Category: people

At the end of his review of Notes on the Death of Culture, Joshua Cohen wrote that the Nobel laureate had announced his new romantic relationship on Twitter and sold an exclusive about it to a Spanish gossip magazine. Vargas Llosa has never had a Twitter account. Cohen says he got the info from The Daily Mail. Oops.

}Over the years Mr. Rose appeared onstage or on the bill with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, the Rolling Stones and Peter Gabriel, and he was among those named as ‘living human treasures’ by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. He made his American debut in 1988 with a 30-member version of his orchestra at the Beacon Theater in New York, a performance featuring exuberant dancers and vivid costuming as a complement to the orchestra’s pulsing rhythms.”

“Shapiro is a star of sorts, the company’s 35th ensemble member (and one of the few nonactors in that group), acclaimed for muscular, lyrical relationship studies, the kind where a chair or two gets thrown. She is a Tony Award winner whose production of ‘August: Osage County’ remains intrinsic to Steppenwolf’s identity. Advance ticket sales alone for ‘Fish in the Dark; ($14.5 million) were about the same as Steppenwolf’s annual operating budget. And for the past few years she has added to her reputation by becoming a Broadway insurance plan of sorts, celebrity-whispering famous actors until they become believable, bankable presences onstage.”

Before John Oliver arrived, choral pieces at Tanglewood were sung by whoever could be corralled among students in all branches of what was then called the Berkshire Music Center, plus anyone regularly at the Berkshires estate and concert venue—including maintenance and cafeteria workers. Auditioning was rudimentary: “Can you carry a tune? Do you have any free time?”

“Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing was spied on by security services for more than 20 years over suspicions of her communist sympathies, newly declassified records show.”

“Oleg Sentsov and his co-defendant Alexander Kolchenko, a leftwing activist, are accused of being part of a terrorist conspiracy in Crimea, setting fire to the offices of a political party and planning to blow up a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the capital, Simferopol.”

“Over the course of his long career, the Symphony’s activities grew from an 18-week season to its current year-round schedule, and the annual budget grew from $200,000 to more than $4 million. [He] worked closely with no fewer than five music directors, beginning with the legendary French conductor Pierre Monteux in the 1940s and continuing with Enrique Jordá, Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa and Edo de Waart.”

Within months, she would lose her job, her career and leave the country. Once a curator so coveted she turned down a plum offer from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, True vanished so completely that one former boss, Barry Munitz, admitted in an interview this summer that he had no idea “where she is or what she’s doing.”

“Islamic State militants beheaded a renowned antiquities scholar in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra and hung his mutilated body on a column in a main square of the historic site because he apparently refused to reveal where valuable artefacts had been moved for safekeeping.”

“Asif Quaraishi, an activist for the so-called ‘Gaysian’ community who performs in clubs as the glamorous Asifa Lahore, has received death threats in the past and is concerned about the public reaction to Muslim Drag Queens when it airs [on Britain’s Channel Four] on Monday night.” (includes video)