Category: people

With the first volume of his memoir – titled The Arab of the Future – Riad Sattouf “[has] emerged as France’s best-known graphic novelist … Not since Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood in Khomeini’s Iran, has a comic book achieved such crossover appeal in France. … [Yet] he claims to have forgotten the Arabic he learned in Syria, has no Arab friends, doesn’t follow the news from the Middle East, and knows no one in the Paris-based Syrian opposition.”

“The Humboldt penguin, the Humboldt squid, and more than a hundred other animal species; Humboldt’s Lily, Humboldt’s Schomburgkia, and three hundred other plant species; … Humboldt Limestone, Humboldt Oolite, the Humboldt Formation, the Humboldt Current; … Humboldt Peak, and Humboldt ranges in China, South Africa, and Antarctica; … four Humboldt counties and thirteen Humboldt towns in North America alone, the Humboldt crater and Mare Humboldtianum on the moon.” So who was this man?

“Acclaimed locally and internationally, Al Ghitani won many awards, the latest being the Nile Award for Literature in 2015, the highest literary honour granted by the Egyptian government.”

“Point blank: Brown is the reason why the ‘Project Greenlight’ audience sees a black location manager, assistant director and production designer when it tunes in on Sunday nights. She was in charge of assembling the crew.”

“Art” is a capacious term. We typically imagine artists to be solitary people creating art by hand. But many artists work in more expansive, disembodied ways.

“Between the late 1940s and the mid-1980s, he carried on an increasingly dense and complex correspondence with his youngest brother, David. Many of these letters survive – some 120 of them, amounting to about 70,000 words. They give an unprecedented picture of his life and work, an epistolary autobiography: they bristle and crackle with the trials, dangers, errors, mistakes, and triumphs of one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century.”

“I sent her everything I wrote, not so much because I wanted to be published by her, though I resolved almost immediately that I never wanted to be published by anyone else, but because I wanted her to know the contents of my mind and my heart, and I wanted her to admire them. Carol’s admiration was a very high attainment.”

“After she was detained by the Cuban authorities and had her passport confiscated, [the artist and activist] suffered harassment, surveillance and physical abuse. Her ‘crime’ was proposing to restage Tatlin’s Whisper #6, a performance piece about free speech, in Havana’s Revolution Square.” She was granted an exit visa to go to London for this year’s Frieze, but warned that she might not be allowed back.

A photo of the Western outlaw Billy the Kid, purchased for $2 at a junk shop, could sell for $5 million at auction, according to a rare coin dealer in California.

Kathryn Schulz: “In [the popular] image, Thoreau is our national conscience: the voice in the American wilderness, urging us to be true to ourselves and to live in harmony with nature. This vision cannot survive any serious reading of Walden. The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world.”