Category: people

One of the few Soviet opera singers to become famous beyond the Iron Curtain, she made many appearances at the likes of La Scala and the Met in addition to her extensive career at the Bolshoi.

From his student days, the Count tried to use what we now call journaling as a tool for everything from self-improvement to capturing the nature of time, memory, and the innermost self. (It didn’t really work, alas.)

“Mr. Frere-Jones will use his contacts in the music industry to bring artists and writers into Genius, seeking a critical mass of influential names for ‘that Twitter moment when suddenly the smart kids stop holding their noses up in the air and they take part, and it just improves.'”

“Witherspoon has certainly emerged, somewhat unexpectedly, as one of the flagwavers of Hollywood feminism.”

“Selma could have been a run of the mill biopic—following a tremendous man who made tremendous changes. But DuVernay makes Martin Luther King Jr. more than the myth—she makes him human. … DuVernay looks at Selma as a story of the community and all the people who were integral to making change happen, showing the quiet moments in between the escalating tension.”

“The voluptuous young starlet’s career didn’t start taking off until after she replaced Marilyn Monroe on a Bob Hope Christmastime visit to Greenland to entertain GIs at an Air Force base in 1954 — Hope’s first show filmed for airing on television.”

The novelist died at 77 on Saturday. “‘It’s literally true that the world is seen by the superpowers as a grid of specific targets,’ he told The Paris Review in 1985.’“We’re all on military maps. There happens to be no action in those zones at present, but they’re there. And then there are the wars we fight with ourselves in our own cities. It is the simple truth that, wherever you are, there is an armed enemy present, not far away.'”

Taylor Negron: “My heyday is coming to an end. Parts for the alternative everyman are increasingly scarce. I have had to let go of my dream of being in a Hobbit movie. This will never happen unless Bilbo Baggins orders a pizza and we all know that when a hobbit orders a pizza in Middle Earth, someone is going down a wet, nasty, dirty hole.”

“‘Die Frist ist um,’ Lyall said, paraphrasing The Dutchman’s opening line, ‘The time is up,’ in Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. ‘I wasn’t asked to leave,’ he said. ‘This was strictly, 100 percent, my choice.'”

“A dyslexic who in childhood had a bad stutter, Crouch was known for pioneering a gospel sound with a contemporary feel – sometimes to the dismay of critics who felt his work was too secular. But he and his group the Disciples received multiple Grammys for their efforts. In 2004, Crouch became only the third gospel artist to be awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.”