Category: people

“Mr. Pardlo’s path to poetry was tortuous and unconventional, punctuated by long breaks and odd jobs. He struggled with alcoholism, which runs in his family. ‘My family’s a hot mess,’ he said.”

The great neuroscientist and writer recounts his treatment of the late actor and monologuist for the head injury that ultimately led to his suicide.

T.H. Tsien, “who was born in China in the twilight of the reign of its last emperor, was a young librarian there during the Japanese occupation, which lasted from 1931 until the end of World War II. Working in secret, he was charged with keeping a trove of precious volumes, some dating to the first millennium B.C., from falling into the occupiers’ hands.”

“McNamara was honored for 2014 columns on the death of Joan Rivers, Stephen Colbert’s departure from Comedy Central, the media circus attending the Sochi Olympics and myriad television shows. She often ranged beyond television to examine broader cultural trends and controversies, including the debate about the role on-screen sexism might play in real-world violence.”

“We need to have a conversation about race. This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back. And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.”

“What I’m doing. Whether it’s standup, the show, books or films, I consider all this just different vehicles to continue a conversation about what it means to be a democratic nation, and to have it written into the constitution [sic] that all men are created equal – but to live with that for 100 years with slaves. How do those contradictions play themselves out? And how do we honestly assess our failings and move forward with integrity?”

The art editor of The New Yorker – the woman who has chosen hundreds of striking, witty, and sometimes powerful covers – talks with Grace Bello about using visual imagery to master English, what comics can tell us about the state of a culture, and collaborating with husband Art Spiegelman on the seminal graphic magazine Raw.

“Crombie became a heartthrob to multiple generations after he won the role of Gilbert Blythe, played opposite Megan Follows as Anne Shirley, in the 1985 award-winning CBC production of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s famous novel.”

“Called the Writers Lab, the screenplay development program aims to increase opportunities for female screenwriters over the age of 40. This year the initiative will accept submissions May 1-June 1, with eight winning scribes named Aug. 1.”

“While Einstein’s bones (and most of the rest of his body) were cremated and his ashes scattered at a secret spot on the Delaware River, in accordance with his wishes, his gray matter took a different course. Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who performed Einstein’s autopsy at Princeton Hospital in New Jersey in 1955, took a bone saw to Einstein’s famous cranium, then a chisel, and snipped out the century’s most famous brain. Then he kept it.”