7172: George Bernard Shaw — How the Original Provocateur Hacked the Attention Economy | pplpod
George Bernard Shaw understood a century before social media that controversy is currency. He made himself the most quoted man in the English-speaking world by saying outrageous things with absolute c...
16 Jun 23min
7171: Antonio Vivaldi — The Red Priest Who Vanished from Music History for 200 Years | pplpod
Antonio Vivaldi was the most famous musician in Europe during his lifetime. Within a decade of his death he was completely forgotten. It took nearly two hundred years for scholars to rediscover that t...
16 Jun 22min
7170: The Beatles — Hamburg Grit and the Most Spectacular Implosion in Music History | pplpod
Before the screaming fans and matching suits, the Beatles were five rough Liverpool teenagers playing eight-hour sets in Hamburg strip clubs. They slept behind a cinema screen, took pills to stay awak...
16 Jun 17min
7169: Gregory Peck — The Private Struggles Behind Hollywood’s Moral Compass | pplpod
The American Film Institute named Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch the greatest movie hero in cinema history. Audiences saw unshakable integrity. What they did not see was the grief, self-doubt, and perso...
16 Jun 22min
7168: Charlton Heston — From Marching with MLK to Leading the NRA | pplpod
Charlton Heston marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 and lobbied Congress for the Civil Rights Act. Three decades later he stood before the NRA holding a rifle overhead. The journey betwee...
16 Jun 17min
7167: Charles Mingus — Jazz Symphonies, Volcanic Rage, and a Cat Training Manual | pplpod
Charles Mingus composed jazz that sounded like a symphony orchestra arguing. He fought club owners with his fists, fired musicians mid-set, and once chased a trombonist offstage with a fire axe. He al...
16 Jun 24min
7166: Arthur C. Clarke — Prophet of the Space Age Who Saw the Future First | pplpod
Arthur C. Clarke predicted geostationary communications satellites in 1945, two decades before one existed. The boy from Somerset who mapped the moon through a homemade telescope became the twentieth ...
16 Jun 22min
7165: Agatha Christie — The Secret Life Beyond the Queen of Crime | pplpod
Agatha Christie sold two billion books and created two of fiction’s most enduring detectives. Her real life held bigger mysteries — an eleven-day disappearance that baffled Scotland Yard, wartime pois...
16 Jun 18min
