Category: people

Cuba Gooding Jr. says he had been preparing his entire life to win an Oscar, which he did in 1997 for Jerry Maguire – but he wasn’t prepared for what to do afterwards. Some very, very bad moves, and movies, followed. “But in recent years Gooding has been clawing his way back. In 2016, he returned to global attention with the acclaimed Ryan Murphy series The People v OJ Simpson; now he’s leading a London revival of the musical Chicago, playing the male lead, lawyer Billy Flynn.”

She denies this firmly, but … wow. “Her more than 30 books have covered topics including linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary theory and feminism. Her many prestigious honors include the Vaclav Havel Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize and France’s Commander of the Legion of Honor.”(Every single humanities grad student for the past 30 years is saying, “I KNEW IT.”)

University student (and English major) Banita Sandhu grew up in Caerleon, Wales, but she had to go to India to find commercial actiing success. “While Bollywood is traditionally perceived as less progressive than western cinema, Sandhu expresses frustration with the lack of three-dimensional roles for Asian women in the UK. ‘I struggled to fit into their version of what a British Asian girl is,’ she says. ‘As a third-generation British Indian, I’m not affected by problems like arranged marriages. That stereotype is from 30 years ago and that’s not where we are at now as a society.'”

Shreve enjoyed putting her protagonists, usually women, in stressful situations. She “drew critical acclaim and a large following with books like ‘The Weight of Water’ (1997), an intricate story involving a long-ago crime and present-day dramas. Susan Kenney, reviewing that book in The New York Times, described it as ‘a cryptic long-lost narrative inside an impending family tragedy wrapped in a true-crime murder mystery framed by the aftermath of all of the above.'”

During deep brain stimulation procedures, doctors implant electrodes in the brain to try and control tremors. The patient must be awake during surgery, so doctors can see the effects of the electrodes. “It is brain surgery, but it’s a way we can really improve a patient’s life, quality of life, where otherwise they’re going to be on medications that may have a modest effect on improving their tremor.”

“Mr. Gaylord, a World War II Army paratrooper who received the Bronze Star Medal for valor during the Battle of the Bulge, said he intended his sculptures to ‘confront visitors with the reality of actual war’ while complying with the design committee’s instructions not to glorify it.”

“Mr. Wilson, a longtime professor at the University of California, Berkeley, grew up listening to jazz and spirituals. He studied African music in Ghana under one of his two Guggenheim Fellowships, opened an electronic music studio at the Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he had formerly taught, and wrote academic papers, including a major essay on the art of black music.”

Gérard Lhéritier, the son and grandson of plumbers, built himself into the biggest, and flashiest, seller of old manuscripts and books in France, a businessman whose (heavily publicized) prize piece of inventory was the Marquis de Sade’s original manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom. (Naturally, Esquire uses that fact as the hook for this article.) Now Lhéritier, his assets seized, stands accused orchestrating France’s largest-ever Ponzi scheme, using a Wall Street-style device to bilk thousands of shareholders of more than $1 billion.

“In the early 1950s, a Mossad agent named Shlomo Cohen-Abravanel was sent to Egypt, under the cover-story that he was a French abstract painter named Charduval. Abravanel’s fake artist persona was so successful that he scored a small solo exhibition at Cairo’s Museum of Modern Art, while the actual Abravanel went on to design the Mossad’s official emblem.”

“As a composer, I believe that the best gift I can offer our troubled world is music. Some composers choose to address the political issues of their times directly in their music. But, although I’ve been politically active all my life, the heart of my music lies elsewhere—again, in the Earth. In order to renew human culture, we sometimes need to step outside of culture, to remember that we are only a small part of the larger order of things. Although my work is in culture, I search for my music at the intersection of human imagination and what we call “nature,” which is the ultimate source of everything that we are as individuals, as societies, and as a species.”