Category: people

“Cash’s famous live albums recorded at Folsom Prison and San Quentin are the stuff of music legend … But it’s much less well-known that these were only two of many prison concerts Cash played over the course of almost 30 years … for inmates all over the US, always unpaid, and in the process, [he] became a passionate and vocal spokesman for prisoners’ rights.”

As an ethnographer who spent two years doing fieldwork among Samoan migrants, Ilana Gershon observes that many aspects of the saga that seem incredible to most Americans make sense in the context of Te’o’s background and likely upbringing.

Twitter mixes literature (of an admittedly minimal sort) with performance, and it’s perfect for Ellis, who has always been, when you think about it, more of a conceptual artist than an author. … In this new métier, each part of his persona is on view: satirist, nihilist, glamour guy, exhibitionist, knee-jerk contrarian, self-pitying cokehead, and a few other things.”

“The kind of behaviour you saw in parliament would not be tolerated for 30 seconds in a professional theatre. Essentially, there’s a lack of professionalism, very poor timekeeping, a great deal of wasting time, and egos the size of which I’ve never seen in my life before.”

“By becoming a martyr to open access, Swartz has, for better or worse, dealt a blow to government efforts to delegitimize hackers and their values.”

“I have provoked an aggression in somebody. Sooner or later this aggression was to take the shape of concrete action.”

“What is the secret to Bieber’s Twitter success? For one thing, as you can see by the screen shot above, Bieber has tweeted about eight times more than Lady Gaga has.”

“In 1953, Time magazine called Antonio Frasconi America’s foremost practitioner of the ancient art of the woodcut. Four decades later, Art Journal called him the best of his generation. Mr. Frasconi did not reach this pinnacle by adhering to orthodoxies.”

“[The] cardiologist who cared for Britten during the last three years of his life has … [told] the Guardian that he believes it is ‘extremely unlikely’ that Britten had the venereal disease, and ‘complete rubbish’ that his surgeon would or even could have covered up the condition.”

“These latest accusations, in particular, seemed too self-evidently preposterous to worry about. Who could possibly believe that I was some kind of literary racketeer who had stolen her material to sell it off to other writers? It was too ridiculous to take seriously.”