Curated playlist
1984 deaths
- Marvin GayeOn the 1st of April 1984, in a house in the Western Heights area of West Adams in Los Angeles, Marvin Gaye was shot twice by his own father. One bullet pierced his heart. He was pronounced dead at 1:01 p.m., one day before he would have…
- Indira GandhiOn the 31st of October 1984, Indira Gandhi walked toward a wicket gate in the garden at 1 Safdarjung Road in New Delhi. Two of her own Sikh bodyguards stood waiting. She was on her way to be interviewed by the British filmmaker Peter…
- Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault was born on the 15th of October 1926 in Poitiers, France, into a family where a surgeon father expected his son to follow in his footsteps. That son became one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century instead.…
- François TruffautFrançois Truffaut was once called "The Gravedigger of French Cinema." In 1958, he was the only French critic not invited to the Cannes Film Festival. His reviews were brutal and unforgiving. A year later, the same Cannes festival handed…
- Chuck Cooper (basketball)Chuck Cooper stepped onto an NBA court for the first time on the 1st of November, 1950, against the Fort Wayne Pistons. That night, three men crossed a line that had been drawn for decades. Cooper, Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, and Earl Lloyd…
- Yuri AndropovYuri Andropov died on the 9th of February 1984 at 16:50, aged 69, after spending barely 15 months as the leader of the Soviet Union. He entered the Kremlin as the first former head of the KGB ever to become General Secretary, and he left…
- Paul DiracPaul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on the 8th of August 1902 in Bristol, England, and died on the 20th of October 1984 in Tallahassee, Florida. In the eighty-two years between those dates, he wrote an equation that predicted the existence…
- George LowIn April 1967, NASA named George Low to manage the Apollo spacecraft program. Three astronauts had just died in a fire on the launch pad. The space agency needed someone to determine what had gone wrong, fix it, and return humans to flight…
- Lionel RobbinsLionel Robbins is remembered today for a single line: "Humans want what they can't have." That quote made him famous. But it also compresses a career spent asking what economics is actually for. Robbins led the economics department at the…
- Åke OhlmarksÅke Ohlmarks is remembered today mainly because a famous author despised what he did to his book. J. R. R. Tolkien was so troubled by the Swedish translation of The Lord of the Rings that he sat down and wrote a detailed guide to the names…
- Hans SpeidelHans Speidel was the man who answered the phone when Hitler ordered Paris destroyed. On the 26th of August 1944, Alfred Jodl, chief of staff of the German high command, rang Field Marshal Walter Model with instructions to begin targeting…