Curated playlist
2013 deaths
- Nelson MandelaPresident of South Africa from 1994 to 1999
- D. Brainerd HolmesD. Brainerd Holmes was the man John F. Kennedy called on to put an American on the moon. In September 1961, Holmes stepped into one of the most pressure-filled jobs in the country: directing NASA's crewed spaceflight program. Cold War…
- Margaret ThatcherMargaret Hilda Thatcher arrived at 10 Downing Street on the 4th of May 1979 and kept a portrait of her Oxford chemistry tutor on the wall throughout her time there. That tutor was Dorothy Hodgkin, a Nobel laureate, and the choice said…
- Roger EbertRoger Ebert typed his last blog post two days before he died on the 4th of April 2013, signing off with words that could have come from any of his 46 years of reviews: "I'll see you at the movies." He had spent his final months writing…
- Peter O'ToolePeter O'Toole holds a record no actor would wish for. He received eight Academy Award nominations for Best Actor across four decades, and never won a single competitive Oscar. When the Academy finally offered him an Honorary Award in 2002…
- Djalma SantosDjalma Santos did not play a single minute of the 1958 World Cup until the final itself. Brazil's coach had dropped him in favour of a player named De Sordi. Santos watched from the bench as Brazil progressed through the tournament. Then…
- David LandesDavid Saul Landes spent decades at Harvard asking a question that made many scholars uncomfortable: why did some nations grow rich while others stayed poor? Born on the 29th of April 1924, he lived long enough to watch that question travel…
- A. K. WarderA. K. Warder spent nearly six decades building one of the most ambitious literary surveys ever attempted in the field of Indian studies. Born on the 8th of September 1924 in England, Anthony Kennedy Warder would go on to write or edit…
- James M. BuchananJames McGill Buchanan Jr. was born on the 3rd of October 1919 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in a farmhouse with no indoor plumbing and no electricity. The family had borrowed heavily to mechanize their farm, then lost nearly everything in…
- Ronald CoaseRonald Harry Coase was born on the 29th of December 1910 in Willesden, a suburb of London, and he would live to the age of 102 - long enough to see ideas he developed in the 1930s and 1960s reshape how lawyers, economists, and policymakers…
- Ossie SchectmanOssie Schectman scored the first basket in what would become the NBA, and he did it on the 1st of November, 1946, in Toronto. The New York Knicks were playing the Toronto Huskies at Maple Leaf Gardens. Nobody in the building that night…
- Jack VanceJack Vance published his first story in the summer of 1945 in Thrilling Wonder Stories. It ran sixteen pages. Over the next seven decades, he would go on to write more than sixty books, possibly close to ninety, across science fiction,…
- Colin WilsonColin Henry Wilson spent a winter sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath in a sleeping bag, working by day at the British Museum's Reading Room on a novel he had been rewriting for years. He was in his early twenties, broke, and so determined…
- Lawrence KleinLawrence Robert Klein was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on the 14th of September 1920, and he would go on to reshape how governments and central banks understand their own economies. At the heart of his life's work was a deceptively simple…
- Tony SheridanTony Sheridan was born Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity on the 21st of May 1940 in Norwich, Norfolk, and he holds a distinction that even most devoted Beatles fans overlook. Of all the musicians who ever appeared on a record alongside…
- Harold Hunter (basketball)Harold Hunter signed his name to a contract on the 26th of April 1950, and in doing so became the first African American to sign a professional deal with an NBA team. The Washington Capitols drafted him the day before. He was a guard, a…