Category: people

Is this massive profile about a cookbook author? About a long marriage that is idealized online? About a celebrity? About the election? About race, class and gender – and balsamic vinegar? (Yes.)

“It is all well and good to say that artists need to be businesslike, rather than bohemian, but those who want the IRS to accept work-related deductions (price of materials, studio rent and insurance, travel expenses, advertising and promotion, photography, postage, shipping and other costs) on their federal tax returns do not have a choice. Because, if the IRS believes someone isn’t really in business, those deductions will not be allowed.”

Ms. Henderson was asked in a 1999 Archive of American Television interview how she would like to be remembered. She answered, “Probably as someone who survived for a long time in a very tough business and, hopefully, managed to retain a sense of humanity.”

“Unknown to those outside Hollywood, the lawyer Nina L. Shaw is a secret weapon, a behind-the-scenes power player adept at striking deals that cultivate freedom of voice, especially for black members of the creative class whose mission it is to be artist and advocate.”

“Madness”, in the terms dictated by this rich literary history, bears no real relation to the objective reality of mental illness. The day to day business of mental illness is hard, boring and unrewarding, and though it can certainly provide benefits – increased empathy for other people’s pain, an ability to withstand intense periods of suffering – it rarely offers profound revelations about the human condition. “Madness”, on the other hand, sounds wild, romantic, even; a primal, primitive closeness to the essential truths of the universe.

“Before the Black and White Ball, no one had ever imagined, let alone attended, a formal party with a guest list so wildly catholic that it brought into one room the poet Marianne Moore and Frank Sinatra, Gloria Vanderbilt and Lionel Trilling, Lynda Bird Johnson and the Maharani of Jaipur, the Italian princess Luciana Pignatelli (wearing a 60-carat diamond borrowed from Harry Winston) and the documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles.”

“Mr. Trevor, who was Irish by birth and upbringing but a longtime resident of Britain, placed his fiction squarely in the middle of ordinary life. His plots often unfolded in Irish or English villages whose inhabitants, most of them hanging on to the bottom rung of the lower middle class, waged unequal battle with capricious fate.”

Seriously, if you’ve ever even for one minute liked a pop or country hit in the past few years, one – or all – of these women was probably involved.

“I call upon the gods of endurance to protect all of us and give us hope. The gods who allow art to flourish during tyrannical regimes through the pursuit of metaphor — think of Ionesco, Brecht, Havel, Fugard, Boal. The gods of endurance who keep us writing not just during regime change but also during life’s other cruelties.”