Category: people

“Film industry executives credit Dr. Dolby with developing sophisticated technologies that enabled directors like Steven Spielberg to endow sound with the same emotional intensity as pictures.”

“One night, playing between sets at a small club … [with] his eyes closed in reverie, [Katz] did not realize that his bandmates had crept back onstage. The stage was tiny and crowded, and by the time the band swung into an up-tempo number and he realized what had happened, he could no longer get to the piano. So he stayed where he was, cello in hand, and played along – and with that the group had its new sound, and went on to become one of the most popular in jazz.”

He was a “determinedly leftist documentary filmmaker and writer whose passion for asking what he called ‘the most intrusive questions’ yielded penetrating cinematic profiles of leaders like Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende.”

“The Hollywood actor Harrison Ford has been accused of ‘harassing state institutions’ in Indonesia and threatened with deportation after allegedly confronting a minister during an interview about illegal logging and climate change.”

“The Writers Guild of America East has set an Oct. 14 date for its trial board to examine charges filed against Joan Rivers – which could lead to Rivers becoming the first member ever expelled from the WGA East.”

How a refugee baker from Bratislava ended up as the patriarch of six generations of great German musicians.

“The fundamental structure of human populations has changed exactly twice in evolutionary history. The second time was in the past 150 years, when the average lifespan doubled in most parts of the world. The first time was in the Paleolithic, probably around 30,000 years ago. That’s when old people were basically invented.” (And “old” means over 30.)

Abdellah Taia, now 40, emigrated to Paris in his mid-20s, but his work is rooted in his homeland, and his newly-released film, Salvation Army, was set and filmed there. He talks about how conditions are improving – slowly – for gays in Morocco, and about his own feeling toward Islam and Muslim civilization.

“In the Anglo-American West, where Camus is often revered as a kind of French Orwell, his stand on Algeria is typically taken as the sole mark against him.” Yet, as Thomas Meaney reminds us, Camus’s opposition to Algerian independence wasn’t just loyalty to his own pied-noir community: he wanted genuine equality for all Algerians as French citizens.

“As an author, she helped carve a space for women writing science fiction. She helped prove media tie-in novels could be great books in their own right. And she fought for writers to get treated fairly, with the indispensable site Writer Beware.”