Category: people

“Joined by a pianist in the operating room, Slovenian tenor Ambroz Bajec-Lapajne delivers the first and last couplets of Schubert’s ‘Gute Nacht’ (in major and minor) so doctors could monitor his ability to sing and recognize key changes” – making sure that they didn’t inadvertently damage his brain further during the operation. (video)

“There was Toto and there was Rin Tin Tin – there was Lassie and there was Benji – but perhaps no dog in recent memory had as much impact on the history of motion pictures as Uggie.”

The John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, “inaugurated in 2003 and awarded by the Library of Congress, is intended to recognize work in disciplines not covered by the Nobel prizes. Mr. Habermas, 86, is widely recognized as one of the most important German thinkers of the past half century, a defender of the Enlightenment tradition … Mr. Taylor, 83, is the author of several influential books questioning individualism and examining the enduring religious underpinnings of morality in the modern world.”

“[They] were an improbable pair. One was very much the bluff Scottish Victorian gentleman, educated at a minor Catholic private school; the other a largely self-educated Hungarian immigrant to the US who had spent most of his life in rackety vaudeville. The two men were brought together by a shared interest in spiritualism, but it was also spiritualism that destroyed this unlikely friendship.”

We’re not making this up. “It’s a story that has lain hidden in a plastic bag at the back of a dusty drawer and forgotten for more than 40 years before being uncovered, alongside faded letters and old diaries – a description of an extraordinary encounter between an art teacher and WB Yeats during a debate on methods to restore sexual potency.”

“The pipes from Shakespeare’s garden might have been used to smoke pot, but they tested negative for cocaine, which was also consumed by some in the playwright’s era. ‘Shakespeare may have been aware of the deleterious effects of cocaine as a strange compound,’ Thackeray writes. ‘Possibly, he preferred cannabis as a weed with mind-stimulating properties.'”

“More than any other 18-year-old alive, Rebecca Black is all of our anxieties about oversharing online made flesh: the fact that more than 350 million photos are shared to Facebook each day and 300-plus hours of video hit YouTube every minute; the nagging sense that kids born into a world where social networking exists are worse off — when it comes to college applications, job prospects, romantic relationships.”

“The bushy-haired conductor ‘accidentally tumbled and hurt his hip’ last Saturday and would be out of commission for three weeks to heal the fracture, the festival said on its website.”

“Her detailed, original research, empathy with the artists she wrote about and insight illuminated the subject. Her approach was both methodical and imaginative: she knew that this was precious historical material that needed to be gathered and recorded before it was lost; but Marion [Whybrow] knew how to tell a story, too, and how to pick out an anecdote that summed up a character.”

Today, we are in a new moment of iconoclasm, as symbols such as the Confederate flag are reconsidered; as celebrities such as Bill Cosby fall spectacularly from grace; as books, plays, films and operas are reconsidered, edited or banished to the margins of the canon for offending contemporary audiences.