Curated playlist
2012 deaths
- Whitney HoustonWhitney Houston sold more than 220 million records and carried a nickname that needed no first name: "the Voice". She was born in 1963 and died in 2012. In between, she became one of the most awarded performers in history. In 2023, Rolling…
- Neil ArmstrongNeil Armstrong's astronaut application came about a week late, until a colleague slipped it into the pile.
- Abdelbaset al-MegrahiA special court at Camp Zeist convicted Abdelbaset al-Megrahi on the 31st of January 2001. Three Scottish judges found the Libyan guilty on 270 counts of murder for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which fell over Scotland on the 21st of…
- Henry HillIn 1955, an eleven-year-old boy named Henry Hill crossed the street from his Brooklyn home and wandered into a dispatch cabstand, hoping for a part-time job after school. The men who gathered there were local mobsters, and Hill had admired…
- Eric IvesHistorian Eric Ives spent decades arguing over Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife.
- Sally RideSally Ride quietly passed along the key clue to what caused the Challenger explosion.
- Ravi ShankarRavi Shankar was horrified when Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire. The sitar master saw instruments as part of God.
- Griselda BlancoGriselda Blanco Restrepo ran a distribution network, stretching across the United States and Colombia, that earned $80 million per month. She lived from 1943 to 2012, and her name is tied to the cocaine underworld of Miami from the 1970s…
- Richard N. CurrentRichard N. Current became a Lincoln expert only because a colleague died. He had written about other figures first.
- Eric HobsbawmMI5 blocked Eric Hobsbawm from a BBC job in 1945 over his communism. He later became a celebrated historian.
- Ajmal KasabAjmal Kasab is the name most often given to the one gunman from the 2008 Mumbai attacks who was taken alive, yet accounts of him spell it in at least a dozen different ways. Qasab, Kasav, Kasar, Qasam and Kamaal all appear in the record.…
- Elinor OstromUCLA rejected Elinor Ostrom's economics application for lacking math. She later won a Nobel Prize in economics.
- Anna SchwartzA Federal Reserve official told Anna Schwartz, "Regarding the Great Depression, you're right."
- John KeeganJohn Keegan taught war for 26 years but never fired a shot in anger. Illness left the historian unfit for service.
- Charles RosenPianist Charles Rosen wrote his first book because a record sleeve note embarrassed him. It won a National Book Award.