7228: Ted Williams — The Science of Hitting and the Physics of Immortality | pplpod
Ted Williams approached hitting a baseball as a physics problem. He divided the strike zone into seventy-seven cells, calculated the probability of getting a hit in each one, and refused to swing at a...
16 Jun 17min
7227: Spencer Tracy — The Demons That Invented Modern Screen Acting | pplpod
Spencer Tracy won two consecutive Academy Awards and made it look like he was doing nothing on camera. That apparent effortlessness was the invention. Before Tracy, film actors performed. After Tracy,...
16 Jun 16min
7226: Sophia Loren — From Wartime Curtains to the Academy Awards | pplpod
Sophia Loren grew up so poor during World War II that her family made clothes from curtains. She was dismissed as just another Italian beauty until she delivered a performance in Two Women so devastat...
16 Jun 20min
7225: Dmitri Shostakovich — Terror, Genius, and the Midnight Elevator | pplpod
Dmitri Shostakovich slept every night with a packed suitcase by his bed, waiting for the secret police to come. He composed some of the greatest symphonies of the twentieth century while living under ...
16 Jun 25min
7224: Sergio Leone — The Italian Outsider Who Reinvented the American Cowboy | pplpod
Sergio Leone had never been to America when he reinvented the Western. He cast a television actor named Clint Eastwood, shot in the Spanish desert, scored the films with Ennio Morricone's operatic mus...
16 Jun 18min
7223: Richard Pryor — The Comedian Who Turned His Own Fire Into Comedy Gold | pplpod
Richard Pryor grew up in his grandmother's brothel, was molested as a child, and set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine. He turned every one of those experiences into material so honest and so f...
16 Jun 20min
7222: Paul McCartney — From Skiffle Bands to the Edge of AI and Silence | pplpod
Paul McCartney heard skiffle on the radio as a Liverpool teenager and it changed his life. Seven decades later he used artificial intelligence to extract John Lennon's voice from a degraded cassette t...
16 Jun 21min
7221: Mick Jagger — The Rock Star Who Was Always a CEO in Disguise | pplpod
Mick Jagger studied at the London School of Economics, and every decision he made after dropping out reflected that education. While Keith Richards played the outlaw, Jagger ran the Rolling Stones lik...
16 Jun 18min
