People who would be the ultimate dinner party guests (living today)

01

Werner Herzog

Herzog boiled and ate his own shoe — with garlic and duck fat — after Errol Morris finished a film Herzog bet he never would. The documentary of the meal runs 28 minutes. He called the shoe "quite acceptable."

02

Rigoberta Menchú

Before turning twenty-three, Rigoberta Menchú had memorized the name and story of every neighbor disappeared in Guatemala's civil war. She dictated her testimony in eight days to anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray — in a second language.

03

Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton quietly donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University's COVID research — helping fund the Moderna vaccine — then turned down a Tennessee statue in her own honor because she felt she hadn't "earned that right yet."

04

Malala Yousafzai

Shot in the head by a Taliban gunman on a school bus in 2012, Malala Yousafzai was airlifted to Birmingham, received reconstructive surgery, and was back in class ten months later — at age sixteen — in the same city.

05

Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin designed curved cattle chutes that now move a third of U.S. livestock more calmly — by imagining the animal's eye-level view of shadows, dead ends, and unexpected sounds. She drew the first blueprints at her aunt's Colorado ranch.

06

Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney woke one morning in 1964 with a full melody in his head, rushed to the piano, and spent weeks playing it for strangers to confirm he hadn't stolen it. The song became 'Yesterday' — recorded by over 2,200 artists.

07

Yo-Yo Ma

Yo-Yo Ma left his 1733 Montagnana cello — valued at $2.5 million — in a New York taxi trunk in 1999. The cab company traced the driver within an hour. He played the cello at the reunion press conference.

08

Patti Smith

Patti Smith spent years photographing Robert Mapplethorpe's hands — obsessively, serially — because, she wrote, she couldn't stop seeing them. Her 2010 memoir 'Just Kids' won the National Book Award and was written, she said, to keep a promise to a dying man.

09

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood co-invented the LongPen — a robotic signing device transmitting her pen strokes in real time from anywhere on earth — so she could "be" at book signings without flying. She filed the patent in 2004 and the company still operates.

10

Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall spent months sitting motionless in Tanzania's Gombe forest until a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard allowed her to approach — the first time a wild chimp accepted a human. She was twenty-six, had no university degree, and had been in Africa five months.