Podcast Episodes
Back to Search7199: Thelonious Monk — The Brilliant Wrong Notes That Changed Jazz Forever | pplpod
Episode 7199
Thelonious Monk played notes that sounded wrong to everyone except Thelonious Monk. His angular melodies, dissonant chords, and unpredictable silence…
1 week, 1 day ago
7196: Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Opium Dreams and the Messy Genius of English Poetry | pplpod
Episode 7196
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan after waking from an opium dream and was interrupted by a visitor before he could finish it. The fragment be…
1 week, 1 day ago
7197: D.H. Lawrence — Banned Books, Scandal, and the Fire of English Literature | pplpod
Episode 7197
D.H. Lawrence wrote novels so frank about sexuality that they were banned, burned, and prosecuted for obscenity. The 1960 trial over Lady Chatterley'…
1 week, 1 day ago
7198: Satyajit Ray — The Uncompromising Eye of Indian Cinema | pplpod
Episode 7198
Satyajit Ray had no film training when he began shooting Pather Panchali. He pawned his wife's jewelry to fund it, shot on weekends over three years,…
1 week, 1 day ago
7193: Percy Bysshe Shelley — The Unburnt Heart and a Radical Poet's Wild Life | pplpod
Episode 7193
When Percy Bysshe Shelley's body was cremated on an Italian beach, his friend Edward Trelawny reached into the fire and pulled out his heart, which h…
1 week, 1 day ago
7194: Rimsky-Korsakov — The Naval Officer Who Became Russia's Greatest Orchestrator | pplpod
Episode 7194
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval cadet who composed a symphony while sailing around the world, despite having almost no formal musical training. H…
1 week, 1 day ago
7191: Domenico Scarlatti — How Spain Transformed a Baroque Italian into a Genius | pplpod
Episode 7191
Domenico Scarlatti spent the first half of his career in his father's shadow, writing competent Italian operas that no one remembers. Then he moved t…
1 week, 1 day ago
7190: Stephen King — The Real Monsters Behind America's Master of Horror | pplpod
Episode 7190
Stephen King has sold over 350 million books by writing about monsters, but the real horrors in his work come from alcoholism, domestic violence, iso…
1 week, 1 day ago
7195: B.B. King — The Man Who Made Lucille Sing and the Blues Weep | pplpod
Episode 7195
B.B. King named his guitar Lucille after nearly dying in a fire caused by two men fighting over a woman by that name. He played her every night for t…
1 week, 1 day ago
7192: H.P. Lovecraft — The Tragic Recluse Who Created Cosmic Horror | pplpod
Episode 7192
H.P. Lovecraft died in poverty at forty-six, unknown outside a small circle of pulp magazine readers. Today his invented mythology — Cthulhu, Arkham,…
1 week, 1 day ago