Category: people

The 31-year-old New Yorker gives a first-person account of his experience being held by Customs and Border Patrol agents after having scanned his passport and fingerprints.

“After an early start as a professional singer, she turned her love for classical music into a groundbreaking career on WQXR in New York, where she became the first female announcer for a commercial classical music station in the country. And she carried on as the host of lecture series and radio shows and as an arts leader after she moved to Sarasota in 2002.”

“[His] epochal play As Is was in the vanguard of Broadway’s coming to grips with the AIDS epidemic and [he] wrote the groundbreaking libretto for John Corigliano’s opera The Ghosts of Versailles.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge “dislikes it when people refer to her as a ‘Maine writer.’ And yet, when asked, ‘What’s your relationship with Maine?’ she replies, ‘That’s like asking me what’s my relationship with my own body. It’s just my DNA.'”

For a time, Mr. Contino was a show business rarity: a heartthrob accordionist who earned up to $4,000 a week in nightclubs. “Dick Contino is one of the few men in musical history who have ever squeezed big money out of an accordion,” Time magazine wrote in 1951.

“Bernstein’s heyday was in a time of high hopes. John F. Kennedy’s Camelot was meant to usher in a new world order; Norman Mailer was supposed to write the Great American Novel. Bernstein, similarly, was expected to catapult American music to a new level of excellence and prestige. But high hopes are invariably bound to be dashed. Kennedy was assassinated; Mailer petered out; Bernstein scattered his energies. Still, perhaps more than Kennedy or Mailer, Bernstein made an enormous contribution to American culture. His tragedy lay in the human fact that he was not the musical messiah that he came so close to being.”

His move from performance artist (his most famous piece, “Seedbed,” included him lying beneath a false floor in a gallery, masturbating and speaking to gallery visitors over a hidden mic) to architect “confused his peers and caused his profile in the art world to recede, to the point where many younger artists who were indirectly influenced by his work had little idea who had created it. In his later years, Mr. Acconci sometimes agonized over this situation, but he said he had no choice but to follow his interests where they took him.”

The madness began after I received a phone call from my brother, Christien, who worked for a luxury travel agency. “Great news,” he said. “I may have a client for the villa for New Year’s week. How’s the project coming?” My heart sank. More than two years in, and we were nearly out of money. We really could have benefited from a holiday rental. But there was no way we could be ready in time, I told him. “But it’s apparently a famous person,” my brother added. “Some architect,” he told me. “His name is I. M. Pei. Ever heard of him?” My brother was not a student of architecture, so the significance of this was lost on him.

Hemingway’s bizarre behavior in his latter years (he rehearsed his death by gunshot in front of dinner guests, for example) has been blamed on iron deficiency, bipolar disorder, attention-seeking and any number of other problems. After researching the writer’s letters, books and hospital visits, Farah is convinced that Hemingway had dementia — made worse by alcoholism and other maladies, but dominated by CTE, the improper treatment of which likely hastened his death.

“Opponents of the Maduro regime, which is trying to starve the country into submission, have accused Dudamel of targeting the opposition by failing to name the government as the cause of present miseries. Supporters of the Government are calling him a turncoat. Debate is raging across social media.”