Category: people

Natalia Lee is the only woman armourer on the Game of Thrones set – something she’s used to. She made the Heartsbane Sword, aka the big one that (spoiler alert) Sam stole from his dad to take into future battle. Lee “has kept an eye out for young women on set, saying: ‘If it’s a stand-in or stuntwoman, I’ll always reach out and talk to them, I know how it is. Some days I’m the only woman in a male environment of thousands of men. I know it can be uncomfortable.'”

Wesley Morris: “The more she empowered us to speak, the better she got at knowing how her emotional algorithm could supply us with books and feelings and tools for betterment. And she took real risks to better understand this country, too. … Oprah didn’t do this work alone. She helped us do it. She was a platform. She was Facebook. Forget the presidency. She was the facilitator in chief.”

“In the US, people have turned their energies to each other because they can’t do much about who is on top of the power structure. … [There’s an] oppression olympics [in which] outrage becomes proof of existence. … [The] grievances are real and our intentions are good, [but we are] looking for flaws, instead of looking for things in common.”

Executive Director Lane Harwell will transition from Dance/NYC this summer to join the Ford Foundation as Program Officer, Creativity and Free Expression, where he will support the foundation’s explorations of how the arts can contribute to fairer and more just societies.

“Professor Cavell was for decades on the faculty of Harvard University, where he often expounded on the ideas of what is called ordinary language philosophy, which argued that philosophers had become so preoccupied with convoluted statements of philosophical problems that they had lost touch with everyday words and their meanings. … He also showed his more cautious peers that writing on Shakespeare and even Hollywood films could make a philosophical contribution, illuminating issues of love, shame and community.”

Says the 25-year-old author of the autobiographical novels The End of Eddy (about his violent upbringing as a gay kid in an impoverished French town) and History of Violence (about his rape and near-murder shortly after he arrived in Paris as a student), “I think that the more you talk and write about violence the more goodness you can create in the world.”

Last week, the Fyre Festival “organizer” was caught allegedly selling fake tickets to events like Coachella and Burning Man—and this is after he plead guilty in March to fraudulently recruiting 80 investors to hand over $26 million for his infamously disastrous music festival.

As the daughters of great men go, Jamie Bernstein has had a happy fate: the existence of this well-written book, with its poignancy and its shuddery detail—her father’s fragrance in the morning—is a mark of sanity and survival. In telling his story, she got to write her own.

“[He] became known as the ‘grandfather of rap’ for his rhythmic, spoken-word verses with the Last Poets, a group that channeled the militant social criticism of the Black Power movement into music that paved the way for hip-hop.”

“A respected conductor of sacred music, his regular performances of Bach’s passions and Christmas Oratorio were eagerly followed by his fans. … [He] was the director of the KlangVerwaltung (Sound Administration) Orchestra and the Neubeuern Choral Association and frequently took the two ensembles on tour to places as far afield as the Concertgebouw concert hall in Amsterdam or the Hong Kong Music Festival.”