Category: people

“South African Simone Botha Welgemoed, 27, has been deaf since birth and was 22-months-old when she was fitted with a Cochlear implant in 1992. But when she saw the Virgin Active advertisement on social media, she realised the implant had been edited out.”

“Not only were there no eyewitnesses; Luther himself, ordinarily an enthusiastic self-dramatizer, was vague on what had happened. He remembered drawing up a list of ninety-five theses around the date in question, but, as for what he did with it, all he was sure of was that he sent it to the local archbishop. Furthermore, the theses were not, as is often imagined, a set of non-negotiable demands about how the Church should reform itself in accordance with Brother Martin’s standards. Rather, like all “theses” in those days, they were points to be thrashed out in public disputations, in the manner of the ecclesiastical scholars of the twelfth century or, for that matter, the debate clubs of tradition-minded universities in our own time.”

Jackson is atop the Forbes list of top-earning dead celebrities for the fifth straight year, with $75 million. Forbes says Jackson’s earnings are boosted by a new greatest hits album, a Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil show and a stake in the EMI music publishing catalogue.

Among the more than 100 books he (actually) authored were Margaret Truman’s Capital Crimes, the Murder, She Wrote books that were a spinoff of the TV series, and the notorious 1967 faux-memoir Coffee, Tea, or Me?, which purported to be the true-life escapades of a pair of swinging stewardesses (as they were called back then).

“Perhaps a man possessed of an ego the size of a hot-air balloon could only subsist within a myth. To keep himself airborne required so much huffing and puffing that inevitably he ran out of breath. He was jealous, insecure, treacherous to his friends, and merciless toward his promoters—no good turn, no matter how good it was, went unpunished—and although he overestimated his talent, he also largely wasted it, which was precisely the charge he had laid against his old pal F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, with The Great Gatsby, surely did write if not the then at least agreat American novel.”

The purchases include $31,900 at an art gallery in Florida and a whopping $623,910 at a New York antiques dealer. All that pales in comparison, however, beside the staggering $1 million spent at a rug dealer in Alexandria, Virginia. Wires were also made for $849,215 to a “Men’s Clothing Store in New York,” $520,440 to a “Clothing Store in Beverly Hills,” and $655,500 to a “Landscaper in the Hamptons.”

“In general, I learned, you should stay away from parties for rich people, because their purpose is donations and having a good time is secondary. Never go to a networking event. Poetry readings are either the best or the worst things. You can skip any book party because they only happen once, they end too soon, and there’s no narrative to them, especially if you’re not there.”

“The title page and dedication page have encrypted in them the exact church, the exact part of that church and the exact spot … where Shakespeare is buried. It’s like an old-fashioned treasure island map. You overlay the title page on to a ground plan of Poets’ Corner and it just points to exactly where he’s buried. It’s just phenomenal.”

The once “very macho” anti-war activist who raged against MIT’s role in nuclear weapons research is the catalyst behind the west’s mushrooming interest in mindfulness meditation, having reimagined Buddhist contemplation practices for a secular age almost 40 years ago.

The book, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, came from a rather literary place: It “grew out of a personal ad Juska placed in the New York Review of Books in 1999. Inspired by an Eric Rohmer film, Autumn Tale, it read: ‘Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.'”