Category: people

Head to Google on Dec. 2 to celebrate what would be the opera star’s 90th birthday.

“Taking risks, running losses, resisting financial pressures and compromises, Mr. Schiffrin championed the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Günter Grass, Studs Terkel, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Noam Chomsky, Julio Cortázar, Marguerite Duras, Roy Medvedev, Gunnar Myrdal, George Kennan, Anita Brookner, R. D. Laing and many others.”

The actor, who also appeared in “Varsity Blues” and “Pleasantville,” was one of two people killed in a single-car accident in L.A.

“But I kept doing it, trying not to do it, and then doing it. There’s such a blessed unrest that you feel all the time, but maybe that’s what keeps you going.”

“Laia Martin’s neighbour, Sonia Bonsom, complained she suffered anxiety from hearing eight-hour practice sessions, five days a week, between 2003 and 2007. At the time, Martin was a music student in the Spanish town of Puigcerdà. She is now a professional pianist.”

“Lewis played a key role in the career of Gehry, the world famous Los Angeles architect. By spending more than $5 million over a dozen years on plans for a house by Gehry that he decided not to build, Lewis bankrolled experiments with computer technology that enabled Gehry to design the widely acclaimed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.”

Alex Ross recounts a visit with 110-year-old Alice Herz-Sommer, a former pianist who is the world’s oldest living Holocaust survivor, who met Gustav Mahler as a child, and who played Beethoven for Franz Kafka after a family Seder.

“[His] illustrious career took off in the 1960s with the crime comedy Monsieur Gangster(Les tontons flingueurs) … His films were generally commercial hits in France” – and are still frequently shown on French television – “so outside the country he wasnt as well known as the [art-house] auteurs.”

“Saluted by the Kennedy Center as a “Living Jazz Legend”, and appointed to the President’s Council on the Arts, this recipient of a NEA Jazz Master fellowship was considered one of the most important jazz artists and composers, creating vivid, positive, uplifting, engaging & relevant music until the end of his life.”

Watching art dealer David Zwirner at work.