Category: people

Uzo Aduba, who plays the character “Crazy Eyes,” explains how she created the character. “I found her voice Season 1 in one of the stage directions. They had described her as being innocent like a child, except children aren’t scary. And I had a flash in my mind of a woman holding a sledgehammer in one hand and sucking on a pacifier. “

“He described himself as a ‘servant’ to his readers — a representative who looked out for their financial interests while also trying to satisfy car enthusiasts’ passions for details about fuel efficiency, horsepower and torque. But in writing about one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy, he also challenged readers who might have preferred that he stick to interiors and exteriors, penning columns that could veer sharply into politics and race.” In 2002, he and Post colleague Martha McNeil Hamilton published Black & White & Red All Over, about her donation of one of her kidneys to him.

“Williams was among the most versatile composers of his generation, earning an Oscar nomination (for adapting opera in Breaking Away, 1979), four Emmys (for dramatic music including Lou Grant, 1980) and two Grammys (for arrangements including his classic jazz album Threshold, 1974) during more than 50 years of music-making in New York and Los Angeles.”

Wrangling over who had Indiana’s best interests at heart has stoked conspiracy theories about his death, said John Wilmerding, a friend and art historian who has studied Indiana’s work. Indiana might have relished this development, said Wilmerding, an emeritus professor at Princeton. For Indiana treasured fame, even as it tormented him, and courted chaos, even when it endangered his craft.

The idea of Oscar Wilde meeting Walt Whitman face-to-face began as a publicity stunt for Wilde’s 1882 U.S. lecture tour. (The two were to ride together in an open carriage through the streets of Philadelphia. It was January and Whitman declined.) In fact, Wilde’s mother had read Leaves of Grass (in an unexpurgated version) to him when he was 11, and he had admired Whitman ever since, and he eventually went to visit his old hero at home. “No reporters were invited to witness the meeting between Whitman and Wilde. This was a strange choice for two dandyish men who loved self-promotion, but it was a canny one: they would each give separate interviews afterwards, and double the attention they received.”

It’s not just that she was the wife of the most famous Surrealist artist. Gala (née Elena Ivanovna Diakonova) was at the very center of the early Surrealist movement, having friendships, love affairs, or personal conflicts with many of its key members. Then there was the castle in Spain that Salvador Dalí bought for her – and the rules she placed on his presence there.

The conventional picture of post-prison Wilde is that of a depressed, impoverished, sick man hopelessly attached to his unworthy lover. But a new biography makes the case that – at least until his final illness – Wilde was liberated in Paris, at last able to live as he wished in a place where love between men was not a crime.

She stalked away from her one paid job (teaching) after only a few months, invested cannily in railway stocks, “she refused to use her rackety health as an excuse, instead throwing herself into strenuous physical domestic labour. … And if by time travel magic we could fast forward Brontë to the age of the suffragettes we would find her snorting in derision and, quite possibly, setting a large dog on the women in purple and green. In other words, Brontë is not on ‘our side’ and were we to meet her, we would not like her. And that, really, is the point.”

“As a Dance Mom, you might get an undeserved bad rap but you definitely have much needed knowledge and capacities. You know that your child is entitled to a dance education. You fight for that. You drive for that, in more ways than behind the wheel — which I know from experience that you do at high volume. I hope you can harness that drive and sense of entitlement for good, living up to your stated intentions to make the NEA more accessible.” Mary Anne Carter replied here.

“The founding fathers of the state of Israel who signed the declaration [of independence] in 1948 considered the principle of equality to be the bedrock of the society they were building. … Instead, we have a [new] law that confirms the Arab population as second-class citizens. It follows that this is a very clear form of apartheid.”