Category: people

“There’s a James Baldwin quote about feeling all alone and isolated until you read Dostoevsky and you discover that someone who lived a hundred years ago connects to you – and you don’t feel lonely any more.”

“A press conference in Oviedo on Thursday got off to a bad start when a journalist asked whether Gehry’s own architecture was just about spectacle.”

“Even today, no one is sure if Fred Herko intended to kill himself when he jumped out of the window” – naked, with Mozart blasting away – “of his friend Johnny Dodd’s Greenwich Village apartment in 1964. The 28-year-old dancer and performer – one of the central figures of New York’s 60s avant-garde and a star of Andy Warhol’s first movies – was high on speed, and possibly LSD.”

Companies like Facebook and Twitter have to deal with “the Grandma Problem” – making their services safe for wholesome regular folks who “won’t continue to log on if they find their family photos sandwiched between a gruesome Russian highway accident and a hardcore porn video.” So there’s now a small army of content moderators – many of them low-paid workers in the Philippines – zapping the nasty stuff out.

“The study, published in the journal Cognitive Science, explored whether two groups of people would perform better than average at task-switching: musicians, and bilingual individuals. Since members of the latter group can, and sometimes do, switch back and forth between languages, it seemed logical that they would also do well on other tasks involving quick mental transitions.”

“When [she] was 18, she got on a Greyhound bus going from Detroit to Dallas. She had 50 cents in her pocket … She’d already gotten pregnant and had an illegal abortion. By her mid-20s, determined not to just get by on her looks, she left Hollywood to study acting with Lee Strasberg. In her mid-40s, after leaving an abusive marriage, she starred as a newly single mom in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. The role was based in part on her own life, and it won her an Oscar.” (audio podcast; includes transcript)

“Susan Sollins, the co-founder of Independent Curators International (ICI) and founder and executive director of Art21 — the non-profit organization that produces an artist documentary series with PBS — passed away on October 13 of unknown causes.”

“Classical music is the slowest-moving boat in the world. Maybe it is a good thing, if it means what I’m doing has meaning.”

“[His] voluminous output ranged from the operatic, oratorio and symphonic to choral hymns. His opera The Postman Always Rings Twice, written in 1982 for Opera Theatre of St. Louis, was popular with regional companies and universities.”