Category: people

Lowell Thomas, the first newscaster voice most Americans (and British people) heard on their first radios, “helped pioneer a more sober style of journalism. Lowell quickly realized that there were people among his hundreds of thousands and then millions of listeners who would write letters and complain to his network if he got things wrong. Because [the radio broadcast] had so many listeners and he was such a dominant figure, what happened there also spread to other iterations of radio, then TV, then newspapers. Lowell contributed to the fact obsession that journalists have today.”

“Pilar Abel, a Tarot card reader, wants to be recognized as Dalí’s daughter, born as a result of what she has called a ‘clandestine love affair’ that her mother had with the painter in the late 1950s in Port Lligat, the fishing village where Dalí and his Russian-born wife, Gala, built a waterfront house.”

“[His] minimalist sculptures were starting to attract attention in New York when his friend Ulfert Wilke, the director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, recommended him for a faculty position at the university. Mr. Breder accepted, and began teaching an experimental drawing course in 1966. Friends threw up their hands, warning him that he was leaving the center of the artistic universe for a cultural desert. He blithely replied, ‘I will bring New York to Iowa.'”

Marti Noxon won fame on Buffy the Vampire Slaver and Angel. Now she’s in the middle of promoting a movie for Netflix, filming a series with HBO, finishing a series with Bravo, and starting the first series of a three-year deal with Skydance Media. “I’m somebody’s Joss [Whedon] now!” she says.

Breder left New York to take a faculty position at the University of Iowa in 1966, and he soon established the first interdisciplinary art focus in the country. “Increasingly drawn to conceptual art and the radical political performance art being practiced by the Viennese Actionists, he asked permission to create a program that would embrace video and performance art and encourage students to move back and forth across artistic frontiers — in general, to throw off all creative constraint.”

“It seems that what happened was that Cliburn simply stopped growing, as though he was trapped in a creative stasis like a bug in amber. One thinks of James O’Neill, a distinguished actor who was the father of Eugene O’Neill. In later life, he only took on one role—Dumas’s Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo—and eventually played it more than six thousand times around the world. He made a great deal of money, but reproached himself for what he considered the squandering of his gifts. Likewise, Cliburn returned again and again to the Tchaikovsky concerto, long after he had ceased to have fresh insights into it.”

“[She] made it her mission in the 1970s and ′80s to cover art and artists overlooked by the mainstream press through the journal Art-Rite, which she helped found, and in the pages of Artforum.”

“There is no one in the British cultural world more single-minded, more monkishly devoted to the arts as a civic and public necessity, more able to bend events to his will. … When he arrived at the Tate in September 1988, it was an affectionately regarded and faintly parochial museum; he left it earlier this month one of the most powerful forces in the international art world.” In a Guardian Long Read, Charlotte Higgins looks at Serota’s career as he moves on to lead Arts Council England, the country’s cultural funding body.

Morton’s terminology is “slowly infecting all the humanities”, says his friend and fellow thinker Graham Harman. Though many academics have a reputation for writing exclusively for their colleagues down the hall, Morton’s peculiar conceptual vocabulary – “dark ecology”, “the strange stranger”, “the mesh” – has been picked up by writers in a cornucopia of fields, from literature and epistemology to legal theory and religion. Last year, he was included in a much-discussed list of the 50 most influential living philosophers. His ideas have also percolated into traditional media outlets such as Newsweek, the New Yorker and the New York Times.

To be Sofia Coppola is to have grown up with certain advantages. The Coppola family tree is a verdant one: ­Sofia’s grandfather was composer Carmine Coppola; actors Jason Schwartzman and Nicolas Cage are her cousins; and her brother Roman produces her films through the family-run production company American Zoetrope. But lineage alone doesn’t determine who we grow up to become. At 46, Coppola, who has made six delicately distinctive feature films over the past 18 years, has built something of a stealth career.