Category: people

Ailey O’Toole’s bizarrely brazen act of plagiarism — stealing lines, phrases, and structural elements from the work of at least three other writers — was uncovered last Friday, unraveling her career at the speed of Twitter, the medium by which her fledgling reputation lived and died. Within 24 hours, the literary press Rhythm & Bones had canceled her forthcoming book of poems, and the insular world of poetry Twitter had already gone through a cycle of blame, bafflement, and measured defense. – New York Magazine

“Ms. Wilson resisted the label of ‘jazz singer’ for much of her career, although jazz was the form to which she returned time and again and in which she had her greatest critical and popular success. She considered herself above all ‘a song stylist,’ she once told The Washington Post. ‘That’s my essence,’ she said, ‘to weave words, to be dramatic.'” — The Washington Post

“Once a week, Max Harris is allowed to leave his 6-by-12-foot cell to go outside. The first thing he does, before the other inmates arrive in the small cement yard in Santa Rita Jail, is run around and pick up all the bugs … He wants to move them out of harm’s way before other men start playing basketball. — The New York Times Magazine

He was Marcel Marceau’s assistant in his U.S. debut tour, played the Fool to Orson Welles’s Lear, was a founding member of both Yale Rep and American Rep Theatre, and acted in everything from the Greeks to Shakespeare to Brecht and Weill. But he made his biggest mark in the plays of Samuel Beckett. — The New York Times

There’s an important distinction to make here about how most of us define gossip – as a way of trash-talking someone not present – and how scientists do. In social science, gossip usually is defined as communication about a person who isn’t present in a way that involves evaluation of that person, good or bad. This kind of informal communication is crucial for sharing information. Gossip is necessary for social cooperation; it’s largely this kind of talk that cements social bonds and clarifies social norms. – BBC

“You have a great many very ac­complished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General, but the only man you should be listening to is that man [Jerome Smith] over there. That is the voice of twenty-two million people. … I am very worried about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the white cop standing on that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham.” And then she led those very accomplished people in walking right out of the room. — Salon

“She has to be the only 60-year-old woman in America who is expected to dance with total strangers wherever she goes. … In person, she is more blunt, introspective and interesting than she is on the show, willing to express mild irritation that might seem off-key in front of a national audience. She’s also much more likely to explore dark corners of her psyche, regrets, second thoughts, anxieties that linger.” — The New York Times

Among them, the handmade books he turned in as papers in art school and Macy’s behavior guide for Santaland elves. As he tells Jennifer Schuessler, “There’s no way I could have ever gotten into a place like Yale. So it thrills me that horrible first drafts of stories I wrote when I was stoned got into an Ivy League school.” — The New York Times

An example of her work is “Three Tables in Rome,” which “has a diaristic quality to it, the artist seeming intent on documenting everything around her. For another, it’s an unusual shape: an elongated rectangle with an appendage (the third of the three tables) hanging off the bottom right. And it is huge, more than 20 feet in length.” – The New York Times