Podcast Episodes
Back to Search7303: Mae West — The Woman Who Turned Censorship into a Fortune | pplpod
Episode 7303
Mae West was arrested for obscenity, spent ten days in jail, and used the publicity to become the highest-paid woman in America. She wrote her own sc…
3 days, 12 hours ago
7304: Marcel Duchamp — The Twenty-Five-Year Magic Trick That Fooled the Art World | pplpod
Episode 7304
Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal to an art exhibition in 1917, signed it "R. Mutt," and called it Fountain. Then he announced he had given up art to…
3 days, 12 hours ago
7301: Joni Mitchell — Life from Both Sides Now and the Cost of Artistic Reinvention | pplpod
Episode 7301
Joni Mitchell gave up her daughter for adoption, wrote the songs that defined a generation, and then abandoned the folk music that made her famous to…
3 days, 12 hours ago
7299: John Cage — The Composer Who Invented Silence and Changed What Music Could Be | pplpod
Episode 7299
John Cage composed a piece called 4'33" in which no one plays a note for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. It was not a joke. It was the logical…
3 days, 12 hours ago
7302: Leonard Bernstein — The Double Life of America's Most Famous Conductor | pplpod
Episode 7302
Leonard Bernstein composed West Side Story, conducted the New York Philharmonic, taught millions about music on television, and spent his private lif…
3 days, 12 hours ago
7300: John Updike — Suburbia, Sex, and the Search for Salvation in Middle America | pplpod
Episode 7300
John Updike wrote about suburban adultery with the precision of a jeweler and the moral seriousness of a theologian. His Rabbit novels tracked one or…
3 days, 12 hours ago
7293: Christoph Willibald Gluck — How One Composer Saved Opera from Its Own Ego | pplpod
Episode 7293
Christoph Willibald Gluck walked into the most extravagant art form in Europe and told it to shut up. Eighteenth-century opera had become a showcase …
3 days, 12 hours ago
7296: Claudio Monteverdi — The Composer Who Made Music Feel Human for the First Time | pplpod
Episode 7296
Claudio Monteverdi took the rigid polyphonic music of the Renaissance and bent it until it could express individual human emotion. His opera L'Orfeo …
3 days, 12 hours ago
7297: Saul Bellow — How a Chicago Novelist Hacked the American Literary Establishment | pplpod
Episode 7297
Saul Bellow was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who grew up speaking Yiddish in Chicago and muscled his way into the center of American literatu…
3 days, 12 hours ago
7298: Joan Didion — The Architecture of Sentences and the Art of Controlled Collapse | pplpod
Episode 7298
Joan Didion wrote sentences so precisely engineered that they made California wildfires and nervous breakdowns feel like the same kind of event — ine…
3 days, 12 hours ago