Category: people

The two authors – novelist/essayist Kincaid and longform journalist Weschler – join scholar Rich Blint and radio host Brian Lehrer to talk about Baldwin’s life and his ideas on love and race. (audio)

In addition to being a busy ensemble singer and marketing professional (as well as custodian of a magnificent moustache), Dinsmore co-created and administered The Crossing, a professional chamber choir which, over only eight years, has become one of Philadelphia’s best ensembles of any kind.

“Given his work ethic and the fact that it’s only 4pm, Marriner could probably conduct a quick opera and record a string quartet before the day’s out. Doubtless there’s more coming from the Academy of you-know-where conducted by you-know-who.”

“Mr. Kaiser, who steps down as president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Sept. 1, will become co-chairman of IMG Artists, the performing arts management agency, IMG announced on Monday.”

“So many of King’s tweets contained spoilers that the author began to capitalise the film, TV show and books he was exposing.”

“Mr. Ho, who was of Chinese descent, considered himself a ‘popular avant-gardist.’ He was inspired by the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and by the ambitious, powerful music of African-American bandleaders including Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Sun Ra and especially Charles Mingus. But he rejected the word jazz, which he considered a pejorative term imposed by Europeans.”

Or, how a soon-to-be-former German professor (he gave up on getting tenure) acquired more than 67,000 followers for his “compendium of utopian negation”. (Sample: “The Tickle Me Werner Herzog doll I got for Christmas only laughs when I tell him the universe isn’t utterly indifferent to our pain.”)

“When they suggested Judi Dench, I couldn’t believe it. I nearly fell off my chair. She’s famous all over the world, you know! I was over the moon. A lot of my friends thought I’d gone soft, because they didn’t believe that it was true. I was so glad to be able to say, ‘Actually, look, it is true.'”

“LBJ was certainly aware of the vagaries of power. He believed that it was important to do everything you could and to use everyone around you in order to further your goals. But at the end of the day there would come a reckoning and power would recede and you would lose your effectiveness. And it didn’t matter how good a politician you were, it was just impossible to control the game all the time”

“In his log-cabin retreat Halliwell-Phillipps kept, and obsessively curated, his huge collection of ‘Shakespearean rarities’. This consisted of ‘about fifteen hundred separate articles’ – a cornucopia of manuscript papers and parchments, early quarto editions, play-bills, portraits, maps and curios carved from the sacred mulberry tree.”