pplpod

Ella Fitzgerald had the purest vocal instrument in jazz history, but the life behind that voice was anything but smooth. She was orphaned as a teenager, spent time in a brutal reformatory, was nearly ...

14 Juni 20min

Ludwig Wittgenstein inherited one of the largest fortunes in Europe and gave every penny away so he could think without distraction. Then he wrote two of the most important works in the history of phi...

14 Juni 23min

Susan B. Anthony spent fifty years fighting for women's suffrage and never lived to see it happen. She was arrested for voting illegally in 1872, refused to pay the fine, and used the trial as a platf...

14 Juni 22min

Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in 1949 and gave the feminist movement its intellectual foundation with a single sentence: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." She lived as radicall...

14 Juni 20min

Michelangelo was not the serene, cerebral artist of popular imagination. He was a brawler whose nose was broken in a fistfight with a rival sculptor, a miser who lived in squalor despite enormous weal...

14 Juni 20min

Mark Twain was born in 1835 when Halley's Comet streaked across the sky, and he predicted he would die when it returned. He was right — he died on April 21, 1910, one day after the comet's closest app...

14 Juni 19min

Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina — two of the greatest novels ever written — then renounced fiction, gave away his fortune, dressed as a peasant, and spent his final decades preaching...

14 Juni 21min

Karl Marx was a university student who fought duels, a journalist who got expelled from multiple countries, a philosopher who spent decades in poverty while writing the book he believed would overthro...

14 Juni 24min