Category: people

“During a career that spanned more than half a century, Ellison wrote some 50 books and more than 1,400 articles, essays, TV scripts and screenplays. Although best-known for his science fiction, which garnered nearly a dozen Nebula and Hugo awards, Ellison’s work covered virtually every type of writing from mysteries to comic books to newspaper columns. He was known as much for his attitude as his writing — he described himself once as ‘bellicose.'”

“Mr. Jackson was an unlikely starmaker who demanded nothing less than perfection as he drove his children toward stardom. To a remarkable degree, he succeeded … Collectively, the Jacksons may have been the most prominent family in pop-music history, but their fame came at the cost of family feuds, lurid accusations and an unending stream of tabloid headlines. Over time, nearly all of the children rebelled against the brutal manner of their father, who was known to some as Joe but preferred to be called Joseph, even by his children.”

“Fifteen minutes into an otherwise smooth interview, Battle takes a deep breath, stops talking and puts down the phone, never to return. No goodbye. No explanation. Nada. Even stranger is the fact that the interview-killing question wasn’t even a tough one. It was a softball query about how it feels to have her career still going strong as she approaches 70.” (Has she never heard of the Streisand Effect?)

Though his tallest tales were those he passed off as the truth, he was as popular as he was prolific, producing more than 30 volumes of prize-winning essays, plays, memoir and fiction, including La Vie devant soi, the bestselling French novel of the 20th Century. But his star faded as he aged and was further dimmed by posthumous revelations that he’d duped the Parisian literary establishment, publishing some of his most rapturously received works (La Vie among them) under a fake name.

What had he done that was so wrong? Here he was, in his essays and interviews, making informed, nuanced arguments about the way we live now — about anything from Twitter (which he is against) to the way political correctness has been weaponized to shut down discourse (which he is against) to obligatory self-promotion (which he is against) to the incessant ending of a phone call by saying, “I love you” (which he is against, but because “I love you” is for private) — and though critics loved him and he had a devoted readership, others were using the very mechanisms and platforms that he warned against (like the internet in general and social media in specific) to ridicule him.

“The video, for a song called ‘Got Me Good,’ begins with a man sitting in front of a wall of computer monitors — a hacker in Russia, it seems — and on those monitors we see real footage of the singer, Emin Agalarov, talking to the real Donald Trump. … Then the video shifts to a scene in which Emin walks through a hotel hallway with a Trump impersonator. They exchange a briefcase implied to be full of cash, as Emin sings to the Trump actor, ‘I wish you at least could be honest. I wish that you told me the truth.’ Soon, they are frolicking in a bed with several women. What makes this more than a silly spoof is that Emin Agalarov is one of the only people in the world who might have firsthand knowledge of what Trump did or didn’t do during his brief trip to Moscow in 2013.”

“[He] spent his entire career in his native South Africa, portraying black and white citizens in some of their most intimate and vulnerable moments. He ventured underground to photograph workers in the country’s gold mines, entered dusty black shantytowns and the segregated white churches and towns of Afrikaner hardliners.”

In 1986, John Vasconcellos, a somewhat tortured California state assemblyman who had attended programs at Esalen, persuaded Gov. George Deukmejian to fund a “task force to promote self-esteem and personal and social responsibility.” Professors from the University of California were to study the links between self-esteem and healthy personal development. And California — nay, the world — could then design programs to nip homelessness, drug abuse and crime in the bud, by teaching people to value themselves and achieve their potential.

Hall was a prolific writer, whose essays, memoirs, freelance articles and poetry spread his readers across many genres. “Hall was one of the leading poets of his generation, frequently mentioned in the company of Robert Bly, James Wright and Galway Kinnell. In evoking a bucolic New England past and expressing a deep veneration of nature, he used simple and direct language, though often to surreal effect.”

The University of Illinois professor had a question. She “was writing a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1975 when she began to wonder why 19th-century American literature was so male-dominated. Hawthorne himself helped pique her curiosity. In 1855 he had famously complained that ‘a damned mob of scribbling women’ was cutting into his sales.” So she found those scribblers, and a whole lot more.