Category: people

“Our study reflects that artists, in the year following the death of a friend or relative, are on average less creative than at other times in their lives,” said economist Kathryn Graddy of Brandeis University. Her analysis, co-authored by Carl Lieberman, is published in the journal Management Science.

“In more than a dozen books and thousands of lectures that were an awe-inspiring form of performance art, Dr. Scully sought to impart several central ideas: that buildings help define a culture, that architecture should be a humanizing force and that a well-built community can foster a well-lived life.”

A second-generation member of one the Hindi cinema’s leading families, he was one of the busiest actors in the world in the 1970s and ’80s, starring in well over 100 Bollywood productions. His English-language career, begun alongside wife Jennifer Kendal for Merchant-Ivory, ranged from Shakespeare Wallah through Heat and Dust and Siddhartha to The Deceivers and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.

His “cease and desist” and proceed “at your peril” letters to media outlets and accusers on behalf of clients are legendary. Recently, as The Times prepared stories in which more than 10 women accused Ratner of sexual misconduct, the lawyer sent the paper multiple letters filled with florid language and threats of litigation. The missives, which would not have seemed out of place in the Hollywood novels of Michael Tolkin and Elmore Leonard, were the pummeling prose of a legal pugilist looking for an early knock-out.

Mayer composed everything from the six-minute opera “Brief Candle” to other, longer operas and orchestral works, choral works, and many, many pieces for children, including the well-known “Hello, World!”

“I thought I could get in this racket. I thought I’d be turning down three and four speeches a year. Not one other school has asked me to do it! I was just amazed. I thought that I would have a whole other career here doing them and, come May, I would be working for two weeks straight. But not a one asked me, not even a prison school.”

“Gomer was a recognizable kind of American hero: a good-hearted, gentle, unsophisticated sort (not unlike Forrest Gump of a later era) who encounters a harder, more cynical modern world – in this case embodied by Southern California – and helps redeem it. … To fans who knew him only as Gomer, his full-throated, almost operatic baritone was surprisingly striking, if strangely incongruous.”

“In the UK survey of 823 artists, 55.1% say they earn between £1,000 and £5,000 net per year while 17.7% earn between £5,000 and £10,000. At the raw end, 9.3% of UK artists state their income as zero. This combined figure of 82.1% is worse than the findings of a previous survey of 1,061 artists, conducted by a-n, an artist data company, which in 2013 found that 72% of artists earned under £10,000. Of the US respondents, 75.2% make less than $10,000, with the majority (48.7%) in the $1,000 to $5,000 bracket; 5.1% in the US stated their income as nothing.”

“On Nov. 9, 2016, I boarded the Lake Shore Limited, Amtrak’s overnight service from New York to Chicago. … Over the next 13 days, I would log 8,980 miles aboard six trains, traversing 31 states, subsisting mainly on Three Cheese Tortellini with Creamy Pesto Sauce and Vegetable Medley. During this time, I had conversations with upward of 80 strangers, almost all of whom I met over meals in the dining car.”