Curated playlist
1954 births
- DJ HollywoodDid DJ Hollywood invent hip-hop style rapping? Kurtis Blow points to him, yet little was taped.
- James CameronJames Cameron dropped alone to the deepest point on Earth in 2012. He stayed more than three hours on the bottom.
- Denzel WashingtonIn 2025, on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the actor Denzel Washington said that the emphasis in his first name belongs on the first syllable. His mother had moved it to the second syllable so that young Denzel would answer to her call and not his…
- Ron HowardRon Howard, age five, had to cry while holding a toy turtle. Andy Griffith coached him through it in 1960.
- Katsuhiro OtomoManga artist Katsuhiro Otomo planned Akira as only about ten chapters. It ran for eight years and two thousand pages.
- Juliane KoepckeJuliane Koepcke fell three thousand meters in her airplane seat and survived. Lightning hit her plane in 1971.
- Rudolf SimekOne Austrian scholar wrote a book tracing trolls from Norse myth to the internet.
- Władysław Żmuda (born 1954)Władysław Żmuda played 21 matches across four FIFA World Cup finals, a total matched only by Uwe Seeler and Diego Maradona. Only five men in the sport's history played more: Lionel Messi, Lothar Matthäus, Miroslav Klose, Paolo Maldini and…
- Larry SummersLarry Summers, born Lawrence Henry Summers, was 28 years old in 1983 when Harvard gave him tenure, making him one of the youngest tenured professors in the university's history. Soon afterward, doctors diagnosed him with late-stage…
- Shinzo AbeShinzo Abe's killer said his motive was the Unification Church, not Abe's politics. It happened in Nara in 2022.
- Catherine O'HaraCatherine O'Hara, the Canadian and American actress and comedian, became the first woman to win an individual Actor Awards trophy after her death. The prize honored her work on the Apple TV+ series The Studio, and the show's co-creator,…
- Kevin WarwickKevin Warwick had a surgeon implant electronics in his own arm. The 1998 RFID chip opened doors as he walked up.
- Rick McCallumNear the end of The Phantom Menace, Palpatine arrives on Naboo, and in that scene the film's producer, Rick McCallum, makes a brief cameo. It is a small in-joke, but it hints at a larger oddity. Richard McCallum was born on the 22nd of…
- Lou PearlmanIn June 2007, a tourist couple from Germany noticed a man staying at a hotel in Nusa Dua, on the Indonesian island of Bali. Their sighting ended a search that had stretched across several continents. On the 14th of June 2007, the man was…
- Philippa GregoryNovelist Philippa Gregory's charity has dug close to 200 wells in The Gambia.
- Rodney BrooksRodney Brooks argued that robots don't need to think much to act.
- Roger LowensteinA financial journalist won a Lincoln prize for a book on paying for the Civil War. Roger Lowenstein won it in 2022.
- Claude RibbeClaude Ribbe wrote a 2005 book accusing Napoleon of ordering mass killings of enslaved Black people.
- James GleickJames Gleick helped inspire Ian Malcolm, a character in Jurassic Park.
- Roger D. LauniusA NASA chief historian also wrote a book on a baseball showman. Roger D. Launius wrote about Charlie Finley too.
- Mario KempesMario Kempes scored the 105th-minute winner in the 1978 World Cup final against the Netherlands.
- Jackie ChanOn the 25th of June 2013, Jackie Chan had to announce that he was still alive. A hoax Facebook page, created a few days earlier, had claimed that he was dead. Several people contacted him to congratulate him on a recent engagement. Soon…