I enjoy collecting unexpected familial connections, and I just learned my new favorite one yesterday. Id like to share some. Here are three, with the new one at the end: 1. Olivia Wilde, famous actress and good looking person, comes from a family of prominent left-wing journalists that include her parents Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, her uncles Alexander and Patrick Cockburn, her cousin Laura Flanders, and her grandfather Claud Cockburn, who was attacked by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. 2. Max Born, Nobel Prize winning physicist who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics and a close friend of Albert Einstein, is the grandfather of Olivia Newton-John, the star of Grease. 3. Nora Volkow has been the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse since her appointment during the Bush administration in 2003. Shes a major researcher on the neurological mechanisms of drug addiction. Shes also the great-granddaughter of... LEON TROTSKY! Thats right, the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse is Leon Trotskys great-granddaughter.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 03:30:10 +0000