Category: people

A new exhibit at the Kahlo Museum in Mexico City features “300 accessories, corsets, clothes and health contraptions worn by Kahlo that have been locked away for over 50 years since her death in 1954, aged 47.” The items are fantastical, sometimes witty, and – in the case of her many orthopedic devices – a bit frightening.

“The average age for the four living members of The Rolling Stones is about two years older than the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

“The editorial director of France’s most respected newspaper, Le Monde, died after collapsing at his office on Tuesday evening. Erik Izraelewicz, who was 58, was overseeing the production of the daily paper when he was said to have felt unwell before suffering a heart attack.”

Charles Jennens “was a scholar, collector, Shakespeare editor and the man who probably brought the first piano into England, on which Handel performed after dinner. … [He] never asked for a penny for his many libretti for Handel, but helped establish the composer’s immortal fame and popularity.”

An ingenious chart provides us with the top 50 epigrams and their sources; a Wilde quotability index; quotability comparisons with JFK, Shakespeare, Churchill, and Jesus; and (naturally) erudite footnotes.

She was “a film actress, veteran of television miniseries and entrepreneur whose company, Dove Books-on-Tape, became a major force in the audio book industry.”

“Depression was part of Wallace’s psyche, and so it was part of his job to describe it. He knew that profound isolation is one of its chief tortures. He also saw how natural it was for observers to find the depressive unbearably self-obsessed. Perhaps that’s why Wallace worked so hard to make communicable the inchoate fragments he managed to pull out of himself while he was suffering.”

Eric Been, Maria Bustillos and Michael Goetzman discuss such propositions as “[He] was his most consequentially gracious when his tenderness and generosity were only barely outpacing his capacity to be a total dickhead.”

“From where Stone sits, World War II begot the cold war, which landed us in Vietnam, a manifestation of American imperialism, which led inexorably to our current battle in Afghanistan. We have, Stone says, been sold a fairy tale masquerading as history, and it is so blinding it may ultimately undo us.”

The author of The Power of One and a string of other blockbuster novels “posted an emotional ‘thank you’ message to his fans in an online video two weeks ago to mark the publication of his final novel.”