Category: Pennsylvania

Comedian Yakov Smirnoff was the 1980s embodiment of the American dream. After escaping the communist Soviet Union in 1977, Yakov arrived in the U.S. unable to speak English. But this didn’t stop him from becoming a household name by the mid-1980s, when he was performing his standup comedy on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” and countless other TV programs, including his very own show, named after his famous catch-phrase.

Not since Ben Franklin has an individual worked as hard as Arlen Specter has to improve Pennsylvania. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1980 and represented Pennsylvania for 30 years, longer than anyone in the state’s history…

If you have ever been sucked into the vortex of an eight-hour “Law & Order” marathon, then you have Dick Wolf to thank for that. The legendary TV producer specializes in crime dramas that exceed all commercial expectations.

Winner of five Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes, actress Candice Bergen was destined for stardom from an early age. Born in Beverly Hills, her father was the famed ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, and her mother was a former model who’d been the face of Chesterfield cigarettes…

Far from Hollywood’s bright lights, Elizabeth Banks grew up in a working-class town with no idea of how exciting her life would turn out when she became one of her generation’s highest-paid actresses. In fact, it took a freak injury during a high school softball game to steer Banks away from competitive athletics and onto a theatre stage, where she became especially known for her comedic performances as an actress…

Sometimes called “the father of modern linguistics,” Noam Chomsky is one of the most cited scholars in modern history. Fueled by his view that language and universal grammar are uniquely human mental abilities, his work has revolutionized the field of linguistics…

Maria Popova is a prodigious confluence of brains and work ethic. She is most widely known for being the sole author of Brain Pickings, a blog containing her writing on culture, books, and eclectic subjects on and off the Internet…