Category: people

“In a video posted on Instagram, someone sets off firecrackers in a bin next to the device. The accompanying text reads: ‘Can you hear this?'”

“Somebody asked me for poems for an anthology of American female poets to be published in Italy. It was very easy to think about which poems of mine I would like to see translated into Italian. The kind of vernacular poetry I write, it’s like those candies that burst when you put them in your mouth, so I thought about which ones would burst well in Italian.”

“You can’t face this alternative, so let’s pretend it’s not there. You can’t face global warming, so let’s pretend it’s not there. We know that Santa Claus is really our parents, but we don’t want to look at that too closely. People do that all the time. We know Stephen Harper is a dictator in the making, but he’s convinced some people that they’re going to be financially better off under him, which is untrue.”

Friel’s diverse output, spanning a 50-year period, was bound together by his passion for language, his belief in the ritualistic nature of theatre and his breadth of understanding.

In the video, produced by the Arts Action Fund, Sanders reflects on his time as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, explaining that in 1981, he helped establish the Burlington Arts Council. “At that time, way back when, it was almost unheard of to have a municipally funded and supported effort to promote the arts,” he says. The goal was to “unleash the creativity of our residents and harness the untold benefits that investments in the arts bring to communities.” He calls the creation of the council “one of my proudest achievements” as mayor.

Now 35, Miranda began working on Hamilton in 2008, shortly after he read the Ron Chernow biography Alexander Hamilton. A lot of people read that same biography around then, but it’s hard to imagine that anybody else was hit by the thought—whew, this would make a great hip-hop musical with a multi-racial cast playing the Founding Fathers!

“[She] became a classically trained actor – and, as a burgeoning special-effects technician, assistant director and still photographer, a force behind the camera as well. A collaborator at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, where Coulson lived from 1994 until her death, said she was once a camerawoman for 60 Minutes.”

“Eddie Redmayne is already being Oscar-tipped for his latest role in Tom Hooper’s biopic, The Danish Girl – the story of the painter Einar Wegener, who underwent the world’s first gender-reassignment operation to become Lili Elbe. But there was another woman behind Einar and Lili.”

“By the time they became acquainted, in 1970, both were well established in their fields – Welty in that nebulous genre called Southern literature, and Macdonald in hard-boiled detective fiction. … With the ice broken, Welty and Millar struck up an epistolary friendship that endured until his death in 1983, exchanging some 345 letters. … Can it come as any surprise, then, that these letters occasionally read like the prelude to a courtship?”