Category: people

In his memo announcing the move, first published by Bill Cooke’s Random Pixels, Herald managing editor Rick Hirsch wrote, “Rene’s assignment obviously means that he will no longer be working as a film critic. That decision is one of several coverage shifts we’ve made to reflect what our audience is telling us about the news they value most.”

This news “is a birthday surprise to even the star herself, who has long pegged her age to a 1924 birthdate that would make her 93. … A copy of Day’s birth certificate, obtained by The Associated Press from Ohio’s Office of Vital Statistics, settles the issue: Doris Mary Kappelhoff, her pre-fame name, was born on April 3, 1922.”

Howe took on the entire police system of Britain and won in the 1970s. In 2003, Howe, a broadcaster as well as a writer, “wrote and presented the controversial series White Tribe, which explored the idea of Englishness and involved travelling around the country.”

Austin’s influence on Saturday Night Live actors was also huge. “His improvisational teaching technique involved creating scenes based on arbitrary suggestions with performers then committing to agreement on the premise of the story — no matter how far-fetched — and then performing to reflect the truth of the scene and characters.”

Rosenquist, who had experience (and a day job) as a painter of billboards, “painted by hand in a lucidly simplified realistic style, [but] the juxtapositions of images remain mysterious. The paintings could be viewed both as critiques of modern consumerism and as glimpses into the collective American consciousness.”

The poet, who “often declaimed with sweeping gestures to thousands of excited admirers in public squares, sports stadiums and lecture halls” in the years soon after Stalin died, ended his own days in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he had been for many years a professor at the University of Tulsa.

Those were just two of the scandalous allegations in a spy’s report to Queen Elizabeth I’s Privy Council – a document that’s now available to the public online.

For example, he said that over the next 20 years, the world as a whole won’t have the demographic ingredients to keep the global economy humming at a “pre-2008 tempo.” The main reason: not enough educated people with the necessary skills. He also argued that the demographic fundamentals of the US and Canada look “quite positive” through 2035—perhaps the best in the world.

Robert Hurwitz has run Nonesuch for 30 years. “At other record company parties, you’re expected to do cocaine with the Rolling Stones or something. At this company party, you listen to the record company president play Satie beautifully on his living room piano.”

As NPR’s Scott Simon said of the broadcaster, author, and literary scholar, “We kept asking him back to talk about books, Ireland and even soccer because no one could make more of a ceremony out of a sentence.”