Category: people

In Germany, where academic philosophers still equate dryness with seriousness, Peter Sloterdijk has a near-monopoly on irreverence. This is an important element of his wide appeal, as is his eagerness to offer an opinion on absolutely anything—from psychoanalysis to finance, Islam to Soviet modernism, the ozone layer to Neanderthal sexuality. An essay on anger can suddenly plunge into a history of smiling; a meditation on America may veer into a history of frivolity. His magnum opus, the “Spheres” trilogy, nearly three thousand pages long, includes a rhapsodic excursus on rituals of human-placenta disposal. He is almost farcically productive.

Hannah Arendt: “I met Auden late in his life and mine – at an age when the easy, knowledgeable intimacy of friendships formed in one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be left, to share with another. Thus, we were very good friends but not intimate friends. Moreover, there was a reserve in him that discouraged familiarity – not that I tested it, ever.”

If you don’t know him from his old pieces for NPR’s All Things Considered or as a panelist on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, you’ve surely heard his voice on ads for Motel 6, a gig he’s had for more than 30 years. And that’s hardly all he does. “There were a number of years where people thought I owned the motel chain – there’s still some of that – and that left some people confused as to what I thought I was doing publishing books and voicing cartoons.” Let alone carpentry.

“Giorgio Vasari has been variously called the father of art history, the inventor of artistic biography, and the author of ‘the Bible of the Italian Renaissance’ – a little book called The Lives of the Artists. It’s a touchstone for scholars looking to get a peek at life in Michelangelo’s day, and quite fun, too, depending on whose wildly embellished life you’re reading. Ingrid Rowland joins us on the [Smarty Pants] podcast to tell the story of the man behind the men of the Renaissance that we know so well – and, of course, to gossip a bit about Florentine egos, and even a few naughty monkeys.”

“A tall, bearded, Falstaffian figure, he had a commanding presence and a voice of depth and authority that could seemingly carry the length of a football pitch with minimal effort. … As Wotan in Wagner’s Die Walküre he could out-sing a bank of roaring tubas.”

“Appearing before a live audience again, she says she felt no more nervous than she had before any performance from decades earlier – which is to say, she was terrified. ‘You can go onto that stage every night, and it’s always the equivalent of going onto the topmost diving board, and you don’t know if there’s any water in the pool. Every time I say, ‘Yes, I’ll do it,’ I think, ‘My God I don’t know how to do it. I can’t do it.’ We are sadomasochists as well as being brave, actors, and we torment ourselves.'”

“While Lockwood acknowledged [Stéphane] Grappelli as his hero, he by no means limited himself to the elder violinist’s ‘gypsy jazz’ milieu. Lockwood was already a rock star by the time he met Grappelli – a veteran of the progressive band Magma – and would proceed from his tutelage to a career heavily identified with jazz fusion. In addition, Lockwood was a composer of violin concertos as well as two operas, and created a musical with his first wife, singer Caroline Casadesus.”

The man, who was attending the museum’s after-hours ugly-sweater party on Dec. 21, entered the terra-cotta warrior exhibition room and used his cellphone’s flashlight to view the displays. Then, according to an affidavit by Jacob B. Archer, an F.B.I. special agent, the man put his arm around the statue and took a selfie. The authorities said the man, later identified as Michael Rohana, then went for a more permanent memento.

Bennett Jr., whose best-known book was Before the Mayflower, “was both lyrical and outspoken in his writing, arguing that the history of black people in the United States had been ignored or told only through a white filter.”