Category: people

“Morley is often discussed in relation to the Photorealist movement, which sought to strip any sense of authorship from the act of painting through the creation of carefully worked images that mirror their photographic sources. However, Morley said he preferred the term ‘super-realist’ to describe his work, because it aligned it with Suprematism, the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde that sought to distill painting to its most basic forms.”

“The Australian-born Dr. Conway was just 40 when, in 1975, she became the first woman to lead Smith, the nation’s largest liberal arts institution for women. In her decade-long tenure, she presided over a transformation that brought the women’s movement to a school dominated for more than a century by conservative male faculty and administrators. … In a wide-ranging career, Dr. Conway was an accomplished scholar who focused on early-20th-century women’s reformers but later wrote a trio of critically acclaimed memoirs.”

Sandler, who wrote many books about Abstract Expressionism and the artists in that movement, “was a senior critic of Artnews in the late 1950s to early ’60s and a contributor to Artforum, among other publications.” He was also an educator, cofounder of Artists Space in New York, and a writer, with a novel coming out in the fall.

Anyone who’s ever played a video game in a pizza place – this must be about 99 percent of Americans over age 30, surely – has Dabney and Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell to thank. “The electrical engineer, U.S. Marine and Atari co-founder led a life about as eventful as his packed CV suggests — but things did really seem to accelerate when those thoughts of pizza entered the picture.”

Sal Soghoian “is a guy who’s built a long career creating technology that lets users hand the tedium of repetitive grunt work off to their computers in creative ways” – and he changed the way we use our computers and phones. Now he’s called “the dean of automation” and is working on new ways to make everything faster, more productive, and more automatic.

But there is still a strong campaign against her. “Fonda’s incandescence has been deliberately dimmed, even in 2018, when the day seems to have arrived in which, as George McGovern predicted in 1988, ‘Jane Fonda will be fully atoned for anything that happened in connection with the war.'”

“The renowned Thoreau scholar Robert Sattelmeyer spotted an odd entry in the Boston Vigilance Committee’s accounting books and wondered: is that the Samuel Clemens, who grew up to be Mark Twain? The committee used most of its funds to help runaway slaves escape to freedom, in direct violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. But in an unusual expenditure in September 1854, the radical abolitionists sent $25.50 to a Samuel Clemens for ‘passage from Missouri Penitentiary to Boston — he having been imprisoned there two years for aiding Fugitives to escape.'”

Anastasia Edel writes about her mother, a pianist and staffer at the Institute of Culture in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, where, for a time, she even had a local television show about classical music.

PEN International recently issued a statement demanding Dareen Tatour’s unconditional release. PEN’s President, Jennifer Clement, wrote the following: “Dareen Tatour is on trial because she wrote a poem. Dareen Tatour is critical of Israeli policies, but governments that declare themselves as democracies do not curb dissent. Words like those of Dareen Tatour have been used by other revolutionary poets, during the Vietnam war, during other liberation wars, and they can be found in the works of Sufiya Kamal of Bangladesh, of Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua, and so on.”