7188: Samuel Johnson — The Man Who Defined the English Language Alone | pplpod
Samuel Johnson spent nine years compiling a dictionary of the English language almost entirely by himself. The French Academy needed forty scholars and fifty-five years to produce theirs. Johnson did ...
16 Juni 21min
7187: Bob Marley — The Bullet Scars Behind the World's Most Famous Smile | pplpod
Two days before a peace concert in Kingston, gunmen burst into Bob Marley's home and shot him, his wife, and his manager. He performed the concert anyway, lifting his shirt onstage to show the bandage...
16 Juni 25min
7186: The Blues Giant Who Traded Ledgers for Licks | pplpod
Before the stage lights and the wailing guitar, there was an accounting textbook. One of the blues' greatest figures started with plans for a respectable career in numbers before the pull of music pro...
16 Juni 24min
7185: W.B. Yeats — The Bizarre Afterlife of Ireland's Greatest Poet | pplpod
W.B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize, led the Irish Literary Revival, and wrote some of the most quoted poetry in the English language. Then he died in France in 1939, and things got strange — his body was ...
16 Juni 19min
7184: Sidney Poitier — From Dishwasher to Hollywood’s Barrier-Breaking Leading Man | pplpod
Sidney Poitier arrived in New York from the Bahamas barely literate and working as a dishwasher. He taught himself to read with newspapers, was laughed out of his first audition, then became the first...
16 Juni 21min
7183: Sergei Prokofiev — The Composer Who Died in Stalin’s Shadow on the Same Day | pplpod
Sergei Prokofiev died on March 5, 1953 — the same day as Joseph Stalin. The dictator’s death consumed all public attention, and one of the century’s greatest composers was buried with almost no mourne...
16 Juni 20min
7182: Prince — The Paradox of Total Control and Purple Genius | pplpod
Prince played twenty-seven instruments on his debut album. He wrote, produced, and performed nearly everything himself, maintaining that control for his entire career. The paradox: the man who control...
16 Juni 20min
7181: Modest Mussorgsky — The Aristocrat Who Wrote Masterpieces While Living in Squalor | pplpod
Modest Mussorgsky was born into Russian aristocracy and died in a charity hospital wearing a borrowed dressing gown. Between those points he composed some of the most original music of the nineteenth ...
16 Juni 20min
