Ron, i.e., Rupert Grint, is 22 today.
Baseball hall-of-fame inductee Cal Ripken Jr. is 50.
Steve Guttenberg is 52. According to IMDb, Guttenberg doesn’t have a single award of any kind to his credit.
Marlee Matlin is 45. She has a best actress Oscar for Children of a Lesser God.
Dave Chappelle is 37.
Kenny Baker is 72 today. He was R2D2 in the “Star Wars” movies.
Howard Zinn was born on August 24th in 1922; he died in January.
He’s the author of A People’s History of the United States (1980). It has sold more than a million copies and continues to sell about 100,000 copies each year.
Zinn wrote more than 20 books, including the memoir You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (1994). Last year, he said: “I think it’s very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name. Socialism had a good name in this country. Socialism had Eugene Debs. It had Clarence Darrow. It had Mother Jones. It had Emma Goldman. It had several million people reading socialist newspapers around the country. Socialism basically said, hey, let’s have a kinder, gentler society. Let’s share things. Let’s have an economic system that produces things not because they’re profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism because you have to go beyond capitalism.”
Every American should read A People’s History of the United States.