Curated playlist
1966 deaths
- André BretonAndré Breton defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism" - a phrase that landed in print in 1924 and reoriented the entire direction of modern art. He was a French poet and writer from Tinchebray, a small town in Normandy, and by the…
- Ludwig BinswangerLudwig Binswanger entered the world on the 13th of April 1881 in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. His father Robert Johann Binswanger was a doctor who ran the Bellevue Sanatorium. The grandfather Ludwig Elieser Binswanger founded that same…
- Buster KeatonBuster Keaton never smiled on screen. Not when a two-ton building facade toppled directly onto him, leaving only the gap of an open window between his body and certain death. Not when a wall of water from a railroad tower broke his neck…
- Walt DisneyWalt Disney holds the record for most Academy Awards won by an individual, with 22 wins from 59 nominations. Yet the man behind that record was, in private, shy, self-deprecating, and insecure. He once told a friend, "I'm not Walt Disney.…
- Vera WeizmannVera Weizmann spent forty years leading one of the world's largest Zionist women's organizations, raised two sons while practicing medicine in Manchester, and lost one of them when his plane was shot down over the Bay of Biscay. She was…
- Anna AkhmatovaAnna Akhmatova chose a Tatar surname for herself because her father refused to see any verses printed under his "respectable" name. The surname she took was her grandmother's: Akhmatova, carrying the lineage of Khan Akhmat, a descendant of…
- Pieter GeylPieter Geyl spent thirteen months inside Buchenwald concentration camp with a half-finished argument in his pocket. The Dutch historian had written an article about Napoleon just before the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940.…
- Boris PodolskyBoris Podolsky earned one of history's more remarkable endorsements in 1933. Albert Einstein called him "one of the most brilliant of the younger men" to have worked with Paul Dirac. Einstein made that observation in a letter to Abraham…
- D. T. SuzukiD. T. Suzuki was born Teitarō Suzuki in Honda-machi, Kanazawa, the fourth son of a physician, and he would spend the better part of a century dismantling the wall between Eastern and Western thought. His Buddhist name, Daisetsu, was given…
- Vinayak Damodar SavarkarVinayak Damodar Savarkar died on the 26th of February 1966 at his residence in Bombay, having renounced food, water, and medicine twenty-five days earlier. He called this act prayopavesha, and he had written an essay arguing that when a…
- Georges LemaîtreGeorges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître was a Belgian Catholic priest who proposed that the entire universe began as a single quantum he called the "primeval atom" - what the world would eventually come to know as the Big Bang. Born on the…
- Peter DebyePeter Debye was born in Maastricht in the Netherlands on the 24th of March 1884, and by the time he died on the 2nd of November 1966, his name had been attached to a unit of measurement, a lunar crater, a minor planet, and more than a…
- Guillermo StábileGuillermo Stábile arrived at the 1930 FIFA World Cup as a last-minute replacement, stepping onto the pitch only because the first-choice striker suffered an anxiety attack before kick-off. By the time the tournament ended, he had scored…