Category: people

“Sources in China said singer Hyon Song-wol as well as Mun Kyong-jin, head of the Unhasu Orchestra, were arrested on Aug. 17 for violating North Korean laws against pornography and were executed in public three days later.”

“Mr. Mrozek, who began his career as a journalist and cartoonist, was known for mordant allegorical plays whose absurdism lampooned the political and social climate of the postwar Eastern bloc nations. Critics often mentioned his work in the same breath as that of the Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco.”

As a 15-year-old in Liverpool, the woman who is now the artistic director of the Southbank Centre had fallen in with the proverbial bad crowd and was spiraling downhill – until a timely word from her headmaster led her to start a drama club. She’s never forgotten the difference it made.

He puts out a steady stream of entertaining tweets – often selfies taken with food – that get him lots of online love, and a new YouTube video in which he teaches us the secret of the quadruple-take is headed toward half a million views.

“Considered through such a filter, Salinger’s life becomes a saga defined by its own trauma and the books a series of small miracles that, by all rights maybe, never should have existed at all.”

“So I can’t sing at all. In fact I couldn’t sing for the last five or six years I appeared on stage, but I kept trying. I kept thinking, ‘What if I tried singing upside down? Or standing on my head? Or while juggling? [Laughs] Maybe I’d be able to sing better then. So I didn’t know why I couldn’t sing – all I knew was that it was muscular, or mechanical.”

“First of all, it’s pronounced ‘Pynch-ON.’ Second, the great and bewildering and, yes, very private novelist is not exactly a recluse.” Boris Kachka didn’t get to talk to Pynchon himself, but he has managed to put together a reasonable portrait of the man.

Cyrus’ performance was a bomb both in the traditional critical sense, and in the blowback it’s producing both for her and for the black women she’s emulating and appropriating. As Chloe Angyal summed it up, “That we consider Miley ‘off the rails’ when she mimics age-old, harmful stereotypes of Black women says a lot.”

“The English folk singer known for most of his life as Louis Killen was a bawdy, bearded pioneer of the 1950s British folk revival, a member of the Clancy Brothers and a soloist admired for giving voice to forgotten miners and sailors in traditional ballads.”