Curated playlist
1929 births
- James McDivittJames McDivitt flew his 145th combat mission in Korea two hours after the armistice was signed. The war was technically over. He flew anyway. That timing captures something essential about the man. He was not someone who stopped mid-task.…
- Raymond L. GarthoffRaymond Leonard Garthoff spent nearly eight decades inside the machinery of American foreign policy, trying to understand what the Soviet Union actually intended. Born on the 26th of March, 1929, he died on the 7th of December, 2024, at…
- Audrey HepburnAudrey Hepburn stood on a train platform in occupied Arnhem as a young girl, watching a boy in an oversized coat board a train bound for a concentration camp. "I was a child observing a child," she said later. That image never left her. It…
- Djalma SantosDjalma Santos did not play a single minute of the 1958 World Cup until the final itself. Brazil's coach had dropped him in favour of a player named De Sordi. Santos watched from the bench as Brazil progressed through the tournament. Then…
- Sándor KocsisSándor Kocsis scored 11 goals at a single World Cup and left Switzerland in the summer of 1954 with a record that had never been matched. He was not yet 25 years old. He had scored two hat-tricks in the same tournament, a feat no player…
- Hafizullah AminHafizullah Amin held supreme power over Afghanistan for a little over three months in 1979. In that time he seized the presidency, executed his own mentor, tried to balance between Moscow and Washington, and ended up dead on the floor of…
- Imelda MarcosImelda Marcos stepped onto a palace balcony on the 25th of February 1986, and sang a song to a loyalist crowd while the Philippine government collapsed around her. Hours later, she and her husband Ferdinand fled to Hawaii, leaving behind a…
- Thomas J. Kelly (aerospace engineer)Thomas J. Kelly had just turned 40 when ice formed in a fuel line on the spacecraft he had built. It was the 20th of July, 1969. Neil Armstrong had stepped onto the Moon inside the Lunar Module, and a clog in the fuel system had the…
- Helmut RahnHelmut Rahn had six minutes left, and a nation's fragile self-belief riding on his boots. It was the final of the 1954 FIFA World Cup, West Germany against Hungary, and the score stood at 2-2. Rahn received the ball just outside the…
- Babrak KarmalBabrak Karmal was born Sultan Hussein on the 6th of January 1929, a general's son from one of Kabul's wealthier families. He would die in Moscow's Central Clinical Hospital from liver cancer in December 1996, having spent much of his final…
- Gordon MooreGordon Earle Moore was born on the 3rd of January, 1929, in a world where the idea of a transistor had not yet been publicly demonstrated. By the time he died on the 24th of March, 2023, the prediction he had typed up for a magazine in…
- Richard F. Gordon Jr.Richard Francis Gordon Jr. was born in Seattle, Washington, on the 5th of October 1929, and he died 88 years later having orbited the Moon 45 times. Most people who know the Apollo program can name the men who walked on the lunar surface.…
- Peter BranscombePeter John Branscombe arrived in Vienna not as a scholar but as a soldier completing his military service, and whatever he found there changed the direction of his life. The Austrian capital's musical and theatrical world left a mark that…
- Hubert DreyfusHubert Dreyfus walked into the RAND Corporation in 1964 with a commission that seemed routine: review the latest work in artificial intelligence. What he produced instead was a document described as "famously combative" that would make him…
- Lev YashinLev Yashin won the Ballon d'Or in 1963 as a goalkeeper. That sentence alone deserves a pause. In the entire history of that award, given annually to the finest footballer in Europe, not one keeper before him had claimed it. Not one keeper…
- Edison DenisovEdison Denisov trained as a mathematician before he ever wrote a note of music. He gave that up to compose instead, and the decision won an unlikely ally. Dmitri Shostakovich approved so strongly that he personally gave Denisov lessons in…
- Barbara RemingtonBarbara Remington painted a cover for The Lord of the Rings. J. R. R. Tolkien himself later said it showed what looked like pumpkins in a tree, and a lion that had no business being there. Tolkien had written the books; Remington had…
- George SteinerFrancis George Steiner was born on the 23rd of April 1929 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. His right arm withered from birth yet his mother insisted he use it as an able-bodied person would. She believed self-pity was nauseating and…
- Antonio CarbajalAntonio Félix Carbajal Rodríguez walked onto the pitch at the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro on the 24th of June 1950, a 21-year-old goalkeeper from Mexico City facing the host nation of Brazil in front of one of the largest crowds…