Category: people

Hargrove’s death would be tragic even if he were in his 90s. But his career was one of expanding influence – and audience. “Hargrove advocated for a bigger audience for jazz, even when he was drawing what most in the medium would consider sizable crowds.”

He was skilled at charming his way into the circles of the great and good, and he built himself a riverside mansion for entertaining them. He was also admired for the high standards he expected of himself, his colleagues, and the operations of his theater. As Samuel Johnson once said of him, “Garrick has made a player a higher man. He lives rather as a prince than an actor.”

Merve Emre: “Over the course of a two-month correspondence, … the distance between us seemed only to expand. She answered questions I had not asked and ignored the ones I had. She got irritated, apologized, misinterpreted my phrasing — willfully, I suspected.”

“Arguably the most influential American dramatist whose work hasn’t become a staple of the mainstream repertoire, Fornés, a nine-time Obie winner, carved a special niche in the American theater. Although she was not as well-known as fellow theater maverick Sam Shepard, her playwriting exerted a similar magnetic pull on generations of theater artists inspired by her liberating example.”

Martha Nussbaum, 71, is the author or editor of more than 40 wide-ranging books covering topics including the place of the emotions (including negative ones like disgust) in political life, the nature of human vulnerability, the importance of liberal education and connections between classical literature and the contemporary world. She is also known for helping to advance the so-called capabilities approach to economic development, which holds that progress should be measured by things like increases in life expectancy and education, rather than simply by increases in income.

“As entire city blocks were razed in urban renewal projects, interstate highways were paved across the countryside and architectural marvels such as New York’s Penn Station were demolished to make way for bigger, newer structures, Dr. Murtagh helped lead a growing resistance effort that culminated in the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. In its aftermath, he was appointed the first ‘keeper’ of the National Register of Historic Places — a job that made him the curator of America’s now-sprawling catalogue of significant districts, objects, buildings, sites and structures.”

“Whether in concert halls or tertiary institutions, or as a guest on the popular television program Spicks and Specks, Gill was committed to the belief that music mattered to all Australians.” In addition to his tireless public education work, he co-founded and directed a major conservatory in Perth, an opera company in Melbourne, and Australia’s first period-instrument orchestra to specialize in Romantic and late-Classical works.

“Despite a widespread assumption that everyone fits into neat gender categories, I’ve always been treated as a gender question mark. My social interactions since childhood have been filled with wildly vacillating gender expectations. These days, though, I identify as nonbinary not because I am androgynous. Rather, I do so because experiencing life as an androgynous person has made me acutely aware of how gendered expectations and assumptions saturate our lives.”

He’s now a half-forgotten legend, compared (when he is remembered) to James Dean. Reporter Karen Heller looks back and reminds us that he was an actor with extraordinary gifts (and extraordinary mishegas), arguably the most gifted member of a group of young actors who lived to become major forces in the movie business.

Although Le Guin was a vocal defender of science fiction and fantasy who argued that those genres had as valid a claim to literature as the best realist or mimetic fiction, she also saw her writing in broader terms. “Where I can get prickly and combative is if I’m just called a sci-fi writer,” Le Guin said. “I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.”