
  Ved Parkash Mehta (Born March 21, 1934) is a writer who was born in Lahore, British India (now a Pakistani city) to a Hindu family. He lost his sight at the age of four as the result of an attack of cerebrospinal meningitis. Because of the limited prospects for blind people in general, his father, a doctor, sent him over 1,300 miles away to the Dadar School for the Blind in Bombay.
  He was educated at Pomona College, at Balliol College, Oxford where he read Modern History, and at Harvard University, where he earned a double BA and MA. While at Pomona, one of Mehta's student readers, because very few books were available in Braille at that time, was Eugene Rose, who went on to become the Russian Orthodox hieromonk Father Seraphim Rose. Mehta referred to him in two books, one of which was Stolen Light, his second book of memoirs: “I felt very lucky to have found Gene as a reader. ... He read with such clarity that I almost had the illusion that he was explaining things.”
  Mehta has lived in the Western world since 1949; he became an American citizen in 1975. His first book, an autobiography called Face to Face, which placed his early life in the context of Indian politics and history and Anglo-Indian relations, was published in 1957. Since then he has written more than 24 books, including several that deal with the subject of blindness, as well as hundreds of articles and short stories, for British, Indian and American publications. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1961 to 1994, during which time Spy magazine published a critical article about his misogynist attitude toward his assistants and writings that were frequently regarded as dull and self-indulgent. He left the magazine after, as he has claimed, he was "terminated" by editor Tina Brown.
  
  wn.com/Ved_Mehta
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  Vladimir Nabokov
  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Набо́ков, pronounced [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr nɐˈbokəf] ( listen); 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1899^c – 2 July 1977) was a multilingual Russian novelist, poet and short story writer. Nabokov's first nine novels were in Russian. He then rose to international prominence as a writer of English prose. He also made serious contributions as a lepidopterist and chess composer.
  Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as among his most important novels and is his most widely known, exhibiting the love of intricate word play and synesthetic detail that characterised all his works. The novel was ranked at No. 4 in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels.Pale Fire (1962) was ranked at No. 53 on the same list. His memoir, Speak, Memory, was listed No. 8 on the Modern Library nonfiction list.
  Nabokov was born on 22 April 1899 (10 April 1899 Old-Style), in Saint Petersburg,^b to a wealthy and prominent Saint Petersburg family of the minor nobility. He was the eldest of five children of liberal lawyer, statesman, and journalist Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and his wife, Elena Ivanovna née Rukavishnikova. His cousins included the composer Nicolas Nabokov. He spent his childhood and youth in St. Petersburg and at the country estate Vyra near Siverskaya, south of the city.
  
  wn.com/Vladimir_Nabokov
• William Shawn
  William Shawn (August 31, 1907 – December 8, 1992) was an American magazine editor who edited The New Yorker from 1952 until 1987.
  William Shawn was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Benjiman T. and Anna (née Bransky) Chon. He was the youngest of five siblings including Harold Irwin (1892–1967), Melba (born 1894), Nelson Allen (born 1898), and Myron Edward Chon (1902–1987). Chon dropped out of the University of Michigan after two years (1925–1927) and began working.
  He traveled to Las Vegas, New Mexico where he worked at the local newspaper, the Optic. He returned to Chicago and worked as a journalist. Around 1930 he changed the spelling of his last name to Shawn.
  In 1932, he and his wife, Cecille, went to New York City, where he tried to start a career as a composer.
  Soon after their arrival in New York City, Cecille took a fact checking job at The New Yorker magazine, and her husband began working there in 1933. He would stay at the magazine for 53 years.
  Shawn rose to assistant editor of The New Yorker and oversaw the magazine's coverage of World War II. In 1946, he persuaded the magazine's founder and editor, Harold Ross, to run John Hersey's story about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as the entire contents of one issue. He left for a few months shortly after that to write on his own, but soon returned.
  
  wn.com/William_Shawn
• William Steig
  William Steig (November 14, 1907 – October 3, 2003) was a prolific American cartoonist, sculptor and, later in life, an author of popular children's literature. Most noted for the books Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Abel's Island and Doctor De Soto, he also created the character Shrek, who inspired the popular movie series.
  Steig was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Polish-Jewish immigrants from Austria, both socialists. His father, Joseph Steig, was a house painter, and his mother, Laura Ebel Steig, was a seamstress who encouraged his artistic leanings. As a child, he dabbled in painting and was an avid reader of literature. Among other works, he was said to have been especially fascinated by Pinocchio. In addition to his artistic endeavors, he also did well at athletics, being a member of the collegiate All-American water polo team. He graduated from Townsend Harris High School at 15 but never completed college, though he attended three, spending two years at City College of New York, three years at the National Academy of Design and a mere five days at the Yale School of Fine Arts before dropping out of each.
  
  wn.com/William_Steig