Category: people

“In a groundbreaking project led by Plymouth University and the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in London, her brain was linked to a computer using Brain Computer Music Interfacing software, allowing her to compose and play music again. This month, for the first time she was able to perform with her best friend Alison Balfour, with whom she last played when they were both violinists in the Welsh National Opera Orchestra in the 1980s.”

Zephaniah is furious about – for instance – police surveillance of Black communities and the neglect of Grenfell Tower that led to the conflagration there. But he keeps a sense of humor: “When I talk to kids, I tell them about me growing up in gangs in Birmingham and how one day I got up and I went to London and I got involved in another gang and these were a real hard lot. All these kids are listening to me, and they go ‘Oh, you poor thing.’ And I go, ‘It was a gang of poets and painters,’ and they all laugh.”

Steward became a press officer for Richard Branson’s first foray into a record label in the 1970s, toured with Captain Beefheart, and worked with the Sex Pistols before she became fascinated with promoting both Latin music and what’s often called “world music.”

The appellate court said that a “Facebook friendship does not necessarily signify the existence of a close relationship,” noting that some people have “friend” counts in the thousands. Facebook members often cannot recall every person they have accepted as ‘friends’ or who have accepted them as ‘friends.’”

“Author of the classic Helliconia trilogy, and the story on which Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film AI: Artificial Intelligence was based, … he began publishing his stories in the mid-1950s, a time when SF was heavily dominated by US writers schooled in the markets of commercial magazines. Aldiss’s work came as a breath of fresh air to a genre beginning to suffocate in its own orthodoxies.”

“[She] started singing on the radio at age 6, became a hit-making pop vocalist” – “Deep Purple,” “Heart and Soul,” “Kiss the Boys Goodbye” – “in the late 1930s and performed into her ninth decade.”

“With [American Studies] and the three [books] that followed, Mr. Merlis was widely praised for the sensitivity with which he addressed such themes as the corrosive effect of shame and the intersecting paths of past and present.” His An Arrow’s Flight was voted by the LGBT industry organization Publishing Triangle as one of the best gay novels of all time.

For four years Kirill Serebrennikov’s Gogol Center has played an important role in Moscow’s cultural life. It was funded by the state but it was Serebrennikov, the theater’s artistic director, who managed this unique venue that provided a platform for political thought and that many fans called “a new place of power.”

Agnès C. Poirier: “Jerry Lewis was always a subject of a deep trans-Atlantic misunderstanding, one that triggered sarcasm in the United States, and bewilderment in France. While some Americans felt embarrassed by this contortionist comic, the French embraced Mr. Lewis’s humor as both an abstract art and social satire of American life. Americans mocked the French for falling for this crass clown, while the French couldn’t understand why Mr. Lewis’s genius was not obvious to his compatriots.”