Category: people

“Because I don’t hold back. Because I have a Sicilian temper. Because I count to 10 – and 10 isn’t enough. I should probably count to 100 and then walk around the block.’ But if I did that, I’d still come back and blow my top.” Even so, as she reveals to Karen Heller, Patti’s ego is intact.

Yes, Vermont has such a post, and the author of Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For is actually the third to hold it. (Her predecessor, whose work you might recognize from the illustration at left, was New Yorker cartoonist Edward Koren.)

“When Mr. Rickles developed his stand-up act in the 1950s, his humor was considered shocking, with a raw, abrasive, deeply personal edge. If he wasn’t the first “insult comic,” he was by far the most successful and most widely imitated, becoming a fixture on television and in nightclubs for decades.”

The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was no saint: he (over-)extended the empire to the largest territory it ever had, but he killed his brothers and imprisoned his father (Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal). Aurangzeb is also said – especially by modern-day Hindu nationalists, including the ones in the current government – to have killed countless Hindus, destroyed countless temples, and to have ignored or suppressed the great Indian artistic traditions brought to their height by his great-grandfather, the emperor Akbar. Historian Audrey Truschke argues that for centuries, for political reasons past and present, the evidence about Aurangzeb was deliberately distorted and that he was no worse than any Muslim ruler of his era.

Klaus Biesenbach lives in an all-white, 550-square-foot high-rise apartment that contains little more than a table, a bed, a couch and two or three chairs. His favorite feature is the view from his window, which he photographs every day and posts to Instagram for his #window23 project. “It’s a calming place because there aren’t many distractions,” he said. “That’s what makes the window so important. How can you compete with the world?”

Well, Egypt’s Jon Stewart with an audience about six times as large as Stewart ever had. That did not please Egypt’s government – either the elected president or the general who replaced him. Now he and his family are safe in the States, and he’s making comedy in English now.

“He’s found them on the streets of Kingsessing and Mantua and Grays Ferry, all over the city: Broken and beat old television sets, cathode ray tubes long gone, many consisting only of angular shells. … It actually makes no difference to Wilmer Wilson IV if the televisions he has found, usually in early-morning wanderings about the city, still play.”

“[He] contributed more than 1,600 cartoons to The New Yorker beginning in the mid-1970s. His work, which featured talking toasters, the Lone Ranger, Sammy Davis Jr. and more, was defined by a satirical, silly, observational style.”

“Stanczak’s acrylic paintings often tended toward brightly colored shapes and grids. … They highlight the act of seeing, in the process showing that, when we look at two unlike forms put together, an unexpected element can result: movement.”

“In a written decision handed down Monday, L.A. County Superior Court Judge Scott Gordon said that Polanski’s current motions are based on the same arguments previously presented and rejected by other judges. ‘No sufficient or compelling basis for reconsideration of these issues … has been presented,’ he wrote in the 13-page decision.”