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Curated playlist

New York (state) Democrats

  • Donald Trump12 minDonald Trump was born on the 14th of June 1946 at Jamaica Hospital in Queens, New York, the fourth child of a family that was already wealthy. He would grow up in a 23-room mansion, become a millionaire in inflation-adjusted terms before…
  • Humphrey Bogart11 minHumphrey Bogart kept a small gold whistle, part of a charm bracelet he had given Lauren Bacall before they married. Engraved on it were the words, "If you want anything, just whistle." When he was cremated in 1957, that whistle was…
  • Katharine Hepburn15 minKatharine Hepburn won four Academy Awards for Best Actress, a record no one else has matched. She wore trousers before women commonly did. She refused autographs, shunned the publicity machine, and once wrestled a camera from a…
  • Bill Clinton17 minBill Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III on the 19th of August 1946, in Hope, Arkansas, three months after his father died in an automobile accident. His mother, Virginia, left him with her parents while she studied nursing in…
  • Judy Garland12 minJudy Garland was born Frances Ethel Gumm on the 10th of June 1922, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, to a family that lived and breathed performance. Her parents were vaudevillians who ran a movie theater. Her first appearance on any stage came…
  • Gwyneth Paltrow12 minGwyneth Kate Paltrow was born on the 27th of September 1972 into a family already at home in Hollywood: her mother, Blythe Danner, was a stage and screen actress; her father, Bruce Paltrow, a film producer and director. By the time she was…
  • Bob Iger12 minBob Iger started his career earning $150 a week doing menial labor on television sets. Decades later, he would oversee a company whose market capitalization grew from $56 billion to $231 billion. That arc, from entry-level grunt work to…
  • Ken Burns12 minKen Burns sat at a family dinner table in Newark, Delaware, in the summer of 1962. He was almost nine years old. The day was hot and sweltering, and when he came in from outside, he found his mother in tears. She had just learned she had…
  • John Francis Hylan9 minJohn Francis Hylan arrived in New York City in the winter of 1887 with $3.50 in his pocket, a few sets of clothes, and a $2 train ticket. He crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on foot, saw men building an elevated railroad, climbed onto the…
  • Robert Downey Jr.12 minRobert Downey Jr. was born on the 4th of April 1965 in Manhattan, into a world already saturated with film sets and controlled substances. His father, Robert Downey Sr., was a filmmaker who introduced him to marijuana before he was ten…
  • Jack Kirby11 minJack Kirby drew at least 20,318 pages of published art and another 1,385 covers across his career. In 1962 alone he published 1,158 pages. He worked twelve to fourteen hours a day at a drawing table in his home, turning out four to five…
  • Janet Yellen14 minJanet Yellen grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in a row house where her father Julius, a family physician, ran his practice out of the ground floor. The daughter of a doctor and a schoolteacher who gave up her career to raise children,…
  • Isaac Asimov12 minIsaac Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books, and on top of that he sent an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. He once said the only thing about himself severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment was his compulsion to…
  • Jamie Dimon9 minJamie Dimon was born on the 13th of March, 1956, in New York City, the grandson of a Greek immigrant banker who once worked in Smyrna and Athens and renamed the family from Papademetriou to Dimon. That chain of inheritance, from Smyrna to…
  • Franz Sigel8 minFranz Sigel was born on the 18th of November 1824 in Sinsheim, in the German state of Baden, and by the time he died in New York City on the 21st of August 1902, his name had been attached to parks, streets, townships, and statues…
  • Daniel Patrick Moynihan16 minDaniel Patrick Moynihan shined shoes at Pennsylvania Station as a boy during the Great Depression, in the same building he would later spend decades fighting to restore as a United States Senator. That arc, from the floors of Hell's…
  • Vince Lombardi15 minVince Lombardi died at 7:12 in the morning on the 3rd of September 1970, in Washington, D.C., surrounded by his wife, his parents, both of his children, and six grandchildren. He was 57. At his funeral four days later at St. Patrick's…

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