7268: Alfred the Great — The King Who Built England from Mud and Marshes | pplpod
Alfred the Great was hiding in a swamp when the Viking invasions nearly erased the last independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom. He rebuilt his army from nothing, defeated the Danes, and then did something no...
17 Juni 23min
7267: Judy Garland — The Industry That Built and Broke a Legend | pplpod
Judy Garland was put on amphetamines to keep her energy up and barbiturates to bring her down, starting at age thirteen. MGM controlled her diet, her sleep, and her image while she sang her way throug...
17 Juni 21min
7266: Wayne Gretzky — The Human Behind the 99 and Hockey's Greatest Mind | pplpod
Wayne Gretzky was too small, too slow, and too weak to dominate professional hockey. He dominated it anyway. He holds sixty-one NHL records, and his career point total is so far beyond second place th...
17 Juni 20min
7265: Baron Haussmann — The Fugitive Who Demolished Old Paris and Built a New One | pplpod
Baron Haussmann tore down medieval Paris and replaced it with the wide boulevards, uniform facades, and grand public spaces that define the city today. He did it under Napoleon III's protection, with ...
17 Juni 21min
7264: The Failed Pianist Who Abandoned Music and Mapped the American West | pplpod
Before he became one of the great explorers of the American frontier, he was a young musician whose dreams of a concert career fell short. The same discipline and obsessive attention to detail that fa...
17 Juni 20min
7263: Werner Herzog — The Ecstatic Truth of Cinema's Most Fearless Director | pplpod
Werner Herzog ate his own shoe on camera, dragged a steamship over a mountain in the Amazon, and was shot by a sniper during an interview and kept talking. He has made over seventy films in conditions...
17 Juni 22min
7262: Edward I — The Chivalric Tyrant Who Forged Modern England Through Conquest | pplpod
Edward I built the greatest castle network in medieval Europe, codified English common law, expelled the Jews from England, and crushed Wales so thoroughly that he gave the conquered nation a prince f...
17 Juni 14min
7261: Jack Nicholson — The Calculated Mind Behind Hollywood's Greatest Madman | pplpod
Jack Nicholson made madness look effortless. The raised eyebrows, the wolfish grin, the explosions of rage in The Shining and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest all seemed spontaneous. They were not. Beh...
17 Juni 21min
