■  The Pop Edition November 1: Bon Jovi Hits #1, MPAA Ratings Turn 58 A New Jersey rock band claims the top of the charts, the movie ratings system that shaped a generation of ticket stubs gets its start, and five birthdays round out the day. The day a glam-rock anthem hit #1 and Hollywood started slapping letters on movie posters. November 1 doesn't get the Halloween-week attention or the holiday-season buildup, but it's quietly packed. A power ballad about love, loyalty, and bad names claimed the top of the Billboard Hot 100 exactly 40 years ago today. Decades earlier, the system that decides whether your kids can see a movie went into effect, reshaping what studios would and wouldn't put on screen. Add a cluster of birthdays spanning rock, Hollywood, and Bollywood, plus a handful of box office openers, and the date earns its spot on the calendar. Toni Collette BORN 1972 · TURNS 54 The Australian actress broke through as the awkward, big-dreaming teen in Muriel's Wedding, then spent three decades proving she could do anything — an Oscar-nominated turn in The Sixth Sense, a Golden Globe win for United States of Tara, and a late-career run of horror standouts including Hereditary that redefined what a grieving-mother performance could look like. Anthony Kiedis BORN 1962 · TURNS 64 The Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman survived the band's chaotic funk-punk early years, a very public battle with addiction, and a lineup that kept shifting under him, and still came out the other side fronting one of the few rock bands to remain a stadium act into the 2020s. Lyle Lovett BORN 1957 · TURNS 69 The Texas singer-songwriter never quite fit the Nashville mold, blending country, swing, and gospel into something critics loved and radio never fully knew what to do with. His brief, much-tabloided marriage to Julia Roberts overshadowed a catalog that outlasted the headlines by decades. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan BORN 1973 · TURNS 53 Crowned Miss World in 1994, she became one of Bollywood's defining leading women and one of the few Indian actors to build a genuine international profile, walking Cannes red carpets for close to two decades running. Jenny McCarthy BORN 1972 · TURNS 54 She went from Playboy Playmate of the Year to MTV host to sitcom lead, then into daytime talk and a long stint on The Masked Singer panel, a career arc built on reinventing herself every decade or so.  ON THE CHARTSOn November 1, 1986, Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the band's first chart-topper and the single that announced Slippery When Wet as more than just another hair-metal record. The song had been kicking around for a while before producer Desmond Child helped reshape it into the version everyone knows, trading a vaguer original concept for the title hook that turned a breakup song into a full-on genre staple.It knocked off a crowded fall chart and gave the New Jersey band — then two years removed from a self-titled debut that barely registered — its first taste of mainstream dominance. Slippery When Wet would go on to spend eight weeks at #1 on the album chart and sell in numbers that turned Bon Jovi from an opening act into an arena headliner almost overnight. "Livin' on a Prayer" followed it to #1 just weeks later, but this was the song that broke the door down first, and forty years on it's still the one bar bands reach for when they need the whole room singing.    THE MOMENTThe MPAA's voluntary film rating system took effect on November 1, 1968, replacing the old Hays Code censorship regime with the familiar letter grades — G, M, R, and X at launch — that still govern what gets shown to whom at the multiplex. The change didn't happen in a vacuum: studios were losing ground to foreign films and independent productions that ignored the Code entirely, and audiences were demanding more adult content than the old rules allowed.Jack Valenti, the MPAA's president at the time, pushed the system through as a way to let filmmakers make grown-up movies while giving theater owners and parents a shorthand for what they were buying a ticket to. The letters have shifted since — M became GP then PG, X got replaced by NC-17 in 1990 after the system's unofficial association with pornography became a liability — but the basic structure, a private industry group deciding what's appropriate without government censorship, has held for well over half a century. Every ratings controversy since, from Jaws pushing PG's limits to Scream's fight over an R, traces back to this one Friday in 1968.   MEANWHILE...1996Barbra Streisand's The Mirror Has Two Faces, starring and directed by Streisand opposite Jeff Bridges, opens in wide release.2002The Santa Clause 2 opens nationwide, with Tim Allen back in the red suit for a sequel that outran expectations at the box office.2013Ender's Game, with Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield, opens in theaters based on Orson Scott Card's novel.2019Terminator: Dark Fate opens, reuniting Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger for the first time as Sarah Connor and the T-800 since the original sequels.1986Bon Jovi's rise to #1 arrives the same week MTV is airing the song's video in heavy rotation, a one-two combination that defines the late-'80s hit-making playbook. That's the ledger for November 1 — a chart-topping power ballad, a ratings system that's been arguing with filmmakers for decades, and a lineup of birthdays spanning rock, country, and Bollywood. See you tomorrow for another day's worth.

On November 1, 2001, Scott Brosius Delivered Yankee Stadium's Second Miracle in as Many Nights A stunned Arizona bullpen watched history repeat itself as the Yankees refused to die in the World Series. One night after Tino Martinez and Derek Jeter had authored one of the most improbable comebacks in World Series history, nobody in Yankee Stadium quite believed it could happen again. But on November 1, 2001, in Game 5 of the Fall Classic against the Arizona Diamondbacks, the ghosts of October — or by now, early November — showed up right on schedule, this time wearing third baseman Scott Brosius's number 18. Lightning Twice   The Diamondbacks carried a 2-0 lead into the ninth inning, with closer Byung-Hyun Kim on the mound looking every bit as dominant as he had the night before — right up until the moment he wasn't. With two outs and a runner aboard, Brosius drove a 2-2 pitch deep into the New York night, a two-run homer that tied the game and sent a crowd still raw from the September 11 attacks into disbelief. It was almost an exact echo of Martinez's game-tying blast twenty-four hours earlier, down to the pitcher on the mound and the inning on the clock. The Yankees finished the job in the twelfth inning, winning 3-2 to take a 3-2 series lead, a feat that pushed their season total of walk-off postseason magic to a level baseball had rarely seen. Arizona would eventually win the title back home in Game 7, but for two surreal nights at Yankee Stadium, a battered city found something to roar about, and Kim walked off the mound having surrendered the same gut-punch blow in consecutive games, a coincidence too strange for fiction.  

November 1: The Ceiling, the Earthquake, the First Tip-Off Three November 1sts defined by what happens when human ambition meets its moment — a ceiling that redefined painting, a disaster that redefined how the Enlightenment understood God, and a league that started with a gimmick about a tall man and became the world's premier basketball organization November 1 holds an extraordinary range of human experience — from the sublime to the catastrophic to the simply scrappy and hopeful. On this date across five centuries, a pope pulled back a curtain and showed the world what one man had spent four years painting on his back sixty feet above the floor. A city that had been filled with worshippers on All Saints' Day was consumed by earthquake, tsunami, and fire within hours, producing a disaster so total that it shook the philosophical assumptions of the Enlightenment. And in a hockey arena in Toronto, two basketball teams played a close, physical, relatively low-scoring game before seven thousand fans and a promotional offer involving free tickets for tall people — and the NBA, though it was not yet called that, began. Three November 1sts. Three kinds of human striving. Look Up   On November 1, 1512, Pope Julius II opened the Sistine Chapel to public viewing and revealed Michelangelo's completed ceiling — 5,000 square feet of fresco depicting nine scenes from Genesis, surrounded by prophets, sibyls, ancestors of Christ, and the celebrated ignudi, the idealized nude figures that frame the central panels. Michelangelo had spent four years painting it — largely alone, on a scaffold of his own design, working in the cramped and physically punishing position of a man painting above his head for hours at a stretch. He had begun the commission reluctantly, considering himself a sculptor rather than a painter, and had argued with Julius repeatedly over delays and funding. What he produced on that ceiling is generally regarded as the supreme achievement of the High Renaissance and one of the greatest single artistic undertakings in human history. The ceiling's central image — God reaching toward Adam, their fingers nearly touching in the gap between them — has become the most reproduced image in Western art, a composition so simple in concept and so extraordinary in execution that it has been referenced, parodied, and quoted by every subsequent generation. What Michelangelo had done was more than paint a ceiling: he had combined the theological ambitions of Renaissance humanism with the physical realities of human anatomy, rendering the figures with a muscularity and psychological depth that made the biblical narrative feel simultaneously ancient and immediate. Vasari, the first art historian, wrote that the ceiling "made a dumbfounded and stupefied world." It was unveiled on All Saints' Day, which Michelangelo either chose or accepted with characteristic irony — a man who had spent four years arguing with his patron and his own body, offering the result to a holiday dedicated to the perfected.   The Sistine Chapel — where on November 1, 1512, the public first looked up and saw what Michelangelo had spent four years creating sixty feet above the floor. All Saints' Day, 1755 On November 1, 1755, at approximately 9:40 in the morning, an earthquake estimated at magnitude 8.5 to 9.0 struck Lisbon, Portugal — at the moment when most of the devoutly Catholic city's population was in church attending All Saints' Day Mass. The shaking lasted between three and six minutes. Churches collapsed onto their congregations. The royal palace crumbled. The great libraries and archives that had survived centuries of history were crushed in minutes. Those who survived the initial collapse fled to the harbor and the open squares for safety — where they were met by a series of massive tsunamis that swept inland from the Atlantic, some reaching heights of twenty feet, within forty minutes of the first tremor. The fires that followed, ignited by overturned candles and cooking hearths throughout the city, burned for nearly a week. Between 30,000 and 60,000 people died. Approximately 85 percent of Lisbon's buildings were destroyed. The Lisbon earthquake arrived at precisely the wrong moment for European theodicy — the philosophical project of explaining how a benevolent God could permit natural evil. The disaster struck on a religious holiday, during Mass, in one of the most devoutly Catholic capitals in Europe. Voltaire, who had been working on Candide — his savage satire of the Leibnizian optimism that insisted this was "the best of all possible worlds" — wrote a poem in response to Lisbon that became one of the Enlightenment's most direct challenges to providential thinking. The earthquake did not end religious belief in Europe, but it profoundly complicated the intellectual framework through which educated Europeans understood the relationship between God and human suffering. The Portuguese chief minister, the Marquis of Pombal, responded with what was essentially the world's first modern disaster management program — systematic assessment, organized rebuilding, and the construction of the Pombaline Lower Town on anti-seismic principles that remain visible in Lisbon today. Lisbon as it stood before November 1, 1755 — a magnificent harbor city whose destruction in earthquake, tsunami, and fire that morning challenged the Enlightenment's most comfortable assumptions about the world. ❦ Maple Leaf Gardens, 1946   On November 1, 1946, the New York Knickerbockers defeated the Toronto Huskies 68-66 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, in the first game in the history of the Basketball Association of America — the league that would, three years later, merge with the National Basketball League to become the NBA. The game was played in a hockey arena, before a crowd of approximately 7,090 fans who had been encouraged to attend in part by a promotional offer that now sounds apocryphal but was entirely real: any fan taller than Toronto center George Nostrand, who stood six feet eight inches, received free admission. The Huskies' management was so uncertain of the league's appeal that they needed height-based gimmicks to fill seats. The game itself was close, physical, and played at a pace that modern fans would find almost unrecognizable — but it was basketball, and it was the beginning. The Toronto Huskies lasted exactly one season before folding — one of several franchises that did not survive the BAA's early years. The New York Knickerbockers, by contrast, have played continuously from that November evening to the present, making them one of the NBA's oldest franchises. The league they helped inaugurate in 1946 has grown into an organization with thirty teams, a global television presence, and players from more than forty countries. The game in Toronto drew seven thousand fans and offered free admission to tall strangers. The 2023 NBA Finals drew an average of eleven million viewers per game. The distance between those two numbers is a measure of what a sport can become when it finds the players and the audience it was built for — starting, on November 1, 1946, with a 68-66 game in a hockey rink and a promotional gimmick that would not survive the week.   A 1940s arena converted for basketball — the scrappy, intimate setting where the league that became the NBA played its first game before seven thousand fans and a promotional offer involving free tickets for tall people.