Category: people

“Early cultures heavily emphasized the importance of communal bonding and obligation, urging the sacrifice of the self to the greater good. But while such bonding is necessary to keep civilizations alive, we’ve always prized those who rejected this: Outcasts like Socrates, Lao Tzu, and Jesus. And while the latter would become a fisher of men, his time alone in the desert would also in time inspire his followers: By the fifth century, the deserts of Syria were pockmarked with hermits, each looking for a little desolate wasteland of his (and occasionally her) own.”

Sphere – more officially called, by the sculptor, Grosse Kugelkaryatide (Large Spherical Caryatid) – “was the best known of his sculptures, though Mr. Koenig produced powerful memorials, including one at the former Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria” and another for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.

“‘He’s either going to be fantastic – or dead.’ That was the verdict of some of opera’s keenest vocal judges a decade ago when they awarded Michael Fabiano … a career-making win at the 2007 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. [Now] he is one of the most exciting, sought-after singers in the world – but the fatalistic warning was still ringing in my ears a few Sundays ago when Mr. Fabiano, who likes to pilot planes on his days off, took me for a flight.” Michael Cooper white-knuckles it for us.

A visit to the building where the playwright and his six siblings grew up (Seven Guitars is set in its backyard), the neighborhood’s Catholic church, the house where Fences is set (and the film was shot), and other spots and scenes from Wilson’s Century Cycle.

It would be enough that he steered two of the country’s key public stations away from looming financial ruin, or that he’s the executive who made the young Ken Burns’s career possible. But Chamberlin, as founding chief operating officer of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, actually ceded a huge piece of his own power by insisting that each individual public television station operate autonomously, independent of the PBS network.

“How much responsibility does Warhol bear for our culture’s shift from substance to flash, human interest to spectacle? How much responsibility does a mirror bear for whatever beauty or ugliness it beholds? Warhol loved both the heights and depths of American culture, and reflected it back at us through his work, which remains resonant to this day.”

Here’s the deal: “It’s not a given that he’ll remain on the industry’s radar for very long. That’s because to be a leading man in Hollywood requires more than just box office success, an award-winning list of credits, or even the esteem of your peers. You also (still) need to embody the American film industry’s narrow ideals of romantic masculinity.”

Jeanine Tesori, among the most-nominated composers in Tonys history, says music is where science and art meet.

The Emmy award-winning actor, co-star of “Apollo 13” and star of “Big Love,” died on Saturday, according to Rolling Stone. Tributes continue to come in from his shocked co-stars and directors.

In the States, until recently she’s been familiar mostly to art-cinema fans. But with this year’s Hollywood awards season, her cool, ambiguous, insouciant je-ne-sais-quoi has caught the fancy of the fashion press. Says Simon Doonan, “She has what the French used to call chien.” Ruth La Perla explores the mystique with the actress herself.