Curated playlist
1961 births
- Barack ObamaBarack Obama was born on the 4th of August 1961 at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii, making him the only person to become president of the United States who was not born in the contiguous 48 states. His…
- Peter JacksonPeter Jackson was born on the 31st of October 1961 in Wellington, New Zealand, and grew up in the far northern suburb of Pukerua Bay. His parents were English immigrants: his mother Joan worked as a factory worker and housewife, and his…
- David A. BellDavid Avrom Bell was born in New York City in 1961, into a family that thought seriously about ideas for a living. His father was the sociologist Daniel Bell. His mother, Pearl Kazin Bell, was a literary critic and the sister of the…
- Isiah ThomasIsiah Lord Thomas III grew up on the West Side of Chicago, the youngest of nine children, in a household that would eventually be without his father. He started dribbling a basketball at age three. By his early twenties, he was one of the…
- Julia GillardJulia Eileen Gillard was sworn in as Australia's 27th prime minister on the 24th of June 2010, and at that moment, two firsts converged on a single country. For the first time in Australian history, both the head of state and the head of…
- Eric Allin CornellEric Allin Cornell was born on the 19th of December, 1961, in Palo Alto, California, to parents who were finishing graduate degrees at Stanford University. Within two years, the family had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his…
- Julia Louis-DreyfusJulia Louis-Dreyfus has won more Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Awards than any other performer in the history of television. That record belongs to a woman who first caught the attention of Saturday Night Live producers not on a major…
- EnyaEnya was born Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin on the 17th of May 1961 in Dore, in the Irish-speaking village of Gweedore, County Donegal. Her name, in English, becomes Enya Patricia Brennan. She is the sixth of nine children in a family so…
- Tetsuo HaraTetsuo Hara was born in Tokyo in 1961, but his childhood unfolded in Matsubara-danchi, a housing complex in Soka, Saitama. By the time he reached second grade, he was already copying characters from Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy. By third…
- Yuri MilnerYuri Milner was born on the 11th of November 1961 in Moscow, into a family of Soviet intellectuals who had no obvious path to Silicon Valley. His father ran the economics division of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His mother worked in a…
- Richard FoltzRichard Foltz spent several years working across Europe as a musician, film critic, and travel writer before he ever set foot in a university classroom as a teacher. That detour matters. It shaped a scholar who would spend the next four…
- Lothar MatthäusLothar Matthäus was born on the 21st of March 1961 in Erlangen, Bavaria, to a father who had fled across the Oder River in 1944 ahead of the Soviet advance. That backstory of escape and reinvention threads quietly through everything that…