Curated playlist
2019 deaths
- Daniel HeartzDaniel Heartz devoted a 1969 book to Pierre Attaingnant, a French Royal Printer of Music.
- Jasper GriffinAn Oxford classicist coined a word that chemists now use. Jasper Griffin's word "agostic" was adopted by Malcolm Green.
- Alexei LeonovAlexei Leonov's spacesuit swelled in space until he could not fit back inside. He let air out through a valve.
- John SingletonAt 24, John Singleton became the first African American nominated for the Best Director Oscar.
- Juice WrldIn 2020, the rapper Juice Wrld was streamed on Spotify more than 5.9 billion times, which made him the fourth most streamed artist in the world. He had died the year before. The name is pronounced "juice world", and it belonged to a young…
- Sogyal RinpocheIn 2017 the Dalai Lama called Sogyal Rinpoche "my very good friend" and then said, "Now he is disgraced."
- Rutger HauerRutger Hauer wrote parts of Blade Runner's tears in rain speech the evening before filming. He added its last line.
- Frank LucasFrank Lucas liked to ask one question when he explained how he moved heroin. "Who the hell is gonna look in a dead soldier's coffin?" He put it that way in an interview for a New York magazine article published in 2000. Lucas operated in…
- Harold BloomHarold Bloom argued that every poet struggles to escape the shadow of earlier poets.
- Stanley WolpertStanley Wolpert quit engineering after landing in Bombay two weeks after Gandhi was shot.
- Abu Bakr al-BaghdadiAbu Bakr al-Baghdadi left so faint an impression on Ahmed al-Dabash that al-Dabash dismissed him as insignificant. Al-Dabash led the Islamic Army of Iraq and fought the allied invasion in 2003. He said he had known the insurgency's leaders…
- Wat MisakaWat Misaka played for the New York Knicks in 1947, then quit basketball to become an engineer.