Curated playlist
2025 deaths
- David LynchDavid Lynch was born on the 20th of January 1946 at St. Patrick's Hospital in Missoula, Montana, the son of a USDA research scientist and an English-language tutor. He died on the 16th of January 2025, four days before what would have been…
- Jim LovellJim Lovell flew to the Moon twice and never set foot on it. That distinction alone would make him one of the most unusual figures in the history of human spaceflight. But what truly separates Lovell from the dozen men who did walk on the…
- William R. LucasWilliam Ray Lucas died on the 10th of February, 2025, at his home in Huntsville, Alabama, at the age of 102. He had been Marshall Space Flight Center's fourth director, serving from 1974 to 1986. For most of his career, he was unknown…
- Brian WilsonBrian Douglas Wilson was born on the 20th of June, 1942, in Inglewood, California, and by the age of two he could reproduce a melody after hearing only a few verses of a march song. That detail, remembered by his father, points to…
- Paul TagliabuePaul Tagliabue was born on the 24th of November, 1940, in Jersey City, New Jersey, the third of four sons. He died on the 9th of November, 2025, at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, of heart failure and complications from Parkinson's…
- Sofia GubaidulinaSofia Gubaidulina was born on the 24th of October 1931 in Chistopol, a small town in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. She was five years old when she discovered music, and from that first encounter she never separated it…
- Tom StoppardTom Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, on the 3rd of July 1937, and he died on the 29th of November 2025, at his home in Dorset, England. He was 88. King Charles, in his tribute, quoted a line from Stoppard's own…
- Richard AppignanesiRichard Appignanesi picked up a Mexican cartoonist's book about Karl Marx in 1976. He turned it into Marx for Beginners, an English translation that read like philosophy done as a comic strip. The book found readers nobody had counted on,…
- Jim ShooterJim Shooter was fourteen years old on the 10th of February 1966. That day, editor Mort Weisinger called from DC Comics to say he wanted to buy the scripts Shooter had mailed from Pittsburgh. Weisinger wanted more. "I was doing this to save…
- Charley RosenCharley Rosen grew up in The Bronx with a body built for basketball and a mind built for argument. By the time he died in Kingston, New York, on the 13th of September 2025, he had filled more than two dozen books with his knowledge of the…
- Jane GoodallJane Goodall was the reason Louis Leakey once declared that scientists must now, in his words, "redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human." He wrote that after Goodall showed him something she had witnessed inside Gombe…