Category: people

“Kristina Wong has crashed Miss Chinatown pageants as a pimply, cigar-smoking, over-the-hill contestant. She has posed as a rabid Jeremy Lin fan, waving sexually suggestive signs at the NBA player’s games. On a sewing machine in her Koreatown apartment, she makes vagina puppets out of colored felt.”

“Her hair is white, her gait a tad unsteady, and she underwent treatment for pancreatic cancer in 2006 and 2007, but her build is still solid, her skin firm, her voice strong, her eyes twinkling, and her cancer gone. When she comes out on stage, she’s used to dominating it, even if her performance these days is devoted less to the operas of Rossini and more to singing the praises of her three grandchildren, Daisy, Henry and Alex.”

“Many people then, and quite a few people now, want to read books that make them feel good, make them feel happy. … I didn’t understand that you read books in order to feel that the world is better than it is, and so I was offending without really understanding it for quite a while.”

“[He] had parallel careers as an art critic for Newsweek and as an artist himself, doing work that explored the possibilities of video and the Internet as creative and interactive mediums.”

Over the course of a seven-decade career, Akkineni Nageswara Rao not only appeared in more than 250 films, earning awards and an enormous following, he led the move of Telugu-language filmmaking (now India’s second-largest movie industry) to the capital city where Telugu is actually spoken. (He also, unusually, resisted the urge to enter politics.)

“For me the most proficient way to teach the values of collaboration, flexibility, imagination and innovation — all skill sets needed in today’s world — is through the performing arts. If you have these tools, you can do well in any field from software engineering to the biosciences.”

“In recent weeks, Shia LaBeouf has been accused of plagiarism and then of plagiarizing his apologies for plagiarism. He has been embroiled in Twitter feuds. He written his apologies for his behavior with an airplane. He even said he sent a picture of his genitalia to a director to land a role in Nymphomaniac. This, he says, was all part of the act.” (Sure it was.)

“The ex-CEO of the now defunct Livent Inc. and his friend Myron Gottlieb were convicted in 2009 in connection with a book-cooking scheme that eventually led to the company’s bankruptcy. The demise of the publicly traded company ultimately cost investors an estimated $500 million.”

Seeing the ever harsher laws against homosexuality being passed in Uganda, Nigeria and elsewhere, Binyavanga Wainaina thought about his own life in cosmopolitan Nairobi and decided that, as “part of a generation of people in Kenya and Africa who [want to] change [Africa] to be accountable to itself,” he had to go public.

Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina has styled his eloquent coming-out essay as a “lost chapter” of his 2011 memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place.