Curated playlist
2024 deaths
- Jimmy CarterJimmy Carter was born on the 1st of October 1924, in the Wise Sanitarium in Plains, Georgia, where his mother worked as a registered nurse. That detail made him the first US president born in a hospital. It is a small but fitting fact for…
- Jerry WestJerry West died in Los Angeles on the 12th of June, 2024, at the age of 86. That same night, before game 3 of the NBA Finals between the Celtics and the Dallas Mavericks, the league held a moment of silence in his honor. It was a fitting…
- Vernor VingeVernor Steffen Vinge spent decades asking one question that made both scientists and storytellers uncomfortable: what happens when machines become smarter than the people who built them? Born on the 2nd of October 1944, Vinge was a…
- Raymond L. GarthoffRaymond Leonard Garthoff spent nearly eight decades inside the machinery of American foreign policy, trying to understand what the Soviet Union actually intended. Born on the 26th of March, 1929, he died on the 7th of December, 2024, at…
- Johnny GentleJohnny Gentle was a Liverpool singer who spent a few days in May 1960 touring Scotland with an unknown backing group called the Silver Beetles. That group would later become the Beatles. Gentle himself never had a chart hit, changed his…
- John Boardman (art historian)John Boardman was born in Ilford, Essex, on the 20th of August 1927, and he spent the next ninety-six years becoming one of the most prolific scholars ancient Greek art has ever produced. He died in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, on the 23rd of…
- Janet NelsonJanet Nelson died on the 14th of October 2024, at the age of 82, after years living with Alzheimer's disease. She was known to friends and colleagues by a nickname, Jinty, and she spent more than three decades at King's College London…
- Daniel KahnemanDaniel Kahneman was born on the 5th of March, 1934, in Tel Aviv, while it was still the British Mandate of Palestine. He would go on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 despite never having taken a single economics…
- Yoshitaka MurayamaYoshitaka Murayama died on the 6th of February 2024, just weeks before the game he had spent years building finally reached players. He was 55 years old. The cause was complications from an ongoing illness, and the timing felt almost…
- Jan AssmannJan Assmann spent decades working through one of the most charged questions in the study of religion: whether the birth of monotheism was not a triumph of spiritual insight but an act of violence against an older, more tolerant way of…
- Richard V. AllenRichard Vincent Allen was born on the first day of 1936 in Collingswood, New Jersey, and died on the 16th of November 2024 in a Denver hospital at the age of 88. For most of that long life, he operated in the shadows of power rather than…
- William AndersWilliam Anders took what many consider the most consequential photograph in human history, and he did it almost by accident. On the 24th of December 1968, the Apollo 8 spacecraft emerged from behind the Moon for its fourth orbit, and…
- Dikembe MutomboDikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1987 speaking almost no English. He had grown up in Kinshasa, attended Boboto College to prepare for a medical career, and spoke French, Spanish,…
- Alexei NavalnyAlexei Navalny boarded a flight from Tomsk to Moscow on the 20th of August 2020 having consumed, by his spokeswoman's account, nothing that morning but a cup of tea purchased at the airport. Within minutes he was screaming aboard the…
- Mário ZagalloMário Zagallo was standing on the pitch at the Maracanã Stadium as a young soldier in 1950, watching Uruguay defeat Brazil in one of the most painful moments in his country's football history. He did not play that day. He was there in…
- Salvatore SchillaciSalvatore Schillaci was born on the 1st of December 1964 in Palermo, Italy. He grew up in a poor family within that Sicilian city. His first steps into football began with Amat Palermo, an amateur team run by the local bus company. This…
- Edward Jay EpsteinEdward Jay Epstein died in his Manhattan apartment on the 9th of January 2024, at 88 years old, from COVID-19. He had spent more than half a century making powerful institutions uncomfortable. His career touched the Kennedy assassination,…
- Thomas P. StaffordThomas Stafford was born on the 17th of September 1930, in Weatherford, Oklahoma, a small town that would later name an airport and a museum after him. At 14, he climbed into a Piper Cub for his first flight. That single hour in the air…
- Franz BeckenbauerFranz Beckenbauer lifted the World Cup trophy as a captain in 1974, then lifted it again as a manager in 1990. Only two other men in football history, Brazil's Mario Zagallo and France's Didier Deschamps, have ever done the same. The fans…