Category: people

“[He was] a critic for The Washington Post whose fervid prose style earned the first Pulitzer Prize for dance coverage and who chronicled an era of surging popular enthusiasm for dance in forms ranging from classical ballet to break dancing” over a 30-year career.

The child of the editor in chief at Harper & Brothers, he was an Exeter and Harvard student who left school to become a regular Chicago laborer. His experiences working and living within the working class informed his entire career – as the author of three successful novels, a prolific left-wing journalist, and ultimately one of America’s top historians of the labor movement and race relations.

Orwa Nyrabia, who with his wife “formed the first production company in Syria independent of the government and founded Dox Box, a festival that brought international documentaries to Syria, … is believed to have been detained by Syrian security services as he prepared to board a flight from Damascus to Cairo.”

“In 1988 Pankaj Mishra was a recent university graduate in the northern Indian city of Benares with big literary ambitions he had little idea how to fulfill. But when he heard that a local library was going to be auctioning back issues of The New York Review of Books as waste paper, he knew exactly what to do.”

“Browne’s picture went around the world. In Washington, Robert Kennedy was calling his brother, the president, to talk about Alabama when Jack Kennedy, still in bed in the White House, saw Browne’s picture on the front page of the New York Times. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said.”

The New Yorker‘s Peter Schjeldahl: “A high-school diploma is my highest academic achievement – actually I’ve got a couple of honorary degrees to go with it – but I think the distinction is people have to want to read me. Academic writing is written for people who have to read it and if the academic writer shows any kind of style or flair then people are just going to resent it.”

“Whatever happened to Baby Peggy? Few people under age 90 might even ask that question … [but] circa 1923, [she] was as well-known to movie-fans as Pola Negri, Rudolph Valentino and Jackie Coogan.”

“A 1975 issue of Millimeter magazine described her as ‘one of the world’s best and busiest’ animators and ‘one of the few women to have reached the top in the traditionally male-dominated animated cartoon field’.”