Curated playlist
2016 deaths
- Michiyo YasudaMichiyo Yasuda spent five decades making colours think. Her work appears in some of the most beloved animated films ever made, from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to Spirited Away, the film that won an Academy Award and introduced…
- David BowieDavid Bowie was born David Robert Jones on the 8th of January 1947 in Brixton, London, and he died two days after releasing his final album, on the 10th of January 2016. That timing was not coincidence. Producer Tony Visconti later…
- Prince (musician)Prince Rogers Nelson arrived at Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis on the 7th of June, 1958, and for the next 57 years he operated at a pitch that most musicians never approach. He sold more than 100 million records worldwide. He played…
- George MichaelGeorge Michael died on Christmas Day 2016, at his home in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. He was 53. His partner, Fadi Fawaz, found him in bed in the early hours of that morning. It was a death as quietly private as the man had, in many…
- Fidel CastroFidel Alejandro Castro Ruz delivered the longest speech ever heard before the United Nations General Assembly, speaking for four and a half hours in 1960. The audience included Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, Egyptian president Gamal…
- Muhammad AliMuhammad Ali walked into the ring on the 25th of February 1964, a 22-year-old from Louisville, Kentucky, facing Sonny Liston, the menacing heavyweight champion with a criminal past and ties to organized crime. The odds were 8:1 against…
- Allan WilliamsAllan Richard Williams was the man who drove the Beatles to Hamburg. On the 15th of August 1960, he loaded a Morris J2 van with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best, and Stuart Sutcliffe, added his wife Beryl, her…
- Carrie FisherCarrie Frances Fisher once wrote that no matter how she died, she wanted it reported that she had drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra. After her death in December 2016, several news outlets honored the request. That single line…
- Alan RickmanAlan Sidney Patrick Rickman was born on the 21st of February 1946 in Brentford, London, and he spent his early years in the shadow of Wormwood Scrubs Prison on an Acton council estate, raised by a mother who worked at the Post Office to…
- Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky once described intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. That idea alone reshaped how scientists and engineers think about minds, both human and machine. But the man who proposed it was…
- Edgar MitchellEdgar Dean Mitchell was the sixth person to walk on the Moon, and on his way home, something happened to him that no training could have prepared him for. Floating back toward Earth after Apollo 14, Mitchell experienced what he would later…
- George MartinGeorge Martin stood at a mixing desk on the 26th of November 1962, listening to the Beatles run through "Please Please Me" for a third time. When the take finished, he leaned over the console and told the four young men from Liverpool:…
- Tony BarrowTony Barrow stood in the south Lancashire suburb of Crosby during the late 1950s. He presented jazz bands and skiffle-folk groups at local dance halls across town. Teenagers John Lennon and Paul McCartney were putting together their…
- Silvio GazzanigaSilvio Gazzaniga worked for a company called the Stabilimento Artistico Bertoni. There, he created the FIFA World Cup Trophy, the trophy raised by a team captain at the end of every World Cup final. That single design earned him what the…
- Hilary PutnamHilary Putnam was a philosopher who changed his mind for a living. He arrived at Harvard in 1965, organized campus protests, taught courses on Marxism, and eventually celebrated a belated bar mitzvah at the age of sixty-seven. The same man…
- Imre PozsgayImre Pozsgay stood before his country on the 28th of January 1989 and said what no ruling Communist official had dared to say: the events of 1956 were not a counterrevolution but a popular uprising. That single declaration, from a man who…
- Yves BonnefoyYves Bonnefoy was born on the 24th of June 1923 in Tours, and by the time he died in Paris on the 1st of July 2016, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had called him perhaps the most important French poet of the latter half of the 20th century.…
- Eric ChristiansenEric Christiansen was born on the 15th of September 1937 and died on the 31st of October 2016. By the end of his life, he was a fellow emeritus of New College, Oxford University, remembered as a historian of the medieval world. Getting…