pplpod

Marilyn Monroe was not the dizzy blonde the studios sold to the public. She studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, founded her own production company to gain creative control, negotiated con...

14 Jun 23min

Diego Maradona scored two goals against England in the 1986 World Cup quarterfinal. The first was a blatant handball he credited to "the hand of God." The second, scored four minutes later, was the gr...

14 Jun 21min

Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling in the first round of their 1938 rematch and became the most important Black American athlete before Jackie Robinson — a man who carried the hopes of an entire race...

14 Jun 21min

Alfred Hitchcock built a career on fear — but the terror in his films was drawn from a well of personal anxiety that consumed him. The man who directed Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window was obsessed wi...

14 Jun 21min

Claude Monet spent his final decades painting through cataracts that progressively distorted his vision, turning the world into a blur of reds and browns. The late Water Lilies — now considered among ...

14 Jun 19min

Geronimo spent twenty-five years fighting the Mexican and American armies with a guerrilla force that never numbered more than a few dozen warriors — and held off thousands of troops across two nation...

14 Jun 20min

Joseph Smith began his public life peering into a stovepipe hat, claiming a magical stone could reveal buried treasure. Within fifteen years, he had founded a new religion, built a city, assembled a p...

14 Jun 15min

The garden-store Francis of Assisi — the serene figure surrounded by birds and bunnies — bears almost no resemblance to the real man. The historical Francis was a wealthy merchant's son who stripped n...

14 Jun 24min