Goldilocks Zone

It's the birthday of the dramatic poet Euripides, who according to legend was born on the Greek island of Salamis in 480 B.C.E. Euripides was made fun of by his contemporaries because he liked solitude — a quality not valued at the time — and went off to write in a large, 10-chambered cave now known as the Cave of Euripides, which was rediscovered by archaeologists in 1997. But his tragedies like Medea, The Bacchae,and Alcestis were hugely influential on generations of playwrights — especially in classical Rome and in 17th-century France — and remain popular to this day.

It's the birthday of singer and songwriter Bruce Springsteen, born in Freehold, New Jersey (1949). He was a working-class kid, his father taking odd jobs, his mother working as a secretary to support the family. He didn't do well in school, and didn't seem to have much ambition. Then one day, he saw Elvis Presley on TV and that inspired him to scrape together $18 to buy a battered secondhand guitar. By the time he was 14, he was playing in local bands on the bar circuit. - Writer's Almanac

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