Curated playlist
2009 deaths
- Michael JacksonMichael Joseph Jackson was born on the 29th of August 1958 in Gary, Indiana, the eighth of ten children in an African-American working-class household crammed into a two-bedroom home on Jackson Street. His father Joe operated a crane at US…
- Richard PoirierRichard Poirier entered the world on Gloucester, Massachusetts, the 9th of September 1925. His academic journey began at Amherst College before he moved to Yale University for further study. Harvard University provided his final degree in…
- Chuck DalyChuck Daly was born on the 20th of July, 1930, in Kane, Pennsylvania, a small town in the Allegheny Mountains. He would go on to become one of the most decorated coaches in American basketball history. Two NBA championships. An Olympic…
- Allen KleinAllen Klein was the man who simultaneously managed the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and he did it by weaponizing the fine print. Born in Newark, New Jersey, on the 18th of December 1931, Klein grew up without a mother, shuttled between…
- Walter CronkiteWalter Cronkite took off his glasses, glanced at the clock, and told a watching nation that President Kennedy had died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, some 38 minutes earlier. He paused, swallowed hard, and put the glasses back on before…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy finally spoke, he called Lévi-Strauss "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time."…
- Paul SamuelsonPaul Samuelson stood at a lectern in a University of Chicago classroom on the 2nd of January, 1932, and later said that was the exact moment he was born as an economist. He was sixteen years old. The lecture that morning was on Thomas…
- Al CerviAl Cervi earned the nickname "Digger" not for anything gentle, but for the way he dug into opponents on defense. Born on the 12th of February 1917 in Buffalo, New York, Cervi spent decades as one of the hardest-nosed backcourt players in…
- Heinz EdelmannHeinz Edelmann was born on the 20th of June 1934 in Ústí nad Labem, a city in Czechoslovakia known in German as Aussig, to a family with mixed German and Czech roots. By the time he was twelve, that family had been expelled from the…
- John Patrick DigginsJohn Patrick Diggins declared, near the end of his life, "I am left of right and right of left." That phrase captures something essential about a man who spent decades unsettling the comfortable assumptions of anyone who tried to…
- Kaoru KurimotoKaoru Kurimoto was still in her twenties when she became the youngest person ever to win the Edogawa Rampo Prize. That happened in 1978, just one year after she had already taken home the Gunzo Prize for New Writers. Two major literary…
- Ray SolomonoffRay Solomonoff was born on the 25th of July 1926 in Cleveland, Ohio, and by the time he was 16 years old, he had already set himself an extraordinary task: to find a general method for solving mathematical problems. Not a specific problem,…
- Hans HolzerHans Holzer wrote more than 120 books. That alone is a staggering output for any author. But Holzer was not writing thrillers or cookbooks. Every one of those volumes was devoted to ghosts, spirits, the afterlife, and the unseen world that…
- Dave ArnesonDave Arneson was the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, and he spent two days watching monster movies, reading Conan books, and doodling on graph paper before an idea took hold that would change games forever. That moment of restless…
- I. J. GoodI. J. Good walked into Hut 8 at Bletchley Park on the 27th of May 1941, fresh from completing his doctorate at Cambridge, on the very day that Britain's Royal Navy destroyed the German battleship Bismarck. He had no idea that his own…
- Sergey MikhalkovSergey Mikhalkov wrote the words that hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens heard every morning, every sporting event, every state occasion for decades. He was, for most of his life, Russia's most beloved children's poet. Yet he was also…