Curated playlist
2005 deaths
- Johnny CarsonJohnny Carson stepped in front of a camera for the last time as host of The Tonight Show on the 22nd of May 1992, and three decades of American nights ended. For thirty years, the country had tuned in at 11:30 to watch a man from Corning,…
- Pope John Paul IIPope John Paul II was born Karol Józef Wojtyła on the 18th of May 1920, in the small Polish town of Wadowice. By the time he died on the 2nd of April 2005, an estimated four million people had gathered in and around Vatican City to mourn…
- Saul BellowSaul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows on the 10th of June, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, to parents who had fled Saint Petersburg two years earlier, carrying with them the memory of a life that had already collapsed. His mother could not stop…
- Hunter S. ThompsonHunter S. Thompson once wrote a line he repeated for the rest of his life. "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." That sentence, equal parts confession and dare, fits the man…
- Charles David KeelingCharles David Keeling stood on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, two miles above sea level, and began counting molecules. The year was 1958. What he measured that day, and every day for the next 47 years, would become one of the most…
- Gopal GodseGopal Vinayak Godse died on the 26th of November 2005, the last surviving member of the conspiracy to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi. He died at his home in Pune. In a 2003 interview, just two years before his death, he stated plainly that he…
- Arthur MillerArthur Miller died on the evening of the 10th of February 2005 - the fifty-sixth anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman. The symmetry was almost too neat for a man who wrote plays about men crushed by the weight of their…
- Yin ShunYin Shun was born on the 5th of April 1906 in a village in Zhejiang Province, China, and he would live for nearly a century, dying on the 4th of June 2005. Eleven days after his birth, the infant who would become one of the most…
- Stanley SadieStanley John Sadie spent the better part of three decades turning a nine-volume reference work into a twenty-volume monument that reshaped how the world studies music. Born on the 30th of October 1930 in Wembley, he would become the editor…
- Al AronowitzAl Aronowitz was the man in the room when two of the most consequential musical forces of the twentieth century first met each other. On the 28th of August 1964, in a New York City hotel room, Aronowitz introduced Bob Dylan to the Beatles.…
- Shelby FooteShelby Dade Foote Jr. was born on the 17th of November 1916 in Greenville, Mississippi. His father worked for Armour and Company, moving the family from Greenville to Jackson and then Vicksburg before settling in Mobile, Alabama. When…
- George F. KennanGeorge Frost Kennan sent a telegram from Moscow on the 22nd of February, 1946, that would reshape American foreign policy for the rest of the twentieth century. It ran to 5,363 words. The Treasury Department had asked the State Department…
- George MikanGeorge Mikan stood six feet ten inches tall, weighed 245 pounds, and wore thick round spectacles , and he single-handedly forced professional basketball to rewrite its own rules. Born on the 18th of June 1924, in Joliet, Illinois, Mikan…
- Karl SteinbuchKarl Steinbuch is remembered in part for a single word. In 1957, together with Helmut Gröttrup, he coined Informatik, the German term for computer science. That word spread from Stuttgart to German-speaking universities across Europe,…
- Byron PreissByron Preiss was buried with a secret that nine people are still trying to find. In 1982, he published a puzzle book called The Secret, hiding twelve plexiglass boxes across parks in North America. Each box held a ceramic container, and…
- Lucien LaurentLucien Laurent scored the most historically significant goal in the history of football, and almost nobody at the time understood what they had just witnessed. On the 13th of July 1930, at the Estadio Pocitos in Montevideo, Uruguay, a…