Four years ago today was the 7.0 M earthquake in Haiti that killed over 200,000 people. The death toll was so high because it struck the most populated area of the country. In all, over three million people were affected by it. I think Haiti is an embarrassment to the west. There is no reason for us to allow its people to live in such poverty and suffer so much. But of course, that’s the modern American way: people are divided into the winners and the losers—the producers and the moochers. If someone was a winner, they would be smart enough not to be born in Haiti. The country is still suffering as a result of that earthquake four years ago. But you won’t see it covered much in America. Al Jazeera America did a pretty good job of covering it the last couple of days, as far as I could tell. For more information see CEPR’s Haiti Relief and Reconstruction Watch.

On this day in 1729, the conservative icon Edmund Burke was born. Actually, he was fairly liberal until the French Revolution. And then he saw that some people we behaving badly and so he ran back to the womb of conservatism: faith in aristocracy. In other words, he was a reactionary. But it’s important to remember that although people like David Brooks and George Will like to quote Burke, there is little that connects him to the modern conservative movement. Regardless, if you ever feel the need to read Burke, read William Hazlitt instead.

Other birthdays: sculptor Francois Duquesnoy (1597); novelist and playwright Frances Brooke (1724); French painter Jean Beraud (1849); writer Jack London (1876); singer Tex Ritter (1905); philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906); singer-songwriter Ray Price (1926); screenwriter Alan Sharp (1934); boxer Joe Frazier (1944); actor Kirstie Alley (63); one of the worst people in the world and a substantial reason our politics is so bad, Rush Limbaugh (63); crime fiction novelist Walter Mosley (62); radio personality Howard Stern (60); actor Oliver Platt (54); probably evil businessman Jeff Bezos (50); and multi-media artist Rob Zombie (49).

The day, however, belongs to the great painter John Singer Sargent who was born on this day in 1856. He was primarily a portrait painter, and an extremely successful one. Those are mostly what you see when you see him in a museum, because that’s what people paid him for. But his landscapes and city paintings are quite different, and I think much more compelling. A good example of this is the following Street in Venice, that I think is just wonderful:

Happy birthday John Singer Sargent!

It turns out that Paul Revere was really born on this day and not on 21 December, as I noted before. It’s that stupid Old Style and New Style date thing that screws me up all the time. Whatever. It’s not like he’s an important guy. If it weren’t for Longfellow’s poem, he wouldn’t even be in Wikipedia!

Speaking of founding “fathers,” on this day in 1752, Betsy Ross was born. I find her interesting for a number of reasons. First, she was married three times. Two of her husbands died in the Revolutionary War. Her third husband was in bad health and eventually died for whatever reasons. She knew George Washington because at the age of 21, she eloped with an Episcopalian (Ross was raised as a Quaker), who went to the same church as Washington. Anyway, the main thing she did with the flag was to change the stars from six points to the easier to create 5 point stars we know and love today. She and her husbands were very successful in the upholstering business. But what’s most interesting about her is how she has been used as a symbol in American life. See girls: you can be part of history too! Look, I think sewing and needle work and all that is very important. But the truth is that we had a terribly sexist society that stopped women from making the kinds of public contributions to society that they were capable of. (They made many, most untold, private contributions.) And the fact that we made a big deal of Betsy Ross when I was in school 200 years later is just pathetic.

The great writer E M Forster was born in 1879. He is best known for writing A Room with a View and A Passage to India. But most people know him for having written the book that every Merchant-Ivory film was based on. Oh, I’m kidding! But sometimes it does seem that way. What I find most interesting about him is his short story “The Machine Stops.” One doesn’t much think of Forster was a science fiction writer, but there you go. The whole story is online, and I highly recommend reading it. It’s about 10,000 words long—so something even I could read in bed before going to sleep. And what is perhaps more interesting about it is that it really isn’t that different from A Room With a View in terms of its theme. Fundamentally, he was always writing about people trying to connect with each other. He may have been pessimistic about that much of the time, but he always held out the hope. Anyway, you can also watch a BBC production of “The Machine Stops,” although it will actually take less time to read:

The great theoretical physicist Satyendra Nath Bose was born in 1894. He is best known for his early work in quantum mechanics, especially Bose–Einstein statistics, which has to do with the ways in which a set of non-interacting bosons can arrange themselves in different energy states. Now what are bosons? They are one of the two classes of elementary particles that act according to Bose-Einstein statistics. The other kind of elementary particles are the fermions. It is probably easiest to think of fermions as the “stuff” of matter and bosons as the “glue” of matter. And before you ask, yes: at that level, our whole intuition of what matter is breaks down. Regardless, Bose was one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century and almost no one would even know his name except that another great physicist Paul Dirac coined the term “boson.” Bose, like the elementary particles named after him, was a kind of glue. He did the work that linked the earliest quantum mechanics of people like Planck with the “new” quantum mechanics of people like Heisenberg.

J Edgar Hoover was born in 1895. More or less a villain of history, I have no real interest in his day job. I’m interested in his sexual proclivities. It is commonly assumed that he was a closet transvestite. I seriously doubt that. In fact, I think that is about as likely to be the case as it is that 9/11 was a government conspiracy. The claim is based only on the say so of one very unreliable person. And people continue to believe it because it is delicious. But that doesn’t make it true. What is almost certainly the case is that Hoover was gay. I don’t necessarily think he ever even acted on it. The man might well have died a virgin. But there is no doubt that he had a very special relationship with Clyde Tolson. Regardless of the details of that relationship, it was sweet. After Hoover’s death, Tolson’s health immediately deteriorated, and he was dead within three years. Hoover left his entire estate to Tolson and the two are buried together. Whatever their relationship, we need more like it. Above on the left is a picture of the two of them together, probably from the late 50s or early 60s.

The great writer J D Salinger was born in 1919. Look, I’ve had some very harsh words to say about the man. And if it turns out that he was working very hard all these years and he produced great stuff, I will take much of it back. I still find the whole thing obnoxious, however. The trolling for young English grad students is creepy. And I don’t buy the whole spiritual element of avoiding celebrity. For one thing, he certainly wasn’t against using his celebrity to get himself laid. What’s more, part of being a public writer is having a conversation with your readers. By cutting off all contact with his readers, he was snubbing the communal aspects of writing. And it is for this reason that I suspect when his work comes out we are going to find that it’s going to be some kind of bad Faulkner. But I’ll be happy to be surprised.

Other birthdays: actor Dana Andrews (1909); “Stymie” actor, Matthew Beard (1925); playwright Larry L King (1929); fine actor Frank Langella (75); comedian Don Novello (70); rapper Grandmaster Flash (55); and actor Verne Troyer (44).

The day, however, belongs to the great Baroque painter Bartolome Esteban Murillo who was born on this day in 1618. He is best known for his religious painting. And rightly so; it’s great. And that was where the money was in Catholic Spain of the 17th century. But in many ways, he is the successor of Diego Velazquez, another painter I greatly admire. And so I think we see Murillo at his best when he was painting the street life of Seville and Madrid. For example, here is The Little Fruit Seller, which he painted in 1670 in Seville:

Happy birthday Bartolome Esteban Murillo!

This is the last birthday post of the year. But it is not the last birthday post. For one thing, I’m not sure what I would do without my birthday posts. Yes, I complain about them all the time. Yet they give my life a certainty that I just don’t get anywhere else. It’s like the old stories of Winchester Mystery House, that the owner, Sarah Winchester, thought she would die if she stopped building it. Except in my case, if I knew I would die if I stopped writing these things, I wouldn’t even be writing this one. That’s not because I especially want to die. It’s just that I don’t much care. And since not writing this series will not go along with losing the responsibility of continued existence, I might as well keep writing. A man has to work, you know.

The second reason this isn’t my last birthday post is that it hasn’t been a year. This series started just by chance on 26 February 2013, with Fats Domino at 85. It wasn’t much of a post: just the mention of his birthday and a video of him doing “Blueberry Hill.” The next day, I did Irwin Shaw, because it was his 100th birthday. That was a hard one, because John Steinbeck was born that same day 11 years earlier. Both authors have been enormously important to me. Over the year, based in part on reader comments, I’ve changed the format of the series. At one time I just listed people, going into depth when I felt like it. Now I pick a few people to talk about in a bit of depth and then dump the rest of them into my “other birthdays” paragraph.

I do think that on the 26th of February, I will change things. But I suspect that I will give it about as much thought as I gave the series when I started it. Anyway, onward. Today’s a big day, which is unfortunate, because I’m exhausted.

On this day in 1714, the mathematician Arima Yoriyuki was born. I don’t know much about him except that at the age of 51, he was able to find a rational number that approximated π to 29 digits. I have no idea how he did it. But it reminds of what I used to force my physics students to do. I gave them strings and rulers and and made them measure (as best they could) the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Now that’s very simple. Everyone knows that c = 2πr. But until they did it, they really didn’t understand what π was. It was just some number.

John Denver was born in 1943. What most people don’t know about him is that he was a big proponent of civilians in space. In fact, he was supposed to go up on the space shuttle. But he was prevented, because the government wanted a school teacher to go up instead. So Christa McAuliffe went and she died. But after that Denver still seemed to be kind of angry that he had been bumped. So I wasn’t surprised when 12 years later, he crashed into the Pacific Ocean and died. He was living on borrowed time. Not a great musician, but he had his moments and he was a great live performer. His extreme vibrato offends me to this day. But he did an excellent job of picking other people’s music to do. That included especially John Prine, but it extended to his own people like John Martin Sommers who wrote “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” and Mike Taylor who co-wrote “Rocky Mountain High” with him. And like many artists, he really did get better as his popularity waned. Anyway, here he is doing “Rocky Mountain High” live:

Ben Kingsley is 70 today. He is absolutely one of my favorite actors. He was the only thing that made Iron Man 3 even slightly watchable. And I’d love to provide you with a nice video clip of Kingsley doing his thing. But with an actor like him, how can you pick a single thing? So I’ll provide you with the trailer of a really good movie that you probably haven’t seen, Turtle Diary (typically not available on DVD):

Other birthdays: German expressionist painter Max Pechstein (1881); songwriter Jule Styne (1905); actor Anthony Hopkins (76); guitarist Andy Summers (71); and gymnast Gabby Douglas (18).

The day, however, belongs to the great painter Henri Matisse who was born in 1869. Unlike many painters, Matisse was truly creative. That isn’t to put other painters down. Think of Vincent van Gogh: he had a vision—a single vision. And he repeated it again and again in different contexts. And we need that. But Matisse was constantly changing. I know that a lot of people think this isn’t so. They think of Red Room and that is what Matisse is for them. Well, if that is all Matisse were to me, he’d hardly make the “other birthdays” list. He’s hard to pin down stylistically. Some of his stuff seems downright neoclassical to me. Other seems to verge on the primitivism. Regardless, it is more expansive and compelling than anything by Picasso.

The following is one of his last paintings, Annelies, White Tulips and Anemones. He painted it while in poor health and that perhaps explains its simplicity. But I think it works, especially the way the colors work together:

Happy birthday Henri Matisse!