Category: people

A fond look at the life and career of the mathematician-turned-satirical-songwriter-turned-mathematician of whom The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Lehrer’s muse [is] not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.” He’s released no new songs in more than 40 years; as he said in 2002, “Things I once thought were funny are scary now. I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.”

“In 1975, Kasell joined NPR as a part-time employee. Four years later, he announced the news for the first broadcast of a new show called Morning Edition. Over three decades, he became one of the network’s most recognized voices. … And then came a surprise second act; after decades of being super-serious, Kasell got a chance to let his hair down as the official judge and scorekeeper for Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!“

One of South Korea’s most famous actors in the 1960s and ’70s, Choi was kidnapped in Hong Kong in 1978 and transported to Pyongyang at the order of Kim Jong-Il. With her ex-husband, Shin Sang-Ok, who was abducted shortly afterward, she was held in North Korea and forced to make films for eight years.

“Mr. Ehle, who had been married to the British actress Rosemary Harris since 1967, wrote radio dramas, biographies, a nonfiction account of student civil rights protests at Chapel Hill, a history of the Cherokee Nation and a guide to French and British wines and cheeses. But he is best known for his seven Appalachian novels, which were partly inspired by stories he heard from his mother’s family, whose roots in the mountains went back several generations.”

An oboist by training, Malgoire in 1966 founded La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy, France’s first period-instrument orchestra, with which he made more than 140 recordings.

“As the world becomes more hostile to us all as artists, you must find that thing in making art that brings you as much peace as reifying my deeper self does for me. Not the thing about theatre that makes you feel ecstatic and high, not the thing you would suffer and die for like artists do in all those stupid movies that romanticize us. Find the thing or idea or core value in your artistic practice that brings you peace. Because when the show is a hit, that peace is what will carry you through self-doubt and self-sabotage. And when the show is a failure, that peace will hold off self-destruction. And when there is no show at all, which is most of the time, that peace is what will remind you that it doesn’t matter.”

“I’m leery of any musician who doesn’t admit to going through a period of trying to emulate their musical idols, or their favorite performance of a piece, or even just trying to match what you’re hearing. Jazzers do it all of the time, and aren’t ashamed to admit it. I think it’s part of how you learn what it is that so struck you about the music or performance in the first place, it’s a path to discovering your aesthetic.”

Ayres “used her hands, brushes, parts of cardboard boxes and brooms to arrange the vivid images that distinguished her work for more than 60 years. She often spent more time staring at a work-in-progress to determine how to organize shapes and space than she did painting it.”

Harrison, who with her husband Newton formed the art duo The Harrisons, created work that was “unconventional, to say the least, pushing the very boundaries of what constitutes art. They made topsoil and grew crops in it. They consulted on urban planning projects in Baltimore, Europe and elsewhere. Well before global warming was in the public consciousness, they considered its likely effects through maps and other means. And then there was ‘Hog Pasture,’ one of their earliest works. … They made an actual pasture indoors, with hopes of having a real hog root around in it.”