Category: people

“On albums from the early 1970s into the 2000s, … [she] developed a pop-folk songwriting style that could be droll or diaristic, full of unexpected melodic turns and often inseparable from the way the sisters’ voices harmonized and diverged.”

This was Margaret Wise Brown: “When she received her first check for writing, she didn’t buy necessities or even champagne, but an entire cart full of flowers. She had dramatic and tumultuous love affairs with both men and women. She was ambivalent about her audience, famously telling a reporter, ‘I don’t particularly like children.'”

After Janelle Monáe finished college, she moved to Atlanta. There, the singer and actress would “update her MySpace profile while working at Office Depot to make ends meet.” Then she met a couple of guys who helped change everything for her.

“A research team led by neurologist Ulrike Willinger of the Medical University of Vienna reports appreciating black humor “seems to be a complex information-processing task,” one that is facilitated by high intelligence and inhibited by bad moods.”

“Although Republicans have ripped Obamacare as a disastrous form of taxing-the-rich socialism since it passed Congress in 2010, the act has given struggling Americans a lifeline for buying health insurance, often for the first time. Musicians have been an especially vulnerable segment of this group — just before the law took effect in 2013, the Future of Music Coalition estimated they were uninsured at a rate of almost three times more than the general population.”

Pinyin, the spelling system that Zhou and a Communist Party committee developed in the 1950s, revolutionized the learning of Chinese – and not only for foreigners. The illiteracy in China was nearly 85% before pinyin was introduced; it’s now in the low single digits. What’s surprising, given the time and place, was that Zhou had a past as a Wall Street banker and economist.

Ms. Peters, who would sing with the Met 515 times over 35 vigorous years, was internationally renowned for her high, silvery voice (in private, she could hit a high A, two and a half octaves above middle C); her clarion diction in a flurry of languages; her attractive stage presence; and, by virtue of the fact that she and television came to prominence at about the same time, her wide popular appeal.

The evidence is circumstantial, not direct, but it’s considerable – and until now, not a single one of the Virgin Queen’s famously lavish dresses was known to have survived.

“Holliday says it wasn’t until a Daily Beast article explicated why those in the LGBTQ community, a group that the singer credits with the success of her career, might find her decision to perform so devastating that she understood her responsibility to bow out.”

“It is a time-honored role for artist as designator, to point at the stuff of the physical world and revision it as art, harkening back to the readymade. But Gates’s decision to ‘bump off from art’ and live ‘in the sphere of dirt, the dirty, the stuff that we think is in the ground’ was revelatory, leading to invitations to Davos and a TED Talk, where he talked about how he revived a neighborhood with imagination and hard graft.”