pplpod

Wolfgang Mozart was not the wigged automaton of popular imagination. He was a foul-mouthed, gambling, hard-drinking rebel who told the Archbishop of Salzburg to go to hell, got literally kicked out of...

14 Kesä 21min

Charles Dickens championed the poor, exposed workhouse cruelty, and created some of the most beloved characters in English literature. He was also a controlling husband who publicly humiliated his wif...

14 Kesä 22min

On May 29, 1913, the audience at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris erupted into a full-scale riot during the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. The pounding rhythms, savage disson...

14 Kesä 24min

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the philosophical foundations of modern democracy, argued that civilization corrupts natural human goodness, and inspired the French Revolution. He also abandoned all five ...

14 Kesä 25min

James Joyce left Dublin at twenty-two and never lived there again, yet he spent the rest of his life writing about nothing else. Ulysses recreated a single day in Dublin — June 16, 1904 — in such obse...

14 Kesä 20min

Roberto Clemente was the first Latin American player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, a right fielder with one of the most feared throwing arms in the sport's history, and a man who fought rac...

14 Kesä 21min

Elvis Presley is buried under so many layers of myth — the jumpsuit, the Vegas shows, the sightings — that the actual human being has nearly disappeared. Before he was the King, he was a desperately p...

14 Kesä 25min

Jackson Pollock dripped, poured, and flung paint onto canvases laid flat on the floor — and physicists have since discovered that his technique produced fractal patterns with mathematical properties t...

14 Kesä 21min