Category: people

“[Brian] Henson said he had to have numerous talks with [Steve] Whitmire over the years about his unprofessional conduct, which included ‘appalling’ communications with colleagues. … Henson declined to go into specifics about Whitmire’s exact demands, but did say, ‘Steve would use ‘I am now Kermit and if you want the Muppets, you better make me happy because the Muppets are Kermit.’ And that is really not OK.'”

“When you work with film, there’s a risk of things becoming very concrete. I think a strength of art is that you can steer people in a certain direction, but they have to take the last few steps themselves—everyone can find their own truth in the piece. I like to push people in a certain direction, but leave a few things for them to interpret themselves.”

At the unveiling Tuesday of the new “tenner” at Winchester Cathedral in southern England, Bank of England governor Mark Carney said the new note celebrates the “universal appeal” of Austen’s work.

“I don’t believe in the afterlife as a reality, but I believe in the afterlife as metaphor, and my mother, from the afterlife, is metaphorically kicking my ass. … I have been sobbing many times a day during this book tour. I have sobbed in private and I have sobbed onstage.” (One commenter called it “the most poetic cancelling of a book tour in history.”)

“[He was] best known for repurposing vintage golf bags by creating assemblages with their tempered plastic, steel, leather, vinyl, and hardware.”

While she has appointed rapper/producer Q-Tip, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and opera singer Renée Fleming as artistic advisers, more than a dozen senior executives and artistic leaders have resigned or been let go.

Steve Whitmire, 58, had been voicing the Muppets’ flagship character for the 27 years since Jim Henson died. He says, “The only thing I’ve done my whole adult life, and it’s just been taken away from me. I just couldn’t understand why we couldn’t resolve this.” The head of the Muppets Studio, on the other hand, says, “We raised concerns about Steve’s repeated unacceptable business conduct over a period of many years, and he consistently failed to address the feedback.”

“In the libel suit, the dealer, Hicham Aboutaam, said he has never handled antiquities looted by terrorists and that sales at his Manhattan-based gallery, Phoenix Ancient Art, have plummeted. The article reported that authorities in Switzerland, France, Belgium and the United States were investigating Mr. Aboutaam and his older brother, Ali Aboutaam.”

If there is a gene for bluntness, Liu likely had it. In the 1980s, while still a graduate student in Chinese literature, he was already known as a “black horse” for denouncing nearly every contemporary Chinese writer: the literary star Wang Meng was politically slippery; “roots-seeking” writers like Han Shaogong were excessively romantic about the value of China’s traditions; even speak-for-the-people heroes like Liu Binyan were too ready to pin hopes on “liberal” Communist leaders like Hu Yaobang. No one was independent enough. “I can sum up what’s wrong with Chinese writers in one sentence,” Liu Xiaobo wrote in 1986. “They can’t write creatively themselves—they simply don’t have the ability—because their very lives don’t belong to them.”

Compared to their counterparts, the longtime yoga practitioners showed significantly greater cortical thickness “in left prefrontal lobe areas associated with attention and other executive functions,” the researchers report. Previous research has linked activity in this area of the brain with language and memory.