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Curated playlist

2007 deaths

  • Tom Moldvay3 minThomas Steven Moldvay was born on the 5th of November 1948 in Ohio. He attended Kent State University during the early 1970s while writing for a science fiction fanzine called Infinite Dreams. This publication served as his first creative…
  • Kentarō Haneda3 minFans knew Kentarō Haneda by the nickname Haneken, a name that spread across the communities he worked for. He died of liver cancer on the 2nd of June 2007, at the age of 58. His composing career stretched from the late 1970s through the…
  • Kurt Vonnegut13 minKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers. "It was cool there," he said. "When we came up the city was gone... They burnt the whole damn town…
  • Ingmar Bergman11 minAt the age of nine, Ingmar Bergman traded a set of tin soldiers for a magic lantern. Within a year, the boy had built a private world he never wanted to leave. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes, and lighting effects. He staged…
  • Michelangelo Antonioni11 minMichelangelo Antonioni died in Rome on the 30th of July 2007, the same day as Ingmar Bergman. Two titans of world cinema left on the same afternoon. Antonioni was 94 years old. His body lay in state at City Hall in Rome, where a large…
  • Wally Schirra11 minWally Schirra was the only astronaut to fly in all three of America's first crewed space programs: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. That distinction alone would be enough to earn him a place in history. But the full arc of his life reaches…
  • John A. Garraty4 minJohn Arthur Garraty was born on the 4th of July, 1920, a date that would seem almost too on-the-nose for a man who spent his career writing American history. He died on the 19th of December, 2007, having shaped how several generations of…
  • Boris Yeltsin15 minBoris Yeltsin climbed atop a tank outside the Russian parliament on a sweltering August day in 1991 and delivered a speech that would echo across the twentieth century. Below him, a crowd had gathered to defy a coup against Soviet leader…
  • Thomas Stoltz Harvey6 minThomas Stoltz Harvey was the pathologist on duty at Princeton Hospital on the morning of the 18th of April 1955, when the most famous brain in the world came into his hands. Albert Einstein had died overnight, and Harvey performed the…
  • Luciano Pavarotti18 minLuciano Pavarotti hit nine high Cs during the aria "Ah! mes amis" at New York's Metropolitan Opera on the 17th of February 1972, then returned for seventeen curtain calls. That night in La fille du régiment earned him a nickname that stuck…
  • Alexey Ivakhnenko6 minAlexey Ivakhnenko was born on the 30th of March 1913 in Kobelyaky, a town in Poltava Governorate, and died on the 16th of October 2007 having quietly laid the groundwork for a field that would reshape computing decades after he first…
  • Frank Cass4 minFrank Cass built one of Britain's most distinctive academic publishing houses from a single bookshop on Southampton Row. Born on the 11th of July 1930 in London, he grew up in a household shaped by craft and migration. His father was a…

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