Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchJo van Gogh-Bonger: The Widow Who Saved Vincent van Gogh's Art From Oblivion
Episode 6809
Vincent van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime. When he died, his brother Theo inherited hundreds of canvases nobody wanted — and when Theo died …
1 week, 1 day ago
Wilma Rudolph: The Polio Survivor Who Outran Segregation and Won Three Olympic Golds
Episode 6810
Wilma Rudolph wore a leg brace until she was twelve. Doctors told her she might never walk normally. Eight years later, she was the fastest woman on …
1 week, 1 day ago
Frank Sinatra: The Scars, the Rage, and the Voice That Defined an Era
Episode 6808
Frank Sinatra was born with forceps scars on his face and a chip on his shoulder that never healed. The skinny kid from Hoboken who could barely read…
1 week, 1 day ago
Babe Ruth: The Reformatory Boy Who Became Baseball's Greatest Legend
Episode 6807
Babe Ruth was essentially an orphan. His parents sent him to a Baltimore reform school at seven because they could not or would not raise him. A Xave…
1 week, 1 day ago
Langston Hughes: The Many Masks of the Poet Who Gave Black America Its Voice
Episode 6804
Langston Hughes wrote poems that sounded like jazz, stories that read like blues, and essays that cut like razors — all while navigating the impossib…
1 week, 1 day ago
Billie Jean King: The Price She Paid for Revolutionizing Women's Sports
Episode 6805
Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes in 1973 before ninety million television viewers and proved that women's athletics d…
1 week, 1 day ago
Henri Matisse: The Law Clerk Who Painted with Scissors and Reinvented Art Twice
Episode 6803
Henri Matisse was training to be a lawyer when his mother handed him a box of paints during a bout of appendicitis — and he never went back to law. H…
1 week, 1 day ago
Pablo Picasso: The Genius, the Cruelty, and the Women He Destroyed
Episode 6801
Pablo Picasso reinvented art more times than any other painter in history — Cubism, collage, assemblage, neoclassicism — and left a trail of psycholo…
1 week, 1 day ago
Ludwig van Beethoven: The Human Drama Behind the Silent Genius Who Changed Music Forever
Episode 6802
Beethoven began losing his hearing in his late twenties — a catastrophe for any person, an unthinkable one for a composer. He considered suicide, wro…
1 week, 1 day ago
Gustav Klimt: The Forest Demon Behind the Gold Leaf Masterpieces
Episode 6800
Gustav Klimt's shimmering gold leaf portraits now sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, but the man behind them was no gilded aesthete. He was th…
1 week, 1 day ago