Category: people

“As a director, Ms. Jones won a Peabody Award for the four-hour documentary 180 Days: A Year Inside an American High School. … In 2005 Ms. Jones was appointed executive director of the National Black Programming Consortium, now called Black Public Media. Her work there included moving beyond the organization’s role supporting black filmmakers. During her tenure, the consortium created an online digital media project documenting the 2005 hurricanes that devastated New Orleans and neighboring Gulf states.”

“We found both a rapid increase in suicides in August 2014, and specifically suffocation suicides, that paralleled the time and method of Williams’ death,” a research team led by David Fink of Columbia University writes in the online journal PLoS One. “Although excess suicides were observed across gender and age groups, males and persons aged 30 to 44 had the greatest increase,” the researchers report. That presumably includes a lot of people who grew up with his movies.

Alexander, a renowned writer, poet, and scholar, is recognized as one of the nation’s leading voices in modern literature and a bold visionary in the academy. Over the course of a distinguished academic and artistic career, she has developed a number of complex, multi-arts and multi-disciplinary teams, departments and partnerships, and dedicated herself consistently to creating, building and sustaining highly successful institutions – from the Poetry Center at Smith College, to a major rebuilding of the African American Studies department at Yale University, from the poetry non-profit Cave Canem, to the Ford Foundation’s programs in journalism, arts and culture.

The point is that most of the really profound pieces of life advice are actually bloody obvious. It’s just that, sometimes, we need to be told. Which is why the idea behind Desperately Seeking Self-Improvementis so terrific. Two sceptical business school professors, André Spicer and Carl Cederström, devote a year to exploring what used to be known as the self-help industry but is now called the optimisation industry because it sounds cooler.

He was a champion student athlete (and occasional football pro), an NYU- and Columbia-trained lawyer, London socialite, and linguist. (He was also, for a time, a nude artists’ model.) Many know that he was a civil rights firebrand, but he became a committed Communist and Sovietophile (he had fluent Russian) – until, far too late, he came to understand what life was like in the USSR, and it wrecked him.

“I’ve made over 100 motion pictures, and some of them were even good. It’s nice to be reborn every few decades, because then you can have another career. The nice part about awards and being nominated is the fact that it wakes everybody up again, and makes them realize you’re alive and kicking and available.”

We cannot say that Rebekah Mercer and her family foundation are dictating museum exhibitions by virtue of her board seat, and the museum, in a statement, has said that she is not and that “its funders do not shape its curatorial decisions.” But that’s not really the issue. As a funder of climate-science disinformation, Ms. Mercer stands in direct contradiction to the museum’s mission “to discover, interpret, and disseminate — through scientific research and education — knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe.”

“When reporter Nicholas von Hoffman joined The Washington Post in 1966, he brought with him a flair for controversy that eventually triggered a resignation threat from a top editor, a boycott from advertisers and, according to Post historian Chalmers M. Roberts, ‘produced more angry letters to the editor than the work of any other single reporter in the paper’s history.'”