Curated playlist
Philanthropists from New York (state)
- Lady GagaStefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was born on the 28th of March, 1986, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She would grow up to sell an estimated 124 million records worldwide, become the first woman to hold the record for the…
- Ella FitzgeraldElla Jane Fitzgerald walked onto the stage of the Apollo Theater on the 21st of November 1934, planning to dance. She was 17 years old, and she had recently survived a state reformatory, homelessness, and years of grief. She had no…
- John D. RockefellerJohn Davison Rockefeller Sr. once said, "Competition is a sin." By 1900 the company he built, Standard Oil, controlled about 90 percent of the nation's oil production. He was born on the 8th of July 1839 into a large family in Upstate New…
- Mark ZuckerbergMark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on the 14th of May 1984 in White Plains, New York, and by his mid-twenties he had built the largest social network in human history. How does a dentist's son from Dobbs Ferry, New Jersey, go from writing a…
- Mariah CareyMariah Carey walked into a music executive's party in December 1988 as an unknown backup singer and left without speaking to anyone important. But she had handed her demo tape to Tommy Mottola, head of Columbia Records. He listened to it…
- Sean CombsSean Combs was born on the 4th of November 1969, in Harlem, New York City, and by the time he reached his mid-twenties he had reshaped American popular music from the inside. His label, Bad Boy Records, launched the career of the Notorious…
- Ryan ReynoldsRyan Rodney Reynolds chose not to get paid for Deadpool to make sure the film would actually get made. That detail, small as it sounds, tells you almost everything about how Reynolds built one of the most unlikely careers in Hollywood.…
- 50 Cent50 Cent was shot nine times at close range outside his grandmother's former home in South Jamaica, Queens, on the 24th of May 2000. The gunman fired with a 9mm handgun. The bullets struck his hand, arm, hip, both legs, chest, and left…
- Julia Louis-DreyfusJulia Louis-Dreyfus has won more Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Awards than any other performer in the history of television. That record belongs to a woman who first caught the attention of Saturday Night Live producers not on a major…
- Jamie DimonJamie 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…
- Armand HammerArmand Hammer died in Los Angeles in December 1990, aged 92, and was buried directly across the street from the headquarters of Occidental Petroleum - the company he had run for 33 years. That proximity was fitting. Hammer spent his life…