“‘I was merely a fool poet,’ he said, ‘with nothing but poetry in his bag, hoping the energy and joy that brought poems from chaos would carry me to the children.’ The school, the Children’s Storefront, has flourished in three adjoining townhouses on East 129th Street, becoming a fully accredited, tuition-free school with a $4 million budget and a student body of about 170 children, from prekindergarten through eighth grade.”
Category: people
How Did A Famous Novelist Get Sucked Into A Psychopath’s Lies And Life?
Walter Kirn: “Here’s the problem: I’d met rich eccentrics at Princeton and Oxford. If I’d never met one, I probably would have seen through him — but because I’d met them and they were so crazy, he just seemed like another crazy one of them.”
Sheila MacRae, AKA Alice Kramden In ‘The Honeymooners’ Sketches, Dead At Age 92
“When friends and relatives wished her a happy 90th birthday in 2011, her family said in a statement, she replied, ‘I am only 90 in London.'”
Gerard Mortier, Feisty Opera Visionary, Dies At 70
“These clashes were always expressions of Mr. Mortier’s bracing and intellectually charged vision of opera, and his disdain for the decorous irrelevance often associated with it.”
Arundhati Roy: Activist Fiction
“I got into trouble in the past for my nonfiction, and I swore, ‘I’m never going to write anything with a footnote again.’ “
Japan’s “Beethoven” Apologizes
“Ditching his trademark long hair and sunglasses, a clean-cut Mamoru Samuragochi repeatedly bowed in shame before a packed press conference in a Tokyo hotel, where some dubious reporters dragged along hearing-impairment experts to assess the mock maestro.”
When James Met Jean-Jacques: How Rousseau Cured Boswell of Calvinism
“Boswell had been raised in the dour Church of Scotland, where the worst of Scottish weather and Scottish Calvinism met to form a perfect storm of fear and trembling.” And so, while on the Grand Tour, the young man turned to the author of Emile and The Social Contract, who had “succeeded in the redoubtable task of uniting, if only on the subject of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Catholics and Protestants, monarchic France and republican Geneva.”
Venezuela’s Artists Increasingly Speaking Out Against Government
“From pop culture to high culture, Venezuela’s conflict is leading actors, artists, athletes and fashion designers to voice their support for the antigovernment protesters, with a minority backing President Nicolás Maduro.”
Russian Court Reduces Sentence Of Man Convicted In Bolshoi Acid Attack
“Pavel Dmitrichenko, a Bolshoi soloist, was convicted in December of organizing the attack and sentenced to six years in prison. The Moscow City Court on Thursday reduced his sentence by six months to 5½ years.”
The People Who Bought Charles Ives’ House (And What They’re Doing To It)
“They have not just [hired] renovation architects, they’ve got restoration architects – historical, sensitive architectural work going on, so things are improved without changing.”