Category: people

The MP for Faversham and Mid Kent replaces Rebecca Pow, who held the role for only four months. Pow is moving to a position in the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Helen Whatley will work under the recently appointed Culture Secretary Nicky Morgan, who remains at the head of DCMS. – Arts Professional

“It’s my personal opinion that at this particular moment, the greatest challenge arts philanthropy faces is to decide what our responsibility is to the institutional nonprofit arts infrastructure that our investments have helped to build over the last 70 to 80 years.” – Barry’s Blog

Sontag’s fraught relationship with her body wasn’t simply about physicality; it was about her tormented relationship to need itself—her shame at having needs in the first place. – The New Republic

Newman starting acting as a child and grew up to win a Tony in 1962, and to become the first woman to host The Tonight Show. After dealing with breast cancer, she also turned into a fierce fundraiser for the health of women in entertainment. – The New York Times

Ocasek wrote and was lead singer on nearly every song The Cars recorded, including hits like “Best Friend’s Girl” and “Shake It Up,” and after the group broke up, he had a second career as a producer, “helping sculpt blockbuster hits like Weezer’s blue and green albums and cult favorites like Bad Brains’ Rock for Light.” – Rolling Stone

Celebrity in the 21st century: The actor Jeremy Renner was nominated for Oscars two years in a row, with The Hurt Locker and The Town. Then Marvel came calling. Then he got his own app. Then things went off the rails in all kinds of ways. “The sheer existence — and vertiginous decline — of the Jeremy Renner Official app is weird and inexplicably hilarious. But like the rest of Renner’s current image, it’s also a symptom of our current, confusing moment in pop culture and the economy built around it, where it’s unclear if the truly massive Hollywood star is increasingly a relic of the past.” – BuzzFeed

Smith not only cleared up the reputation of President Ulysses Grant – showing that “Grant’s poor reputation as president had been fostered in part by biased graduate students at Columbia University who wrote the first studies of Reconstruction” – but restored to prominence the contributions of John Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. (And he also wrote a scathing biography of the 43rd president, George W. Bush.) – The New York Times

Siddons was an advertising copywriter before her buddy Pat Conroy, author of Prince of Tides, urged her to write about Atlanta – which she did. But that wasn’t her only topic. “‘The South is hard on women,’ she told People, ‘partly because of the emphasis on looks and charm. No matter what I did, I always ended up with this hollow feeling. … That’s why I wrote: I am writing about the journey we take to find out what lives in that hole.” – The New York Times

Zukerman, 74, has Alzheimer’s. She was diagnosed about three years ago after her two daughters insisted that she get checked. At the time, Zukerman thought nothing of the memory slips… – Albany Times-Union

An Armenian born in Iran and raised in Iraq, Martin came to New York to study and met Scorsese in the early 1960s. He worked on the director’s first feature (Who’s That Knocking at My Door?) and documentary (Italianamerican) and co-wrote Mean Streets; New York, New York; The Last Waltz; and Raging Bull. – Variety