“When Rowling first told fans about Dumbledore’s sexuality, she shed light on the wizard’s confirmed single status by indicating that he was once in love with his childhood friend Gellert Grindelwald – who later went on to become an extremely dangerous dark wizard, and was defeated by Dumbledore prior to the events of the first Harry Potter book.”
Category: people
Pierre Boulez Turns 90: His Influence Is Undeniable
“Boulez’s style is explosive. He detonates a germ of an idea and, like a seed, it grows a sonic forest. The common fallacy is that pieces as highly and intricately structured as these require technical understanding. But you don’t need to be a botanist to be stirred by a field of wild flowers.”
Norman Scribner, 79, Founder Of D.C.’S Choral Arts Society
“The late Washington Post music critic Paul Hume once called Mr. Scribner ‘one of Washington’s finest musicians and one of the most gifted choral conductors in the country.’ A skilled pianist, organist and composer, he spent nearly five decades at the helm of the Choral Arts Society.”
What A Neuroscientist Says About Jon Stewart’s Brain
“Quick-witted would be the layman way to put it; he’ll be interviewing someone… and he’s just very quick, very quick at making these unexpected connections. But the term we would use for that is divergent thinking – that is, making novel connections between things that other people don’t put together, and finding the humor in that.”
What A Forensic Psychiatrist Says About Gesualdo, The Wife-Murdering Composer
Don Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa is even more famous for killing his wife and her lover in flagrante than he is for his surpassingly weird madrigals. But he didn’t simply dispatch the pair himself: he brought along three men armed with guns and double-headed axes and he energetically mutilated the dead bodies. Dr. Ruth McAllister considers what might have driven Gesualdo to such extremes (and then tortured himself over them for the rest of his life) when a couple of bullets or sword thrusts would have done the job.
Two Opera Singers Among Passengers On Downed Airline
“The singers were traveling to their homes in Düsseldorf from Barcelona, where they had played Alberich and Erda, respectively, in Wagner’s Siegfried at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. French officials said everyone aboard the Germanwings Airbus A320 died when the plane crashed on its way from Barcelona to Düsseldorf.”
Hans Erni, Prolific Swiss Artist, Dead At 106
“During his long career he produced murals, tapestries, mosaics, sculptures, ceramic art and medals, as well as designing stamps, hundreds of posters and illustrations for books. In 2009, at the age of 100, he completed a 60-metre-long ceramic fresco that decorates the entrance to the United Nations [compound] in Geneva.”
Director Peter Sellars On Art, The Audience, And Controversy
“For me, the art that’s made with the audience in mind is so numbing and insulting and demeaning – because it’s assuming that I don’t have a really interesting and complicated life, and somebody knows what I think. And nobody knows what I think because I’m still wrestling with what I think most days, so I hate it when somebody tells me what I think.”
The Actor Who Wished He’d Never Heard Of Ed Wood
“Gregory Walcott, an admired actor who appeared in such memorable films as Mister Roberts, The Eiger Sanction, Norma Rae and, unfortunately for him, Ed Wood’s lamentable Plan 9 From Outer Space, has died. He was 87.”
Vladimir Tolstoy, Great-Great-Grandson, And Cultural Diplomat For Putin
“Not long ago, the sense that Russia had somehow lost its way after the fall of the Soviet Union was pervasive here, but Mr. Tolstoy and other Putin loyalists have succeeded in reviving a sense of national pride expressly through cultural policy.”