Category: people

What exactly is life, and why do we die? Without biologist Lynn Margulis, we might never have known that the answer is sex.

“Zombies are a great rhetorical prop to talk about people and paranoia, and they are a good vehicle for my misanthropy.”

“While some critics have praised his tuneful and eclectic melodies, which can veer from pop and soul to blues and jazz, many have said that Mr. Wildhorn has trouble dramatizing theatrical moments in music and weaving songs into and out of book scenes, and that his taste and occasional efforts at lyric writing are uneven.”

“[She] made her debut at the Vienna opera as Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro on May 1, 1945 – the first production after World War II. She performed as Cherubino 129 times and went on to become one of the best-known singers at the opera house in the 1940s and 50s, singing in operas including Don Giovanni, Der Rosenkavalier and La Bohème.”

“[One] of the most influential jazz musicians of the past 50 years,” he was a key member of the legendary combos of Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. “But it was in the second half of his life that Mr. Motian found himself as a composer and bandleader, with work that could be counterintuitive or straightforward, runic or crowd-pleasing.”

“Bookshelves line the walls but they are not enough. The coffee table, desk and side tables are heaped with books, as is the replica electric chair in the hall. They range from Taschen art tomes such as The Big Butt Book to Jean Genet paperbacks and a Hungarian translation of Tennessee Williams with a pulp fiction cover.”

“The feisty Salford-born writer, who drew on the gritty reality of working-class life, was one of the pioneers of the ‘kitchen sink’ realism movement of the late 1950s and 1960s. She was just 19 when A Taste of Honey premiered in 1958 and became an instant success.”

“For Huffington, who, on the one hand, serves as a glittery Earth Mother and, on the other, is the world’s best bullshit artist, with stagehands and pulleys at work in conversation (although, oddly, she remains intensely enjoyable to be around), AOL is in some respects a ‘magical land’.”

“Hardly anything Ms. Abramovic says offhand is publishable in this newspaper, any more than are photographs from the performances she has presented over the decades, during which, often naked, she has cut or burned or whipped herself, or put herself in situations the plausible outcomes of which included death.”

“First it was money folded into paper planes that were flown over the walls of dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s home. Now Chinese Internet users’ latest show of solidarity with Ai has taken the unlikeliest form of protest: mass nudity.”