Category: people

“[He was a] million-selling adventure writer and real-life thrill-seeker who wove personal details and spectacular fantasies into his page-turning novels. … In real life, Cussler … participated in dozens of searches for old ships, including one that turned up a steamship belonging to Cornelius Vanderbilt. He also had a long history of questionable claims — some admitted, some denied.” – Yahoo! (AP)

In 1961, Fred Adams — then a theater professor with two years of experience at the College of Southern Utah (now SUU) — and Barbara Gaddie, his girlfriend (they married in 1963), were in a laundromat when they hatched the idea for a Shakespeare festival in Cedar City. Adams went to Ashland, Ore., to study how the Oregon Shakespeare Festival worked. He came back to Cedar City, and cajoled the Lions Club to donate $1,000 — the entirety of the first festival’s budget in 1962. Townspeople and students built sets, props and costumes. – Salt Lake Tribune

“[She] fled Hitler’s Germany as a teenager and became a [multiple-]prize-winning poet in the United States, drawing on her family history for lyrical works about love, art, nature and loss, acknowledging pain even as she looked outward with joy.” – The Washington Post

Actresses and activists celebrated Monday when a New York jury found the producer guilty on two counts, in a decision that could send him to jail for up to 25 years.  – The Daily Beast

“Born Peggy-Jean Montgomery, she became one of the country’s youngest self-made millionaires by age 4, then suffered a devastating reversal of fortune and fame in her adolescence. In adulthood, she rebounded with a new name, Diana Serra Cary, and became a respected author of books on Hollywood film history. In her autumnal years, at screenings of her few extant films, she found herself embraced as a movie pioneer.” – The Washington Post

Two days before Weizman, a professor at London’s Goldsmiths College, was due to fly to the US from Britain, he received an email from the US Embassy telling him that the visa waiver on his British passport had been revoked. When he went to the embassy in London last week, an official would only tell him that an algorithm had identified a related “security threat. That association could involve any aspect of his work with Forensic Architecture, which painstakingly pieces together evidence from a variety of sources when investigating human-rights violations and miscarriages of justice, often challenging the official versions of fatal events. – Artnet

Cerny, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., was “the proverbial dean of American genealogical research, … [whose work was] transforming raw data into narratives and metaphors about diversity and our common humanity.” Gates, the Harvard prof who hosts and produces Finding Your Roots on PBS, began working with Cerny in 2006, and their work on personal (and social) histories flowered from there. – The New York Times

Take one cane, add whiskey, then gather a “mood” pitch for movie financiers, decades of photography, years of moving pitching, and presto! A new Emma. Miranda July on the director: “If there were more female directors, Autumn’s story wouldn’t be such a rare and precious thing to us. … Basically a single mom who worked so hard and at this age is coming into her own. I think we all feel really tender because it’s a very powerful example.” – Los Angeles Times

“As a critic Ms. Tobias did not pull punches. In the early 1980s, for instance, when other critics were tiptoeing around the decline in the dance skills of Rudolf Nureyev, who was then in his 40s, she declared, ‘His groupies refuse to believe it, but Nureyev really can’t dance anymore.'” (You can see two pieces about Tobias, who wrote for ArtsJournal, on ArtsJournal.com here and here as well.) – The New York Times