Category: people

“[Noah] Baumbach has a wary gaze and speaks in careful loops of retraction and calibration; it’s hard to imagine that he spent years doing improvised comedy, during and after college. … [Greta] Gerwig, who is twenty-nine, also has a precise, literate mind, but she is more buoyant, and sometimes has the air, not uncommon among her contemporaries, of having swallowed a very low dose of LSD.”

Marian Keyes: “I thought because I was addressing my issues on a daily basis I wouldn’t be one of those people who suddenly blew, but I did. I can still feel the fear. It was very primal. It wasn’t anxiety – I was terrified and everything looked different. It felt like I’d landed on another planet.”

Roth: “For me, Bob’s is one of the persuasive voices I can still hear speaking. The tang of the real permeated his talk. Like all great teachers, he personified the drama of transformation through talk.”

“A self-taught welder, carpenter, set designer and explosives expert, Vercoutere was a creative, unruffled presence on the set of ‘The Exorcist.'”

“During his 57-year tenure, he played under six different music directors, most recently with Gustavo Dudamel. (Kelley’s tenure with the L.A. Philharmonic began 44 years before Dudamel was born.)”

“‘You don’t have to hit home runs every time,’ he recently cautioned second-year tenor Diego Silva, who was going for a high note. ‘A double is very good sometimes. Triple is the best. If you aim for the home run, you’re going to overdo it.'”

“‘Let me ask you something. How many conductors have there been at Carnegie?’ Four thousand, maybe five, Mr. Francesconi guessed. ‘And how many historians have there been?’ the teacher persisted. ‘I said “none,” and my teacher said, “Well, think about that.”‘”

“My father’s laughter introduced me to the comedy of Jonathan Winters. My dad was a sweet man, but not an easy laugh. We were watching Jack Paar on The Tonight Show on our black-and-white television, and on came Jonathan in a pith helmet…”

“In 1836 in East Texas, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanches, raised by the tribe, and eventually became the wife of a warrior. Twenty-four years later she was reclaimed by the U.S. cavalry and Texas Rangers and reunited with her white family.”

“Soviet-era beacons like Radio Liberty and the BBC have lost their place on Russian airwaves, and now the Kremlin is offering a fresher voice: Tim Kirby, an expatriate from the suburbs of Cleveland, who says he wants Russian citizenship and says Joseph Stalin was a better leader than he has been portrayed in history books.”