7220: Maurice Ravel — The Obsessive Watchmaker Who Crafted Perfect Music | pplpod
Maurice Ravel composed music the way a Swiss watchmaker assembles a timepiece — every gear placed with microscopic precision, every surface polished until it gleamed. He spent years on single composit...
16 Jun 21min
7219: Marlene Dietrich — The Hollywood Icon Who Fought Fascism with Glamour and Grit | pplpod
Marlene Dietrich left Germany, renounced her citizenship, and spent World War II entertaining Allied troops on the front lines while the Nazis put a bounty on her head. She weaponized her glamour agai...
16 Jun 21min
7218: Magic Johnson — From Court Vision to Billion-Dollar Business Empire | pplpod
Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive in 1991 and the world assumed he was dying. Instead he built a business empire worth over a billion dollars, became part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a...
16 Jun 20min
7217: Lucille Ball — The Fearless Architect of Modern Television | pplpod
Lucille Ball was a failed B-movie actress who became the most powerful woman in television history. She co-founded Desilu Productions, pioneered the three-camera sitcom format, greenlit both Star Trek...
16 Jun 19min
7216: Lead Belly — The Man Who Sang His Way Out of Prison Twice | pplpod
Lead Belly was serving time for murder when the folklorist John Lomax recorded him in a Louisiana prison. His singing was so powerful that the governor pardoned him. He had already sung his way out of...
16 Jun 16min
7215: John Lennon — The Journey from Rage to Stillness and Back Again | pplpod
John Lennon wrote Imagine and then screamed his childhood trauma into a microphone on Plastic Ono Band. He preached peace while terrorizing the people closest to him. He abandoned his first son, then ...
16 Jun 20min
7214: Joan Crawford — The Relentless Survivor Beyond the Wire Hanger Mythology | pplpod
Joan Crawford reinvented herself more often than any star in Hollywood history, surviving the transition from silent films to talkies, from ingenue to dramatic actress, from has-been to Oscar winner. ...
16 Jun 21min
7213: Sergei Rachmaninoff — How He Survived Depression, Revolution, and Exile | pplpod
Sergei Rachmaninoff suffered a creative breakdown so severe after the failure of his First Symphony that he could not compose for three years. Hypnotherapy brought him back, and he wrote his Second Pi...
16 Jun 22min
