The Creators Podcast

Jerry Siegel (1914–1996) & Joe Shuster (1914–1992): Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were the writer and artist who created Superman. They met as teenagers at Glenville High School in Cleveland, and created The Superman hoping to make a comic book.. After years of rejection, Superman was finally published in Action Comics #1 in 1938. Siegel and Shuster had sold the rights to the character to Detec...

In this episode Rainier explores the myth that art can save us or that making beautiful things necessarily makes us better people. He travels to Córdoba, Spain, following the strange history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated Jewish manuscript that survived expulsion from Spain, censorship in Venice, Nazi occupation, and the siege of Sarajevo. What begins as a story about the survival of a b...

Mary Renault (1905–1983): Mary Renault was a British novelist best known for her historical fiction set in ancient Greece. Born Eileen Mary Challans in London in 1905, she studied English at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, before training as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary. There she met fellow nurse Julie Mullard, who became her lifelong partner. Renault worked as a nurse through much of the 1930s...

In this episode, Rainier goes looking for the myth insisting that talent isn't earned, that it's beyond our control. He traces the story of blues legend Robert Johnson, who allegedly made a deal with the devil for his skill. The search widens to Niccolò Paganini, whose own audiences swore they saw the devil guiding his bow. And then looks at an ancient Greek legend about what happens when...

In this episode Rainier explores the myths of the lone genius and the idea of authorship itself. He travels to Amsterdam to look at the work of Johannes Vermeer, discovering that what is often credited to the master is actually the work of an anonymous hand. The mystery pulls him further into the work of the Dutch realists, eventually taking him to Paris to trace the story of Alexandre Dumas, whos...

Audre Lorde (1934–1992): Audre Lorde was an American poet, essayist, librarian, teacher, and activist whose work explored race, sexuality, gender, motherhood, illness, and the uses of power. Born in New York City to Caribbean immigrant parents, Lorde began writing poetry as a teenager and published her first poem in  Seventeen  magazine while still in high school. She later worked as a librarian a...

Osip & Nadezhda Mandelstam (1891–1938 / 1899–1980): Osip Mandelstam was one of the 20th centuries great poets and founder of the Acmeist movement in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, Osip composed his poems aloud, committing them to memory rather than paper, until sixteen unwritten lines mocking Stalin got him arrested, exiled, and finally killed in a transit camp near Vladivostok in 1938. His...

The Chauvet Cave (c. 36,000 years ago): Chauvet Cave preserves some of the oldest known works of human art. Discovered in 1994 after being sealed for more than twenty thousand years, its walls are alive with animals, many of which are now extinct, rendered with astonishing technical mastery. The cave was never a home. These paintings weren’t created for public display, but for purposes that remain...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861):  One of the great poets of the Victorian era. Confined for years by chronic illness, family control, and fear, she produced remarkable poetry from an isolated room. It was only after secretly marrying Robert Browning and escaping to Florence that her fullest work emerged. There she began to live a free life and sense of self, publishing Sonnets from the Port...

Jiro Ono (1925– ) Jiro Ono is a Japanese sushi master whose life's work has become one of the clearest modern examples of craftsmanship. Born in rural Japan, he began working in the kitchen at the age of seven, served in a munitions factory during the Second World War, and spent nearly two decades apprenticing in kitchens before opening the ten-seat restaurant that would become Sukiyabashi Jir...

Varian Fry (1907–1967): Varian Fry was an American journalist, classicist, and magazine editor who became one of the most consequential rescuers of the twentieth century. In August 1940, he arrived in Vichy France to do what his own government refused to do. Over thirteen months in Marseille, Fry forged documents, ran a safe house out of a crumbling villa, and built a footpath over the Pyrenees th...

Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine abbess, composer, mystic, scientist, healer, linguist, and one of the most extraordinary creative minds of the medieval world. Enclosed in a monastery from childhood, she transformed the apparent confines of her life into an astonishing intellectual and artistic career. Over eight decades, she composed groundbreaking music, wrote visionary theological works, p...

Ted Lucas (1939–1992) was a Detroit-born guitarist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose music blended folk, blues, psychedelia, raga influences, and intimate singer-songwriter traditions. Emerging from Detroit’s vibrant 1960s underground scene, Lucas first gained attention as a member of the psychedelic folk-blues band The Spike Drivers before releasing his now-cult 1975 solo album  OM , a...

Jean Genet (1910–1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, and political provocateur whose life and work transformed twentieth-century literature. Genet spent much of his youth in reformatories, prisons, and on the margins of European society as a thief, drifter, and sex worker. While imprisoned during World War II, he began writing novels such as Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journ...

George Sand (1804–1876) , born Aurore Dupin in Paris, was one of the most prolific and influential writers of 19th-century France. She married Baron Casimir Dudevant before leaving the marriage to pursue an independent literary life in Paris. Adopting the male pseudonym “George Sand,” she published novels, essays, plays, and political writings that explored class, gender, rural life, love, and soc...

Anthony DeMello (1931-1987) Indian born Jesuit priest and trained psychologist. He was the founder of Sadhana Institute in Pune. DeMello spent his life trying to wake people up. His method was short, funny, disorienting stories and his core teaching was awareness. He taught that human suffering comes from unconscious conditioning, from clinging to identity, beliefs, and outcomes. He was an inter r...

Jack Gilbert (1925–2012)  An American poet born in Pittsburgh, he published his first collection, Views of Jeopardy , in 1962; it won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and brought him immediate recognition. Gilbert left the United States on Guggenheim Fellowships and spent nearly twenty years living mostly in Greece, as well as in Italy and Japan, often in deliber...

Rainier sets out on a journey to uncover the origins of the novel. Starting in Madrid, researching Don Quixote and Miguel de Cervantes, he ultimately follows the trail around the world to Japan in the 11th century. He discovers the story of a woman known as Murasaki Shikibu who began to write in a very different way, long before the West named it as the novel. What starts as a search for a literar...

Arthur Cravan (1887–1918?): Swiss-born writer, poet, boxer, and provocateur who turned his life into a deliberate act of artistic disruption. Born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, he adopted a new name and drifted across Europe and the Americas, publishing the short-lived magazine Maintenant! in which he attacked the art world and became the original troll. He staged chaotic lectures, anticipating performa...

Alice Coltrane (1937–2007): Alice Coltrane was a pianist, harpist, and spiritual composer who expanded jazz beyond form and into devotion. She grew up in a rich musical environment shaped by gospel, classical training, and the city’s thriving Black artistic culture. In 1965 when she joined the band of saxophonist John Coltrane. Their partnership, both musical and personal, pushed her toward increa...

In this final episode, we follow Tesla’s final years, the strange signals, the obsessive rituals, the rumors of new inventions that would revolutionize the world, death rays and disappearing ships and time travel. We ask a deeper question: what happens when imagination outpaces the conditions that can hold it? Because not every great idea becomes a breakthrough. Some become stories. Some become wa...

Nikola Tesla set out to build a machine that could change the way energy moved through the world. A tower on the north shore of Long Island designed to transmit power and information across the planet itself. It was bold. It was expensive. And depending on who you ask… it was either genius or madness. In this episode, we follow the rise and fall of Wardenclyffe, the strange experiment that brought...

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943): Nikola Tesla was a Serbian American inventor and electrical engineer whose ideas helped electrify the modern world. Born in the Austrian Empire (modern-day Croatia), he arrived in the United States in 1884 and became a central figure in the development of alternating current power systems, which made large-scale electrical grids possible. But Tesla’s imagination extended...

Lenny Bruce (1925–1966): Lenny Bruce was the comedian who transformed stand-up from light entertainment into cultural confrontation. After serving briefly in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he drifted into the nightclub circuit of the late 1940s and 1950s, where comedians were expected to deliver safe jokes and predictable punchlines. Bruce broke those rules. His routines became rapid-fire expl...

Madame Jeanne Guyon (1648–1717): Jeanne-Marie Bouvier Guyon was a French mystic who taught that dissolving into divine love was the highest spiritual path. Born into minor nobility during the reign of Louis XIV, she wrote in an age defined by monarchy and church authority. She taught that the soul could encounter God directly, without striving, fear, or reward. In A Short and Easy Method of Prayer...