Category: people

“Her repertoire was catholic—Gershwin, Ellington, Jacques Brel, Kurt Weill, Bob Dylan—but whatever she sang ended up sounding like a Nina Simone tune. She did not so much interpret songs as take possession of them.”

“She had two big initiatives she immediately pushed to enact. First, she wanted to reformat the annual Academy Awards banquet. Since her election, Pearl Harbor had been attacked, thrusting America into World War II and prompting calls for the cancellation of the Oscars, which had theretofore centered around dinner and dancing. She argued that it would be more appropriate to scrap the dinner and dancing and present the awards in a large theater, charging at least $25 a seat and donating the proceeds to war relief efforts.”

“The black-and-white photographs, taken in the 1940s and ’50s by different photographers, are being exhibited by Cahiers d’Art, the gallery of the eponymous art magazine.”

“Despite his ebullience, an aura of sorrow hovers over Eustis these days. The last eighteen months have been the most artistically and commercially successful of his ten years at the helm of the Public; but personally, it has been a time of terrible loss, including the deaths of his mother and stepfather.”

Andrew O’Hehir: “At this point, if Rock doesn’t open the show with a slam-bang musical number, featuring Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Bill Cosby in KKK robes, half of Twitter will announce that he sucks. (And if he does, the other half will profess undying outrage.) But he’s the right man for the job; I honestly can’t think of anyone who is better positioned to tackle the #OscarsSoWhite moment with humor and anger and just a little cerebral detachment.”

“Under the vigilant eye of her publicist Lauren Schwartz, who never left her side, Ms. Rampling replied stoically to a question about the slim chance, in the wake of her lapse, that she would make off with an Oscar. She had held out the hope, it seemed, that the highly charged matter would never come up. A stony silence followed the question.”

“Despite a career-long alignment to both Jesus and God, neither is actually what Kanye truly seems to be aiming for. Nor is the perfect Martin Luther King of legend. … [And] if you peel back a layer, Trump and Kanye actually share a lot, at least as public characters, starting with many rhetorical gestures, a truly messianic sense of purpose, and an amazing conviction that one’s ego is itself a kind of messianic purpose.”

If confirmed by the Senate, she’ll also be only the second person in the position to have made a career as a librarian.

“[He] said that he felt liberated after what he described as a lifetime’s and three divorces’ worth of suppressing what he once considered ‘devilish’ desires. The change has altered his music in ways both quantifiable and more ineffable.”

“Forty state-run media outlets in Iran have pooled together to raise $600,000 to add to the fatwa on writer Salman Rushdie, 27 years after Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, called for Rushdie’s assassination following the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.”