Curated playlist
1965 deaths
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot wrote the opening of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when he was twenty-two years old. The lines compared an evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table". Critics called the image shocking and offensive. Georgian…
- Kōdō SawakiKodo Sawaki died on the 21st of December 1965 at Antaiji, a Zen temple in northern Kyoto, with his eyes on the mountain outside. His last recorded words named that mountain directly: "Kodo, Kodo," he said, hearing it call to him from the…
- Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill was born on the 30th of November 1874 inside Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home his family had held for generations in Oxfordshire. The building itself said something about who he was: a man descended from John…
- Le CorbusierLe Corbusier insisted that "a house is a machine to live in," a maxim that would unsettle architects for a century. The man who wrote it was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, a watchmaker's son with no formal training as an architect. He…
- Malcolm XMalcolm X was pronounced dead at 3:30 pm on the 21st of February 1965, shortly after gunmen opened fire on him at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. The autopsy identified 21 gunshot wounds. He was 39 years old. In the hours after the…
- Martin BuberMartin Buber was born in Vienna on the 8th of February 1878, into an Orthodox Jewish family with deep rabbinic roots stretching back to the 16th century. By the time he died on the 13th of June 1965 at his home in Jerusalem's Talbiya…
- Paul TillichPaul Tillich arrived in the United States in 1933 at age 47, without fluent English, his university post stripped by the Nazi regime, his first marriage long collapsed, his nerves still frayed from years of burying soldiers in the mud of…
- Lynn ThorndikeLynn Thorndike coined a phrase that historians still use every day, and he did it almost in passing. In A Short History of Civilization, published in 1926, he became the first historian to propose the term "early modern" for the stretch of…
- Nikolay LosskyNikolay Onufriyevich Lossky once summed up his entire philosophy in four words: 'all is immanent in all'. He called the system built from that idea intuitive-personalism. It was a way of thinking about reality that put him at odds with the…
- Bernard BaruchBernard Baruch refused. On the 25th of September, 1929, a group of financiers asked him to join a buying pool to support the falling stock market. He said no. He had already shifted his portfolio into bonds, cash, and gold. Baruch was born…
- Eric GutkindEric Gutkind sent Albert Einstein a copy of his book "Choose Life: The Biblical Call To Revolt" sometime before January 1954. Einstein wrote back from Princeton on the 3rd of January 1954, and what he said was blunt. God, Einstein wrote,…