Category: people

To Deborah Solomon: “Every year I visit [one of the Manson Family killers] on Oscar morning. I go from her prison to Elton John’s dinner party. I guess, oddly, that sort of sums up my life.”

“‘I was always attached to mud,’ she once wrote, and a sophisticated understanding of plants and flowers is reflected in her poetry. … On the path that runs between beds of flowers at the New York Botanical Garden,” where the exhibition “Emily Dickinson’s Garden” is running, “more than 30 poems are displayed on boards next to plants and trees and flowers that inspired them.”

“At 55, facing his largest live audience ever, [Jimmy Tingle will] stand in front of 32,000 people at Harvard’s commencement and deliver the graduate student oration…. ‘He’s clearly got a media presence,’ said Kennedy School professor and political commentator David Gergen, who had Tingle as a student in a leadership development class.”

Especially renowned for her Mozart and for Berg’s Lulu, she “sang the world over with the best in the business including in Milan’s La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York … She also had her own television show in Germany and appeared in numerous musical films.”

He “was best known for his plays on Lenin [and Stalin]. These ‘dramas of fact,’ as he called them, turned a lens on pivotal events in the revolution and the early years of the Soviet state, when economic and political freedoms still loomed as possibilities.”

“And before anyone asks, let’s settle the question of honoring someone who’s a mere 40 years old. ‘It does change the paradigm a bit,’ said Mark Krantz, co-executive producer of the Twain salute. … ‘A lot of people felt it was a lifetime achievement award for an old person. It never has been.'”

Though “the Polanski Liberation Front is hardly a mass movement in France,” its prominent partisans include more than just outraged film directors. “Several popular philosophers, of the sort the French call intellectuels médiathèques, are carrying Polanski’s banner. The most prominent of them is Bernard-Henri Lévy….”

“[Wrapped Reichstag] took quite literally hundreds of people, … It was, for all intents and purposes, a military operation. And I saw that the general in charge of this was not Christo, but Jeanne-Claude. Not for nothing did she grow up in a family that was closely connected to the French government. She combined the intellectual precision of Descartes with the unwavering determination of DeGaulle.”

“A glance along the ‘A’ shelf of any good bookshop will reveal a dizzying array of books on Jane Austen: study guides, biographies, source books, companions … [She has also inspired] board games, tarot card decks, figurines, Web sites, discussion forums, book club meetings, Empire-waist fashions.” And, of course, “[n]ever before, perhaps, has so small an oeuvre (she wrote six novels) launched so many academic careers.”

“The community’s love for Mike was tangible in the days of agony that preceded his death — a hectic time on the theatrical calendar…. Hearing that he was hospitalized, colleagues began visiting regularly; news of his condition flowed from friend to friend; press reps at the various shows opening handed out updates on his precarious state along with the press tickets.”