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Soulfeedz, Melbourne (2026)

05/09/2026

Neil McGill Gorsuch was born on August 29, 1967, in Denver, Colorado. His mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, made her own mark on Washington years earlier as the first woman to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, serving from 1981 to 1983.

Gorsuch graduated from Columbia University, where he founded a student newspaper of his own. He went on to Harvard Law School, earning his degree in 1991 on a Truman Scholarship.

Later, as a Marshall Scholar, he earned a doctorate in legal philosophy from Oxford University in 2004, writing his dissertation on the ethics of assisted dying and euthanasia.

He clerked for federal appellate judge David Sentelle, then for two U.S. Supreme Court justices, Byron White and Anthony Kennedy, before moving into private practice and later government service at the Justice Department under President George W. Bush.

In 2006, Bush nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The Senate confirmed him unanimously by voice vote.

Justice Antonin Scalia died on February 13, 2016, leaving a Supreme Court vacancy that stayed open for more than a year through the rest of that election year.

On January 31, 2017, newly inaugurated President Trump announced his intent to nominate Gorsuch to fill the seat.

Senate Democrats attempted to filibuster the nomination. Republicans responded by invoking the "nuclear option," changing Senate rules so that Supreme Court nominees could advance with a simple majority instead of 60 votes — the same maneuver Senate Democrats had used in 2013 for lower court and executive branch nominees.

The Senate confirmed Gorsuch on April 7, 2017, by a vote of 54-45, with three Democrats joining every Republican in support. He was sworn in three days later, becoming the 113th justice in the Court's history at age 49.

He's since built a reputation as a reliable conservative vote, joining the majority in 2022's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade. But he's also broken from expectations at times — in 2020, he wrote the majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, extending federal workplace protections to LGBTQ employees.

Outside the courtroom, Gorsuch has kept close to his Colorado roots, splitting time between Washington and Boulder, where he's known for hunting, fishing, and skiing.

05/09/2026

Ketanji Onyika Brown was born on September 14, 1970, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Miami, Florida.

She graduated magna cm laude from Harvard University, then earned her law degree from Harvard Law School, where she served on the Harvard Law Review.

Her early legal career took a path unlike almost anyone who came before her on the nation's highest court: she worked as a federal public defender, representing clients who couldn't afford their own attorney.

She went on to serve as a U.S. District Court judge, then was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in June 2021, by a 53-44 vote that included support from three Republican senators.

On February 25, 2022, President Biden nominated her to fill the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice Stephen Breyer.

Her confirmation hearings drew national attention, including a widely discussed exchange with Senator Marsha Blackburn, who asked her to define the word "woman." Jackson declined to offer one, responding, "I'm not a biologist."

The Senate confirmed her on April 7, 2022, by a vote of 53-47, with three Republicans joining every Democrat and independent in support.

She was sworn in on June 30, 2022, the same day Breyer officially stepped down, becoming the Supreme Court's 116th Associate Justice.

That made her the first Black woman ever to serve on the Court in its 233-year history, and only the third African American justice overall, after Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas.

Her arrival also marked the first time four women sat on the Supreme Court bench together, joining Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Amy Coney Barrett.

She's also the first former federal public defender, and the first justice since Thurgood Marshall himself, to have represented everyday criminal defendants before reaching the bench. She cast her first vote as a justice on July 21, 2022.

05/09/2026

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born on October 13, 1989, in the Bronx, New York, and grew up in Yorktown Heights, in Westchester County.

She studied international relations and economics at Boston University, graduating cm laude. Her father died in 2008, while she was still a student there.

Before running for office, she worked as a waitress and bartender to help support her family, and volunteered as an organizer for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign.

In 2018, she decided to challenge Rep. Joe Crowley, the Democratic Caucus chair and a 10-term incumbent, in the primary for New York's 14th congressional district. Crowley hadn't faced a primary challenger in 14 years and was seen as a potential future Speaker of the House.

Ocasio-Cortez ran on a shoestring budget, raising about $300,000 to Crowley's $3 million.

On June 26, 2018, she won anyway, in what was widely described as the biggest primary upset of that election cycle.

She went on to win the general election that November against Republican Anthony Pappas, then took office in January 2019 at age 29.

That made her the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress, breaking a record previously held by Rep. Elise Stefanik, who'd been elected at 30.

She was also one of the first two members of the Democratic Socialists of America elected to Congress, alongside Rep. Rashida Tlaib.

She's since been reelected three more times, in 2020, 2022, and 2024, representing the same Bronx and Queens district where she once tended bar.

05/09/2026

Bernard "Bernie" Sanders was born on September 8, 1941, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a paint salesman who had immigrated from Poland.

He attended Brooklyn College for a year before transferring to the University of Chicago, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science in 1964.

As a student, he joined the Young People's Socialist League and worked with the Congress of Racial Equality on civil rights issues. In August 1963, he attended the March on Washington.

After moving to Vermont, he ran for office repeatedly through the 1970s and lost every time — bids for governor in 1972, 1976, and 1986, and for the U.S. Senate in 1972 and 1974.

His first win finally came in 1981, when he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, by just 10 votes, running as an independent. He held that job for four terms, through 1989.

He moved on to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990, then the U.S. Senate in 2006 — all while staying registered as an independent rather than joining either major party. That makes him the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress.

In 2016, Sanders ran for the Democratic presidential nomination despite not actually being a Democrat. He won the New Hampshire primary on February 9, 2016, with 60 percent of the vote, becoming the first Jewish candidate ever to win a presidential primary contest.

He endorsed Hillary Clinton that July after losing the nomination to her, then ran again for president in 2020, dropping out of the race on April 8 of that year.

Between his two campaigns, Sanders introduced the Medicare for All Act of 2019 alongside 14 other senators, pushing a single-payer health care proposal he had campaigned on since 2016.

He's been married to Jane O'Meara Sanders since 1988. Together they raised his son, Levi, along with her three children from a previous marriage.

04/09/2026

Condoleezza Rice was born on November 14, 1954, in Birmingham, Alabama, the only child of a Presbyterian minister and high school football coach and a public school teacher.

Her parents told her, again and again, that she'd have to be twice as good as anyone else to get the same opportunities.

She grew up in a Black middle-class neighborhood called Titusville, and one of her closest childhood friends was an 11-year-old girl named Denise McNair.

On September 15, 1963, a bomb planted by Klan members went off at the 16th Street Baptist Church, and Denise lost her life along with three other girls, all 14 years old.

Rice was eight at the time.

She later said an eight-year-old doesn't fully understand terror like that — she just understood that her hometown had stopped feeling safe.

In 1967, her family moved to Denver, Colorado, after her father took an administrative job at the University of Denver.

Rice had been playing piano since early childhood and once planned to major in music, but a college course in international politics changed her direction entirely.

She earned her bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Denver in 1974, at 19 years old.

A year later, she picked up a master's from the University of Notre Dame, and in 1979, she spent time studying Russian at Moscow State University.

In 1981, she completed her Ph.D. at the University of Denver and joined Stanford's faculty that same year as a political science professor.

Her expertise in Soviet affairs caught Washington's attention, and from 1989 to 1991, she advised President George H.W. Bush's administration during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany.

Back at Stanford, she was named provost in 1993, becoming the first woman and first African American to hold that role, a job she kept for six years while helping pull the university out of a budget deficit.

In January 2001, President George W. Bush appointed her National Security Advisor — the first woman ever to hold that position in U.S. history.

On January 26, 2005, she was sworn in as the 66th United States Secretary of State, making her the first Black woman, and only the second woman overall, to lead the State Department.

She served until January 20, 2009, then went back to Stanford as a professor and later became director of the Hoover Institution.

In 2012, Rice and businesswoman Darla Moore became the first two women admitted as members of Augusta National Golf Club, 80 years after the club was founded.

A year after that, in 2013, she joined the original selection committee for the College Football Playoff — despite never having worked in college athletics, she'd once said her actual dream job was running the NFL.

From a childhood shaped by loss in segregated Birmingham to a seat at the highest table in American diplomacy, her list of firsts kept growing well past the moment most people assumed her story was finished.

04/09/2026

Mitch McConnell was born on February 20, 1942, in Sheffield, Alabama. As a toddler, he contracted polio and spent two years in treatment before regaining the ability to walk.

He was first elected to the U.S. Senate from Kentucky in 1984 and took office on January 3, 1985.

He rose to become Senate Republican leader in 2007, a position he held through multiple shifts in power, serving as both minority leader and majority leader over the following 17 years.

From 2015 to 2021, he served as Senate majority leader. By 2023, he had become the longest-serving Senate party leader in American history.

In 2016, after Justice Antonin Scalia's death left a Supreme Court vacancy, McConnell declined to hold a confirmation hearing for President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland. He argued the seat should be filled only after the next presidential election.

That decision kept the seat open until a new administration took office. Under McConnell's leadership from 2017 to 2021, the Senate went on to confirm three of President Trump's Supreme Court nominees, along with 54 circuit court judges and 174 district court judges.

He stepped down from Senate Republican leadership in November 2024, saying he wanted to make way for someone new.

On February 20, 2025, his 83rd birthday, McConnell announced he would not seek an eighth term in 2026. His current term runs through January 3, 2027, closing out 40 years in the Senate.

In recent years, McConnell has experienced health episodes connected to his childhood bout with polio, including public freezing incidents and falls, one of which left him in a wheelchair.

Whatever else gets said about his 40 years in Washington, one fact isn't in dispute: few senators in American history have shaped the makeup of the federal courts as directly as he did.

04/09/2026

Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907, in Springdale, Pennsylvania, and grew up watching the natural world around her family's farm.

She trained as a scientist first. In 1932, she earned a master's degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University, then spent 15 years working as a biologist and editor for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries.

Writing came alongside the science. Her 1951 book, The Sea Around Us, won the National Book Award and became a national bestseller, giving Carson a public platform most scientists never get.

By 1958, she'd turned her attention to something troubling her — the widespread use of synthetic pesticides, especially DDT, and its effects on birds, fish, and other wildlife.

Silent Spring, her fourth book, was serialized in The New Yorker starting in June 1962, months before it reached shelves. Houghton Mifflin published the full book on September 27, 1962.

Its title borrowed imagery from a John Keats poem, evoking a future spring with no birdsong left in it.

The chemical industry fought back hard, but the science held. Within months, President John F. Kennedy asked his Science Advisory Committee to investigate her claims, and Carson testified before Congress in 1963.

She was fighting breast cancer the entire time the book made headlines. On April 14, 1964, less than two years after publication, she died at age 56.

Carson never lived to see what came next. DDT was banned for domestic use in the U.S. in 1972, and the Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 — six years after her death, built partly on the case she'd made.

The chemical's agricultural use was eventually restricted worldwide in 2004, though it's still permitted in limited amounts to fight malaria. A scientist who spent her career studying oceans ended up reshaping how an entire country regulates the air, water, and land around it.

04/09/2026

On August 2, 1990, Iraqi forces crossed into Kuwait and seized the small, oil-rich country in under 36 hours.

President George H.W. Bush called it aggression that would not stand. Within five days, on August 7, 1990, he ordered American troops into the region under Operation Desert Shield.

The United Nations backed him. Security Council Resolution 678 gave Iraq a deadline of January 15, 1991, to withdraw or face military force.

Bush spent those months building something rare in modern warfare: a coalition of 39 countries, from Egypt to the United Kingdom to Saudi Arabia, all standing against one invasion.

The deadline passed. On January 16, 1991, Operation Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm, and the air campaign began.

For nearly six weeks, coalition aircraft targeted Iraqi military positions. General Norman Schwarzkopf commanded on the ground, while General Colin Powell oversaw strategy from Washington.

On February 24, 1991, the ground assault began. Coalition forces pushed through Iraqi lines faster than almost anyone expected.

Kuwait was declared liberated on February 27 — just three days later. Bush ordered a ceasefire the following day, closing out the ground campaign in roughly 100 hours.

Nearly 697,000 American troops had deployed to the Gulf region during the operation. Of those, 382 became American casualties, and 98 gave their lives in the effort to free Kuwait.

The financial cost ran close to $61 billion. Allied nations covered most of it, with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia contributing $36 billion and Germany and Japan adding another $16 billion.

On March 14, 1991, Kuwait's emir returned home after more than seven months in exile. A formal ceasefire took effect on April 11, closing one of the shortest major wars of the century.

What started as a five-day political decision turned into a defining moment of Bush's presidency — a war fought, funded, and finished faster than the world thought possible.

04/09/2026

Henry Kissinger arrived in America in 1938 as a Jewish refugee fleeing N**i Germany, born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in the small city of Fürth. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943, then served in the Army as a German interpreter, earning a Bronze Star in 1945 for his counterintelligence work.

By 1969, he was one of the most powerful people in Washington, appointed National Security Advisor by President Nixon.

Three years later, he pulled off one of the most secretive diplomatic maneuvers of the Cold War.

In July 1971, Kissinger slipped into Beijing for a covert meeting with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. The world had no idea it happened until it was already done. That secret groundwork made possible Nixon's historic visit to China in February 1972, ending more than two decades of diplomatic silence between the two countries.

At the same time, Kissinger was locked in another set of secret talks, this time with North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho, trying to find a way out of the Vietnam War.

Those talks produced the Paris Peace Accords, signed in January 1973. Time magazine had already named Kissinger its "Man of the Year" the month before.

In September 1973, Kissinger was formally appointed Secretary of State. A month later, he and Le Duc Tho were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the accords.

Here's the part that often gets left out.

Le Duc Tho refused to accept the prize. He said peace in Vietnam hadn't actually arrived, and he was right. Fighting continued for two more years before the war finally ended in 1975. The decision was controversial enough that two members of the Nobel committee resigned in protest, and Kissinger himself reportedly tried to return the award once the accords collapsed.

He remained Secretary of State after Nixon resigned in 1974, continuing under President Gerald Ford. In the years that followed, he negotiated the 1975 Sinai Accord between Egypt and Israel through a method that became known as "shuttle diplomacy," flying between capitals to broker peace face to face.

His record has never stopped being argued over. Supporters point to the China opening and the loosening of Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union. Critics point to a secret 1969-1970 bombing campaign in Laos and Cambodia, which some historians tie to the later rise of the Khmer Rouge.

Kissinger died on November 29, 2023, at his home in Connecticut, at age 100, having spent more than five decades as one of the most discussed and debated figures in American foreign policy.

03/09/2026

Steven Allan Spielberg was born on December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Arnold, an electrical engineer, and Leah, a concert pianist and restaurateur.

The family later settled in Phoenix, Arizona, where young Steven picked up a camera before he was old enough to drive. He shot his first amateur war film before turning 16, then finished a full feature called Firelight in 1963.

His father rented out the local movie theater for one night so it could screen. His sisters sold refreshments at the door.

That early spark wasn't enough for USC's film school. They rejected him twice. He enrolled instead at California State University, Long Beach, and eventually left before finishing his degree to chase a directing career full time.

At 21, he became the youngest director ever signed to a long-term contract with a major Hollywood studio. Universal put him to work directing television, including episodes of Night Gallery and Columbo, before he directed the acclaimed TV movie Duel in 1971.

His first theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express, arrived in 1974. It impressed critics but didn't prepare anyone for what came next.

In 1975, Jaws became the first film ever to cross $100 million at the domestic box office, a number that reshaped how studios released movies and effectively invented the summer blockbuster.

Spielberg followed it with Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, then Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982, part of a run that also included the Indiana Jones trilogy through 1989.

He didn't stay locked into spectacle, either. The Color Purple in 1985 and Empire of the Sun in 1987 showed a different, quieter side of his filmmaking.

Then came 1993, the year he released two films that could not have been more different. Jurassic Park became the highest-grossing film ever made at the time. Schindler's List, shot largely in black and white, told the true story of a businessman who saved more than a thousand Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

Schindler's List grossed $230 million worldwide and earned Spielberg his first Academy Award for Best Director. He used the profits to establish the Shoah Foundation, which has since recorded tens of thousands of survivor testimonies for permanent historical record.

In 1994, he co-founded DreamWorks alongside Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, backed in part by investors including Microsoft's Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

Four years later, Saving Private Ryan earned him a second Best Director Oscar, cementing a career built as much on human stories as on spectacle.

Along the way, his personal life took shape too. His first marriage, to actress Amy Irving, ended in divorce. In 1991, he married actress Kate Capshaw, whom he'd met years earlier on the set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Together, they built a blended family of seven children.

Over a career spanning more than five decades, Spielberg has directed 32 films, won three Academy Awards, and seen seven of his movies preserved in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry.

Two rejection letters from USC never mentioned any of that.

Soulfeedz

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