Category: people

“[His] compelling narratives chronicled the business of extortion by Colombian terrorist groups, Vietnam War reporters who turned a skeptical eye on sunny government accounts of the conflict, and followed a man on a seemingly quixotic seven-year journey by kayak.”

Salman Khan, who has made more than 100 movies and is known as both a romantic hero and an action star, has been convicted for illegally killing two rare blackbuck antelopes during while on location in 1998. This is the fourth case in which he has been tried for poaching during that film shoot; he was convicted in two of those cases and then acquitted on appeal.

“The 250-year history of circus would have been very different if a man from Newcastle-under-Lyme had got on better with his father, and been happy to become an apprentice cabinet maker. … Philip Astley … in 1768 drew a 13 metre (42ft) diameter ring on the ground and filled it with men and women standing on the backs of cantering horses plus clowns, jugglers and other marvels – [and thus] the modern circus was born.

“During the 1990s, Mr. Nabay took the speedy beat of music that had been heard for centuries in parades and celebrations and transferred it to Western instruments. His songs became hits as civil war tore Sierra Leone apart and were claimed by both sides, although his music increasingly held direct antiwar messages.”

“‘Michael set a new standard for the viola,’ [violinist Arnold] Steinhardt, [Tree’s Guarneri colleague,] said. ‘Now orchestras are not filled with failed violinists playing the viola, but with sensational violists,’ performers whom Mr. Tree encouraged to treat the viola as an integral part of an ensemble, rather than a backing voice supporting a violin’s melody or cello’s ostinato.”

While many continued to think of Baldwin as the spokesperson for a vision of ultimate cross-racial communion such as concluded The Fire Next Time, Baldwin’s speeches and essays grew increasing direct about the impossibilities of saving the United States from itself. By the time of King’s murder, Baldwin had shifted his intellectual focus mainly away from black–white reconciliation to instead undertake a no-less-difficult project: facilitating a conversation connecting younger, more radical black leaders with those of his own generation.

Bochco also created “LA Law” and “NYPD Blue.” His “boundary-pushing methods as a producer could make some network executives skittish. But they often deferred to him and were ultimately rewarded with strong ratings and critical kudos, a combination that was less common in the pre-Peak TV era of the 1980s and ’90s.”

The poet, who wrote for many years in obscurity, “kept small stacks of paper in every room of the farmhouse — just in case. She wrote whenever the rhymes blossomed: sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes at the chirp of dawn, sometimes in the summer fallow tractor, where she’d draw a finger across the dusty windshield. She started with a single line, a single rhyme, and ‘then you have to fill in all this other garbage,’ she once said, with the sort of dry, self-deprecating humor that often infused her verse.”

This is a fun interview with a true New York actor:
“What’s been the biggest surprise?
“Becoming a successful actress. Never in my wildest dreams. I waitressed for a gazillion years and then I’d get some little job, and either they would let me go or they would let me get my shifts back when I came back. My whole life was like that for the first 15 years in New York.”