Youngest ever. Still rewriting records.

This week in Bedtime Biographies — a songwriter who wouldn't take another artist's job, a brand-new life of the man who reached both ends of the Earth, and a birthday for the woman who found two elements in the dark.

On Sunday night in New York, Taylor Swift sat down in front of a screening audience and told a story against herself. Pixar had asked her to write the end-credits song for Toy Story 5 — and she took months to answer. When she finally came back, she kept asking director Andrew Stanton the same question: be honest, did you replace me? She didn't want the job if taking it meant, in her words, kicking somebody off the project. Stanton hadn't replaced her. He'd decided there would be no song at all unless it was hers — and once she saw the finished film, she and Jack Antonoff wrote "I Knew It, I Knew You" in a matter of hours. It went to number one, and she is now campaigning, openly and cheerfully, for what would be her first Oscar nomination.

It capped a remarkable fortnight. On October 26 she became the youngest person ever inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame — twenty years, almost to the day, after a teenager from Pennsylvania released her first album. Voice of a Century tells the whole arc: the Christmas-tree farm, the move to Nashville, the songwriting deal signed at fourteen, and the long fight to own her own work and rewrite the rules of the music business around herself.

Three things you didn't know about Taylor Swift:

Read or listen to Voice of a Century:

Our newest biography is here. Roald Amundsen conquered both ends of the Earth — and died flying to the rescue of the man he hated. A Norwegian sea captain's son who gave up medicine for the ice, he became the greatest polar explorer who ever lived not by heroics but by study: wintering with the Netsilik Inuit to learn their clothing, their diet and their dogs, and planning every expedition to the last biscuit. The first man through the Northwest Passage, the first to the South Pole, the first to reach the North Pole — and, in June 1928, a final flight out of Tromsø to search for his rival Umberto Nobile, from which he never returned.

A birthday worth marking: Marie Curie was born on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw — and this Saturday, on her birthday, MIT hosts an afternoon of theater and science in her honor. Barred from university in her own country, she studied in secret, moved to Paris, and stirred tons of pitchblende in a freezing shed until two new elements glowed in the dark. She remains the only person ever to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. This is the life behind the glow.

Six lives that rewired the world, in one collection: Isaac Newton inventing the language of physics; Charles Darwin and the idea that changed biology; Nikola Tesla lighting the age of electricity; Alan Turing breaking codes and founding computing; Ada Lovelace, the first programmer, a century ahead of her machine; and Stephen Hawking taking on the universe itself. Curie would have fit right in.

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On the workbench: Ralph Waldo Emerson, who told America to trust itself; Henry David Thoreau and his pond; George Westinghouse, who fought Edison for the current; then Eli Whitney and Samuel Morse, whose inventions shrank the world. And a date to circle: on November 18, a Van Gogh unseen in public for more than sixty years goes under the hammer in New York, with an estimate in the region of $180 million. We'll have a letter worthy of it that night.

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Happy reading,
Jamie Glick — Bedtime Biographies