Category: people

“In the early days my work was about collapse and decay. Now some of the changes that occur are too beautiful to be described as simply decay.”

“Years before other novelists joined Twitter and Facebook, Mr. Coelho was reaching out to fans on MySpace and, later, putting short videos on YouTube. He has accounts on Instagram, Tumblr, Vimeo, Google+ and Pinterest.” On Twitter and Facebook, he has more followers than Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Danielle Steel and John Grisham combined.

“It’s a miserable state to be in permanently. Can you imagine how dreary that would be?”

“I love taste, and I love the immediate gratification of flavor and that satisfying swallow you feel all over. But I look at my body and I should say, ‘Is that really the most healthy thing for me?’ Wouldn’t it be great if I stopped eating this and worked out every day? Imperfection and perfection go so hand in hand, and our dark and our light are so intertwined, that by trying to push the darkness or the so-called negative aspects of our life to the side … we are preventing ourselves from the fullness of life.”

The Baroque flute and recorder soloist of choice for many of the pathbreaking recordings by the likes of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt, Brüggen went on to a busy career conducting both period and mainstream orchestras. In 1981, he founded the Netherlands-based Orchestra of the 18th Century, with which he did hundreds of concerts and dozens of recordings over the next three decades.

Maria Konnikova interviews Austin (Soon I Will Be Invincible) and Lev (The Magicians) Grossman – really, they interview each other – about separating (and not) from each other and from the family business: both parents were writers, the black-sheep sister is a sculptor, and they say they’re “failed non-writers”.

“A Long Island man was arrested this week after authorities accused of him siphoning nearly $500,000 of prize money that had been awarded to 85-year-old free jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor last year.”

“[She] was one of the last surviving major stars of the studio system, which flourished from the silent-movie era to the dawn of the television age. … [Her] husky voice and smoldering onscreen chemistry with her husband Humphrey Bogart made her a defining movie star of the 1940s … Decades later [she] won Tony Awards in the Broadway musicals Applause and Woman of the Year.”

“When the flags appeared, rumors flapped: It was a prank or a grave security breach. But the artists, Mischa Leinkauf and Matthias Wermke, … explained that they only wanted to celebrate ‘the beauty of public space’ and the great American bridge whose German-born engineer, John Roebling, died in 1869 on July 22, the day the white flags appeared.” (They even say the flags were white-on-white stars and stripes.)

He appeared from the California wilderness in 1911, “For the last five years of his life until he died in 1916 from tuberculosis, he was a sort of living diorama, as well as a voice for a vanishing past … isolated as a survivor of the disease and destruction that had claimed his culture.”