Podcast Episodes
Back to Search7297: 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…
6 days, 1 hour 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…
6 days, 1 hour ago
7295: Leonard Cohen — How Betrayal, Bankruptcy, and Buddhism Produced Hallelujah | pplpod
Episode 7295
Leonard Cohen wrote eighty drafts of "Hallelujah" before he was satisfied, and his record label refused to release the album containing it. The song …
6 days, 1 hour ago
7294: Led Zeppelin — How Four Musicians Hijacked the Music Industry | pplpod
Episode 7294
Led Zeppelin refused to release singles, rarely gave interviews, and let their manager Peter Grant intimidate promoters into unprecedented revenue sp…
6 days, 1 hour ago
7291: Albrecht Durer — How a Renaissance Printmaker Went Viral Across Europe | pplpod
Episode 7291
Albrecht Durer made prints so technically brilliant that they were copied, forged, and distributed across Europe within months of their creation. He …
6 days, 1 hour ago
7292: Gene Kelly — How One Dancer Brought Athletic Power to the Hollywood Musical | pplpod
Episode 7292
Gene Kelly danced like an athlete and choreographed like a filmmaker. He brought a muscular, grounded physicality to the Hollywood musical that made …
6 days, 1 hour ago
7288: Erik Satie — The Eccentric Composer Who Invented Ambient Music a Century Early | pplpod
Episode 7288
Erik Satie composed music he called "furniture music" — designed to be heard but not listened to, meant to fill a room the way wallpaper fills a wall…
6 days, 1 hour ago
7289: Gabriel Faure — The Radical French Voice That Reshaped Modern Harmony | pplpod
Episode 7289
Gabriel Faure composed music so subtle that audiences often missed how radical it was. His harmonies drifted between keys in ways that anticipated De…
6 days, 1 hour ago
7290: Hieronymus Bosch — The Medieval Painter Whose Nightmares Still Haunt Us | pplpod
Episode 7290
Hieronymus Bosch painted monsters, demons, and torments so vivid and so strange that art historians have spent five centuries trying to figure out wh…
6 days, 1 hour ago
7285: Bruce Springsteen — The Boss and the Myth of the American Working Class | pplpod
Episode 7285
Bruce Springsteen grew up in a dying factory town in New Jersey, watched his father move between dead-end jobs, and turned that anger and despair int…
6 days, 1 hour ago