Category: people

Based on a study of Leonardo’s portraits (including Salvator Mundi), a research opthalmologist argues that the artist had a rare form on strabismus, “a binocular vision disorder characterized by the partial or complete inability to maintain eye alignment on a fixed object.”

“A leading figure in the history of Chinese art, Professor Fong taught for 40 years at Princeton University, where in the 1950s he established the nation’s first doctoral degree program in Chinese art and archaeology. Beginning in the early 1970s he was a driving force behind the Met’s ambitious effort to expand its collection of Asian art, including masterworks from China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and India, and add space in which to display it.”

The Trump Organization has filed a lawsuit seeking $90,000 in unpaid common charges and fees from a Trump Tower resident– six months after he died in a fire that engulfed his Fifth Avenue apartment. Trump Tower did not have sprinkler system that might have put out the blaze

In a span just shy of two decades, they gave away more than $1.3 billion to charity — money spent on expansions at the Curtis Institute of Music and Philadelphia Museum of Art, to substantially fund the creation of the Museum of the American Revolution, for college scholarships to students in rural Pennsylvania, to fund hospitals, literacy programs, and nature preserves, and on and on. Wednesday’s three-hour-plus tribute offered seemingly no end of testimony to their generosity, a montage of institutions transformed and individual lives changed.

Eve Ewing has had quite the year, with a book of poetry, a play co-authored with Gwendolyn Brooks, and then a new work of sociology coming out this week. But then there’s Marvel. “In August, Dr. Ewing caused minor pandemonium on the internet when she announced that she had been hired to write Ironheart, the first solo title featuring its character Riri Williams, black girl genius from Chicago.”

The British actor who won the Emmy, Grammy and Tony as Celie in the Broadway revival of A Color Purple is about to be on the big screen in two different movies. “I am not aiming for [the Oscar]. … I’m aiming to do the work well, and if by chance that comes in my direction, I will be welcoming it with open arms.”

Yeun, who played Glenn on The Walking Dead and is starring in a new Korean film called Burning (based on a short story by Haruki Murakami), says that he hopes and believes there truly will be a sea change for Asian American actors. “We live in this era that, while Joy Luck Club came out that one time, we got so many things coming up now. We got talent now. We got people everywhere. Is it still going to take some time? Yeah.”

She entered a field dominated by men like John Le Carré and Ian Fleming, and found fertile ground in the rivalries among Britain’s intelligence services. Getting to know actual WWII spies changed her writing, her life, and the genre.

She was a widely admired translator of German literature in particular, introducing works by Sebald, Zweig, and Freud as well as Kafka to anglophone readers. But she’s best known for her translations of children’s books from German and French, especially the Asterix series of comics, whose puns she cleverly rendered in English.

“[She] was the best-known voice coach of her generation, though the term vastly underrates what she did and her attitude towards it.” In three books and 45 years at the Royal Shakespeare Company (along with extensive work elsewhere), she transformed the way that voice work for actors was taught, and even conceived.