Category: people

“Cicero was … a brilliant man and gifted speaker, with a burning desire to gain the highest office in the ancient republic. As the campaign approached, his brother Quintus … decided that his older sibling needed to learn a few things about how to win an election.”

“Why can everyone learn Portuguese? Are some aspects of our nature unknowable? Can you imagine Richard Nixon as a radical? Is Twitter a trivialiser? New Scientist takes a whistle-stop tour of our modern intellectual landscape in the company of Noam Chomsky.”

“It may surprise people who only know his name from the controversy that Daisey is a highly respected theater performer who has toured the world with his solo shows. … Like the late Spalding Gray, Daisey is essentially a monologist who pens his own material and performs it behind a simple desk. His shows usually tackle current issues from a highly subjective angle, weaving together the topical and the personal into something that isn’t quite fiction or nonfiction.”

Artist Chris Hackett likes to improvise with things he finds on the streets of Brooklyn. “Nathaniel Grouille, a television producer who produced Mr. Hackett’s most recent show, ‘Stuck With Hackett,’ for the Science Channel and is helping him pitch the new show, said, ‘There’s an elegant, design way to make things, and then there’s a Dunkirk, let’s-get-it-done-with-baling-wire-and-string way — that’s Hackett’s way.'”

“Paul Taylor, who danced with Ms. Winter in the Graham company in the 1950s, summed up her versatility in his memoir, Private Domain, writing, ‘Ethel Winter is a many-pointed star — spiritual as St. Joan, lascivious as Aphrodite, flirtatious as Cleopatra.'”

Esperanza Spaulding, bassist and singer who earned the wrath of millions of Justin Bieber fans when she won the Grammy for Best New Artist last year, widens her spotlight to include her band members – and jazz itself.

Gordimer “has always taken the line that what a writer must do, in times of oppression, is write to the best of her ability; to articulate her truths and examine her conscience.”

The French filmmaker was captured during the 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu and spent most of his life as a war correspondent before making movies like the Oscar award-winning The Anderson Platoon.

“After more than 40 years in stand-up comedy, music and acting, Billy Connolly has turned his hand to contemporary art. The comedian on Wednesday unveiled to the world a series of pen and ink drawings called Born on a Rainy Day, the result of two years of sketching.”

Jonathan Franzen’s observation that “she wasn’t pretty” (which he considers a “potentially redeeming disadvantage”) has, predictably, drawn a lot of angry comment. Yet, observes Laura Miller, “if Wharton’s looks didn’t have some significant impact on her life, she’d be a very unusual woman indeed, for any period of history. … And if her life is relevant to her work, then I’m sorry to say that her looks probably are, too.”