Category: people

“For years, Mr. Kinder led the creative writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he became renowned for his generosity as a teacher and as a [party] host” as well as for a huge novel he just couldn’t finish. “Chabon, who was Mr. Kinder’s student in the 1980s, used him as the model for Grady Tripp, the narrator and central figure of the 1995 novel Wonder Boys.” – The Washington Post

“Known for his incisive, off-kilter and sometimes controversial approach to joking about race, family and relationships, Chappelle has influenced a generation of younger comedians since becoming a national sensation with Chappelle’s Show, his early 2000s sketch comedy series on Comedy Central. His subsequent sudden retreat from the public eye added a layer of mystique, but Chappelle has been actively performing stand-up since 2013 and has since won two Grammys and two Emmys.” – The Washington Post

“[She] was among Brazil’s most celebrated singers, with a husky alto voice that soundtracked dances, street parties and the earsplitting, eye-widening Carnival festival … [She] filled soccer stadiums with her followers, battled music-industry machismo, and championed overlooked composers and performers.” – The Washington Post

“[She] was the youngest recruit and last survivor of the original Lindy Hoppers, the all-black Herbert White troupe that broke in at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom and popularized the Lindy Hop in Broadway shows, on tours of Europe and Latin America, and in Hollywood films.” – The New York Times

“For a woman who, on arriving in New York, had worked as a housekeeper for $1 a day — and a woman who had taught herself English with the help of romance novels (‘because I always wanted to read to the end to know what happened’) — it [has been] a remarkable reversal. But it was also a logical one: There was a market for treatments of sex that prioritized truth over timidity. And there was, in an even broader sense, a need for those treatments.” – The Atlantic

Seeing what Twitter thinks you like can be a fun activity — but it can also be an odd experience to see what the company infers about you from your online moves. The psychology around targeted advertising is complex. On the one hand, if we have to see ads, it’s probably better that they’re in line with our interests. On the other, knowing how much advertisers know can feel a bit, well, creepy.  – Vox

Anna Wintour rules with an iron fist. No selfies (yeah right). No unattractive food. No cellphones or smoking. And don’t even think about declining the invite if you ever want to attend again… – New York Post

Heller blurred the line between collector and dealer – and caused an international incident because of it. “Heller’s sale of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles to the National Gallery of Australia, then under construction in Canberra, the nation’s capital, was announced in September 1973. The news caused an uproar in the New York art world; in Australia it nearly brought down the Labor government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who had to sign off on the $2 million sale.” – The New York Times

Spooner made her name with a photo of the woman at the center of the John Profumo scandal, but she did much more. “‘Who’d ever imagine a woman might be a photographer on a national newspaper?’ she wrote in a 2016 memoir. ‘A woman might be a tart or a monarch, but a press photographer?'” – The New York Times

In her writing on her site and in her massively popular books, Evans “confronted every controversial issue in American evangelical culture. She wrote about biblical literalism, racism, abortion, evolution, theology, marriage, patriarchy, women in leadership, and evangelical support for Donald Trump. She advocated for the full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the church and analyzed her own complicity in racial bias after the police shooting of Michael Brown.” – Slate