Category: people

Coming off a brutal year in which he faced withering criticism for his business tactics and came dangerously close to not being reelected to the company board, Disney CEO Michael Eisner has announced that he will leave the company when his contract expires in 2006. Sources suggest that the board would not have renewed the contract anyway, and that the announcement was a way for both sides to save face in what had become an embarrassingly public and drawn-out separation.

Two years is a long, long goodbye by corporate standards. Not only that, but the race to succeed Michael Eisner at the helm of Disney is reportedly wide open, leading to fears that the two-year lame duck period could cause chaos or institutional paralysis. “That could be particularly problematic for Disney, which has just started to rebound after a prolonged stock slump and months of turmoil marked by a failed takeover bid from cable giant Comcast Corp. and a shareholder revolt to unseat Eisner.”

“Six months after the abrupt dismissal of its former editor, The American Scholar, one of the nation’s leading literary and intellectual journals, has found a successor. On Thursday, the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the journal’s publisher, named Robert S. Wilson to replace Anne Fadiman, whose departure after a budget dispute with the publisher led to the angry resignation of 20 contributing editors and board members.”

Filmmaker Steven Spielberg has been awarded France’s highest civilian honor. “He was made a knight of the French Legion of Honour to recognise his work fighting hatred and intolerance. President Jacques Chirac said Spielberg’s holocaust film Schindler’s List ensured that past atrocities were remembered along with heroic deeds.”

Writer Roddy Doyle is amused at the Irish obsession with writing about being Irish: “Being Irish has changed ‘about 17 times’ in the last hundred years. He finds the image put out by the tourist board of Ireland these days hilarious in its cheek, particularly since all around the world people have swallowed it. ‘It’s a big con job,’ he says. ‘We have sold the myth of Dublin as a sexy place incredibly well; because it’s a dreary little dump most of the time. Try getting a pint at one in the morning and you’ll find just how raving it actually is’.”

“Howard Decker, the knowledgeable, affable chief curator at the [Washington, D.C.-based] National Building Museum for the past four years, abruptly resigned this week. His last day at the museum was yesterday.” Decker’s departure, which appears to have been amicable, was apparently precipitated by the desire of NBM executive director Chase Rynd to reorganize the museum’s management structure. “Rynd explained that he wants to replace Decker with a curator who is not ‘overly burdened with administrative tasks’ and who takes direct charge of certain exhibitions.”

Christopher Hitchens takes a close read of poet Czeslaw Milosz’s understanding of politics: “The long-term achievement of Milosz was to have scrutinized, not just in between but clean through, and well beyond, the party “lines” that claim for themselves exclusive truth. In doing so he shamed the so-called intellectuals who managed the ugly trick of denying freedom to their own minds, the better to visit the same deprivation upon others.”

Greg Dyke speaks out about Tony Blair’s campaign to influence the BBC’s coverage of the Iraq war. “In an explosive autobiography which returns the corrosive issue of Iraq to the heart of political debate, Dyke reveals that Tony Blair wrote an unprecedented letter to him and Gavyn Davies, the former BBC chairman, trying to force the corporation to change the tone of its coverage.”

Conductor Han Vonk has died of a rare neurological disease. “Vonk became the St. Louis Symphony’s music director in 1996 and continued in that position until his declining medical condition forced his retirement in April 2002.”