Category: people

The New York Society Library, founded in 1754, “not only still keeps records of all the books that Burr and Hamilton borrowed (and, mostly, returned) but also has many of the books themselves – not merely the same titles, but the exact same books that Hamilton and Burr handled and thumbed and read and learned from. What’s more, it turns out that, by a series of benevolent bequests, the library also has a few choice and telling letters from Burr and Hamilton and even from Eliza Hamilton.”

“Ebullient, multitalented, warm and open to a fault, Reilly, 71, was a key figure on the Washington music scene for decades: the leader of the Cathedral Choral Society as well as the founder and leader of the Washington Bach Consort, and a crack organist to boot.”

And no wins. “Greenwood received her first nomination back in 1965,” and her most recent this year for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

“Most of the year, Montana presents a nearly monochromatic landscape: white in winter, brown in summer, with a bright green moment in late spring. Raised on that sober palette, Harry Koyama is wanton in his use of color. His bears are red. His bison glow golden.”

“How do you celebrate one of the 20th century’s most sophisticated artists in a place where his brand of sophistication and artistry is not generally valued?” Cathy Day – like Porter, a native of Peru, IN – looks at Hoosiers’ ambivalent (if that’s the word) attitudes toward the great songwriter and other high achievers who leave the state.

“Iranian American comic Negin Farsad doesn’t always feel the love when she’s doing her stand-up routine. And some of the toughest reactions to her comedy have come from fellow Muslims.”

“Byron’s memoirs – which might have finally provided the “truth” about his life – were destroyed soon after his death. The story goes that three of his closest friends (his publisher, John Murray; his fellow celebrity poet, Thomas Moore; and his companion since his Cambridge days, John Cam Hobhouse), together with lawyers representing Byron’s half-sister and his widow, decided that the manuscript was so scandalous, so unsuitable for public consumption, that it would ruin Byron’s reputation forever…  What was the damning secret his friends needed to protect? Domestic abuse? Sodomy? Incest? Probably all three, we imagine.”

Yes, the late television newsman, notorious in the art world for his supremely snarky 1993 60 Minutes segment “Yes, But Is It Art?”, was himself a painter, and just last year he sent a package of his work to a famously uninhibited art critic.

“When it came to selling copy, Hemingway was one of America’s most versatile leading men, and certainly one of the country’s most fascinating entertainers. By then, everyone had long forgotten one of his earliest roles: unpublished nobody. It was one of the few Hemingway personas that never really suited him. In fact, in the early 1920s – strapped for cash, ravenous for recognition – he was frantic to rid himself of it.”

“According to press releases from the time, [Korla Pandit] was born in New Delhi, India, the son of a Brahmin government worker and a French opera singer. … Not once in 900 performances did he speak on camera, preferring instead to communicate with viewers via that hypnotic gaze. … The way he came to fame is one of those only-in-America fables where the audience and the performer are both invested in the illusion.”