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Curated category

2017 deaths

  • Gene CernanGene Cernan stepped off the lunar surface on the 14th of December 1972, climbed the ladder of the Apollo 17 lunar module, and has not been followed by any…
  • Helmut KohlHelmut Josef Michael Kohl governed Germany for sixteen years, the longest chancellorship in the country's post-war history.
  • Charles MansonCharles Milles Manson was born on the 12th of November 1934, in Cincinnati General Hospital to Ada Kathleen Maddox, a 16-year-old woman from Ashland…
  • Chuck BerryChuck Berry was buried with a cherry-red Gibson ES-355 guitar bolted to the inside lid of his coffin. That image captures something essential about the man…
  • Magic AlexMagic Alex arrived in England in 1965 with a student visa and a small plastic box full of randomly blinking lights. The box had no purpose. It did nothing.
  • Jerry FodorJerry Fodor walked into philosophy at a moment when the mind was considered either a black box of behavioral inputs and outputs, or a tangle of neurons best…
  • Richard F. Gordon Jr.Richard Francis Gordon Jr. was born in Seattle, Washington, on the 5th of October 1929, and he died 88 years later having orbited the Moon 45 times.
  • Hubert DreyfusHubert Dreyfus walked into the RAND Corporation in 1964 with a commission that seemed routine: review the latest work in artificial intelligence.
  • Stanislav PetrovStanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was alone at a command console when the Soviet Union's most sensitive nuclear early-warning system told him the world was about…
  • Jeremy Noble (musicologist)Jeremy Noble entered the world on the 27th of March 1930 in London. His father James Noble descended from South African missionaries.
  • Chuck BlazerChuck Blazer spent decades at the top of world soccer, collecting titles and influence the way other men collect stamps.
  • Daniel LichtDaniel Licht was born on the 13th of March 1957, and by the time he died in August 2017, he had scored some of the most distinctive television and video game…
  • William BaumolWilliam Jack Baumol was born on the 26th of February 1922 in the South Bronx, to immigrant parents who had come from Eastern Europe.