Category: people

“Unlike the other greats of his generation, he was not a figure affected by the media. The genius emperor Boulez, the sensuous artist-prince Henze, the galactic Stockhausen, had all already cut their own paths as Klaus Huber continued to teach 40 violin students per week, and only pursued a vocation he’d long known in the mornings.” (Huber was also a highly-regarded composition teacher; among his students were Brian Ferneyhough, Wolfgang Rihm and Kaija Saariaho.)

The late novelist Anthony Powell was an important mentor and supporter of Naipaul during the latter’s early years as a young Trinidadian writer in London. Years later, Naipaul included in his own memoir a harsh dismissal of Powell’s writing. Now Powell’s biographer has discovered evidence that Naipaul’s remarks about Powell were quite possibly based on a lie and definitely different from what Naipaul had told Powell personally.

Barthes was a rock star of the writing world when he died suddenly in 1980 and, as with all rock stars, his death only led to a new lease of life. “Lately”, one commentator observed in 2012, “the posthumous corpus of Roland Barthes has been growing at a rate that rivals Tupac Shakur’s.

The body of Nicholas of Myra, the beloved fourth-century bishop whose figure morphed over the centuries into the jolly old Santa Claus seen everywhere each December, was long thought to have been disinterred in 1087 and taken to the Italian city of Bari, where his shrine was built and remains to this day. But it seems that the Crusader merchants who took the remains away 930 years ago got the wrong guy: a team of archaeologists says they believe they’ve found the tomb of the real St. Nicholas under his old church in Myra, now Demre on Turkey’s southern coast.

“Through his treatment of celebrities – among them entertainers John Lennon, Yoko Ono and James Earl Jones – Dr. Janov became a celebrity in his own right beginning in the 1970s. In a best-selling book, and in appearances on television programs such as The Dick Cavett Show, he converted curious onlookers to committed followers with an enticingly simple explanation of psychological ailments, and what he billed as a near surefire way of resolving them.”

When reporter Sam Anderson called the New Yorker legend for directions to his Princeton home, McPhee said of Anderson’s tiny hometown, “I’ve been there,” and proceeded to recount the story of his mountaintop picnic there decades ago with (of all people) convicted spy Alger Hiss. McPhee remembered the name of the manufacturer of the little incline railway up the mountain (Otis Elevator) and the slope of the incline (60 degrees).

Renate Langer, a former child actress from Germany, claims that she travelled to the filmmaker’s house in the Swiss resort town of Gstaad in 1972, when she was 15, and that he raped her there.

The Berggruen Prize for philosophy and culture, inaugurated last year as a sort of Nobel equivalent, goes this year to University of Cambridge professor Onora O’Neill, known for her work in international justice, human rights, and bioethics.

“Jesse Jackson hailed him as a strong supporter of the civil rights movement, while Larry King called him ‘a GIANT’ of free speech. Others noted that while Hefner loved to excoriate feminists in the pages of Playboy, he was a supporter of some of their causes, including abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment. … But how well does the idea of Hef the liberator of women really hold up? The New York Times Culture writers Amanda Hess, Wesley Morris and Taffy Brodesser-Akner joined [Jennifer Schuessler] in a discussion of Hefner’s social and cultural legacy.”

Still a fugitive in the case of the 1977 drugging and rape of a 13-year-old girl (Polanski pled guilty and served 42 days, but fled the U.S. when told the judge was going to disregard his plea deal), the filmmaker said, “As you know, [victim] Samantha Geimer has been asking for over 30 years for this thing to end. But, I’m sorry the judges who dealt with it the last 40 years were corrupted, one covering for the other. So I don’t maybe one of them will [eventually] stop doing it.”