Category: people

“He had a particular beat, as it were – the preppy world, the world of Ralph Lauren, the Protestant WASP establishment that was on their way out, holding on to their diminishing privileges.”

“Selena Coppock, a comic who founded the private Facebook group, said, ‘Usually you’re the only woman’ in a standup show,” she explained after the photo. ‘It’s like nine men, one woman. So it was really hard for us to even know each other, or collaborate, or network.'”

“Cleary tried to drop out of school in the first grade. But her parents forced her to keep going, and Cleary eventually excelled in school and in college and found a job as a librarian in Yakima, Wash. A boy there complained that there weren’t any books about kids like him. In response, Cleary sat down and wrote about Henry Huggins and his dog.”

“Unlike scholars in the Bach field who have often succumbed to a bland attitude of continuous adulation towards the master, [Peter] Williams, who has died aged 78, never shirked from showing where Bach fell short of his own astonishing standards, observing, for instance, that certain of his pieces show ‘teeth-gritting dogma’ and that there is something alienating in the thoroughness of the Well-Tempered Clavier’s progress through all the major and minor keys twice over.”

“After photographing Malayan bears at the London Zoo, [Peggy Fortnum] depicted, in black and white with pen and ink, an endearingly frumpy refugee with a floppy hat and duffel coat — ignoring her London art tutor’s advice that she never draw animals that talked and wore clothes.”

“A former actress, artist and photographer, Inge Hardison sculpted a cast-iron collection in the 1960s that she called Negro Giants in History, which included George Washington Carver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson and Harriet Tubman. She titled another series, featuring relatively obscure black inventors, ‘Ingenious Americans’.”

“The body of 18-year-old Haruka J. Weiser was found Tuesday in a creek in the heart the University of Texas campus, one day after her roommate reported her missing … She was in Austin on a full dance scholarship.”

“It’s weird, isn’t it? Because I don’t see myself that way and I’m not that way. But I agree that obviously I’ve played a lot of people like that. I don’t know why it’s come about to be like that.”

“Almost nobody in Russia remembered that Vladimir Putin’s closest friend from the 1970s was a St. Petersburg musician named Sergei Roldugin. Even fewer could imagine that the cellist with an old- fashioned haircut lived a secret life offstage, allegedly plotting huge scams and moving more than $2 billion through a network of offshore bank accounts and companies.”

Peter S. Onuf: “Every Jefferson biography on the shelf is a polemic, one way or another, but we wanted to get beyond that.” Annette Gordon-Reed: “People read history the way we watch movies, where you have a good guy and a bad guy. What’s the point of even going to the library to do research if you already know what you think?”