Category: people

A trip to Hawaii and a hastily arranged lecture in San Francisco transformed the young and debt-ridden journalist’s life.

“It’s a city where you go to the rock show or the play or watch the fashion runway at Lincoln Center, and just about everyone on that stage is barely making ends meet even though they look like they have it all and more.”

“If Alain ruled the world – let’s say he were one of Plato’s philosopher-kings (never mind that Plato distrusted art and wished to banish it) – museum captions would offer more than bland, neutral facts like name and date, but moral instructions ‘appropriate’ to the work of art, prompting us to, for example, ‘remember to be patient’.”

Richard Ayoade: “You do this thing that is completely personal and invested and then you find yourself on T4 trying to see if you can throw a hoop over Justin Bieber’s erect nipple and you go, ‘I’m in the most absurd kind of weird light-entertainment world anyway.'”

“Carving out a 150-seat performance space in a basement under a supermarket in Chelsea (now home to the comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade) and drawing an audience with an inexpensive subscription offer (three plays for $5 — the first season had 400 subscribers), Mr. Feist assembled a schedule made up largely of revivals of classic plays from various eras.”

“The only prominent woman among the Czech New Wave directors —a group of avant-garde auteurs in the 1960s who included Milos Forman and Jiri Menzel — Ms. Chytilova was known for films that were formally rigorous even by the standards of the movement.”

“During his prolific five-decade career, the Philadelphia native also was memorable as the district attorney that sent Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer to jail on the Seinfeld finale in 1998 and as the prosecution’s FBI expert automotive witness in the hilarious film My Cousin Vinny (1992).”

G. Willow Wilson “was a white kid with no religious upbringing, but converted to Islam during the height of the War on Terror. She’s lived in Egypt, done foreign correspondence for the New York Times, penned a memoir, written an acclaimed novel” – and created a female Muslim superhero who’s a commercial and popular success.

Steven Pasquale “has generated excitement as the kind of bona fide leading man Broadway perpetually hungers for and has trouble holding onto.” Says a leading casting director, “They just don’t exist – leading men in musical theater who can sing. They’re snatched up by television and movies.”

Best known for his dismissal of Tosca as a “shabby little shocker” in his 1956 book Opera as Drama, Kerman “was a man of many parts: a scholar whose work on such topics as Beethoven and the Renaissance madrigal reflected deep research and study; a disciplinary gadfly who almost single-handedly changed the direction of academic musicology; a powerful and influential teacher; and a prolific public intellectual.”