Category: people

“Wendy White, the veteran Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano who fell from a platform during a performance nearly a year ago, has still not recovered from her injuries and feels abandoned by the company she once considered family, her lawyer said on Monday.”

“Barrett Wissman, co-chair of IMG Artists, will serve no jail time for his role in a sweeping case of securities fraud in which investment firms paid kickbacks to manage assets of the New York state pension fund.”

The lifelong Marxist thinker’s “four-volume history of the 19th and 20th centuries, spanning European history from the French revolution to the fall of the USSR, is acknowledged as among the defining works on the period.”

“After drawing fire for criticizing Israel’s stance on Iran in a controversial poem earlier this year, prominent German writer Günter Grass confronts Israeli policy in a new poem, in which he lauds Mordechai Vanunu, a former nuclear technician imprisoned by Israel for years for revealing details of Israel’s nuclear program to the British media.

David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, volunteers to help at the first reading of the movie script (which he didn’t write).

“As the notion of an ‘underclass’ – a socially chaotic replacement for the old, more tightly-knit working class – has taken root in Britain, attitudes have hardened.” Rowling wants to cut through those attitudes – so chill out, reviewers.

“Wright, the champion of a democratic American architecture, had the sensitivity to embrace what he saw as a fresh aesthetic rooted in turn-of-the-century Europe. His artists were at the end of their époque. Wright assimilated into a broader aesthetic sensibility what they represented, and moved on.”

Agnès Godard, who shot (among other films) Wings of Desire and Belly of an Architect, on her first experience with digital cameras: “The images don’t have the same texture, the poetic charge is different, so you have to reinvent the images.”

“It’s not a knock on performers to point out that they tend not to write well about anything else. To become a first-rate actor or musician requires a ruthless single-mindedness that leaves little time for secondary pursuits.”

“Though she wrote more than a dozen novels and several memoirs, [she] remained inadvertently best known for Women’s Barracks, … a fictionalized account of the author’s wartime service in London with the women’s division of the Free French forces.”