Category: people

It was utterly apt that Gold became the first food writer to win a Pulitzer. He wrote miles around the rest of us. But aside from his sui generis, incomparably pungent prose, Gold’s lasting inspiration for all writers is to review restaurants as a way of celebrating and forming community.

YouTube is the pinnacle, with the highest earners – 7m subscribers or more – able to demand $300,000 for an ongoing video brand-partnership. On Instagram and Facebook, the biggest influencers are taking home anywhere between $150,000 to $187,000 per post. And even smaller “micro-influencers” with followings around 100,000 are able to command up to $5,000 per sponsored post – a pretty good living when you add it up at the end of the day.

“Of the writers in Kurosawa’s stable, Mr. Hashimoto was among the longest-serving, contributing to eight screenplays from 1950 to 1970. Their other pictures together include Throne of Blood (1957), a reworking of Macbeth set in feudal Japan; The Hidden Fortress (1958), an adventure film about a princess escorted in disguise through enemy territory; and Dodes’ka-den (1970), about the residents of a Tokyo slum.”

Bowen “shaped countless young lives through the Bowen/Peters School of Dance in New Haven, which she ran from 1963 to 1982 with her husband at the time, Ken Peters. For the students, many of whom were black and came from less-than-affluent homes, the dancing they did was only part of the instruction.” She later shaped more young lives as an English professor in California.

Is there anything he can’t do? “Brooks and the director Susan Stroman mounted a musical version of [Young Frankenstein], a show that Brooks now calls ‘lugubrious.’ It was only moderately successful, so he cut about 40 minutes, bringing the entire evening (with intermission) down to about two hours, and that version has been playing at the Garrick Theatre in London since last September. Was it hard to edit himself? ‘I did it in a couple weeks. I knew what to do.’ He cut three songs and added a new one. (Singing) ‘It could work! My grandfather wasn’t wrong. You could re-animate dead tissue’” He finds it hard to believe ‘It Could Work’ wasn’t in the original show, since it’s the ‘Rain in Spain’ moment, the song that makes the musical a hit. In imitation of Dr. Frankenstein, he seems to have reanimated his own dead show.”

Jonathan Gold changed the dining scene in Los Angeles, and changed food criticism all over the world. He died soon after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. “‘I can’t imagine the city without him. It just feels wrong. I feel like we won’t have our guide, we won’t have the soul,’ said filmmaker Laura Gabbert, who directed City of Gold, a 2015 documentary that followed the legendary critic as he ate his way through and reflected on Los Angeles. ‘It’s such a loss. I can’t wrap my head around it.'”

Her own anonymous grant program is called Anonymous Was a Woman, in reference to a line in Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” to pay tribute to female artists in history who signed their paintings “Anonymous” so that their work would be taken seriously. The donor behind the prize wanted to remain unknown. But now she is stepping out from behind the curtain: Susan Unterberg, herself a once underrecognized female artist over 40.

“In the decades following her death [in 1963], Patsy’s people were ascendant: Winchester’s white laborers and cleaners, people who proudly traced their family land to the [impoverished] hilly folds of the surrounding valley, became homeowners, businesspeople, parents to first-generation college students, even mayor. And through it all, Patsy was their North Star, their proof that a Kent Street girl could be globally recognized.”

“Russian theater and film director Kirill Serebrennikov called the embezzlement allegations against him and his colleagues ‘absurd’ as a Moscow court ordered him to remain under house arrest until August 22.” This is the fourth time his pretrial detention has been extended. “Initially treated as a witness in an investigation targeting Moscow’s Gogol Center theater, Serebrennikov was charged in August 2017 with organizing the embezzlement of 68 million rubles ($1.1 million) in state funds.”