Curated playlist
1912 births
- John CageJohn Milton Cage Jr. spent his entire life asking a single question: what is music? He was born on the 5th of September, 1912, in Los Angeles, and for nearly eight decades he pursued an answer so radical it would alienate friends, baffle…
- J. Walter KennedyJ. Walter Kennedy ran the National Basketball Association for twelve years, from 1963 to 1975, and in that span the league went from nine struggling teams to eighteen. When he took over, there was no television contract, attendance was…
- Michelangelo AntonioniMichelangelo Antonioni died in Rome on the 30th of July 2007, the same day as Ingmar Bergman. Two titans of world cinema left on the same afternoon. Antonioni was 94 years old. His body lay in state at City Hall in Rome, where a large…
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman died on the 16th of November 2006, and his last column ran in The Wall Street Journal the very next day. He was still a working economist at 94. That detail alone tells you something about the man. Born in Brooklyn on the…
- Kim Il SungKim Il Sung arrived at the Korean port of Wonsan on the 19th of September 1945, stepping off a ship as a 33-year-old captain in the Soviet Red Army after 26 years away from the peninsula. According to one Soviet official, he had been…
- Kim PhilbyKim Philby died in Moscow on the 11th of May 1988, buried with the honours of a KGB General. His fourth wife, Rufina Ivanovna Pukhova, told a reporter that he was "disillusioned with Communism by the end of his life, tortured by his…
- Thomas Stoltz HarveyThomas Stoltz Harvey was the pathologist on duty at Princeton Hospital on the morning of the 18th of April 1955, when the most famous brain in the world came into his hands. Albert Einstein had died overnight, and Harvey performed the…
- Alan TuringAlan Turing once chained his tea mug to a radiator pipe at Bletchley Park so it could not be stolen. In the first week of every June he cycled to the office in a service gas mask, fending off hay fever pollen. His bicycle chain slipped at…
- Richard N. CurrentRichard Nelson Current spent the first half of his career writing about Thaddeus Stevens, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and even the history of the typewriter. Abraham Lincoln was not his destination. He arrived there by accident, when…
- Otto von HabsburgOtto von Habsburg was born on the 20th of November 1912 at Villa Wartholz in Reichenau an der Rax, at a moment when Austria-Hungary still stood as one of the great empires of Europe. His full baptismal name ran to twenty-two words: Franz…
- Wernher von BraunWernher von Braun helped carry humanity to the Moon, yet more people died building his most famous weapon than were ever killed by it. Born on the 23rd of March 1912 in the small Prussian town of Wirsitz, he grew into a man whose…
- Erich HoneckerErich Honecker stood at a podium in Saarland in September 1987 and spoke of a day when Germans would no longer be separated by borders. The crowd listening to him knew that this man, born in their region three-quarters of a century…