Category: people

“It’s time to pack the old Thoreau – austere, high-minded, solitary – in mothballs and break out the new. This new model … is a wisecracking, subversive, entrepreneurial party boy, as likely to dance a jig and break into song as preach at you.”

He “captured the promise, the harshness and the sheer beauty of California in novels like Continental Drift and Snow Mountain Passage and in nonfiction works like Farewell to Manzanar, about a World War II internment camp for the Japanese.”

He became famous for writing the words to the WWII anthem “Le Chant des Partisans,” wrote such classic French historical novels as Les Rois maudits (“The Accursed Kings”), and spent two decades battling the inclusion of women in the Académie and of English words into French, even as he spoke proudly of learning his English from Winston Churchill.

“Whether they talk about it or not, plenty of rappers are from the suburbs, but not one has created an aesthetic around it until [Asher] Roth. […] He’s also facing a very long white shadow. Has the archetype of the white rapper mapped out by Eminem, the one-man category killer, left any room for Asher Roth?”

“[She] broke new ground when, drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault, she began teasing out the hidden socio-sexual subplots in writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James. […] Several of her essays became lightning rods for critics of poststructuralism, multiculturalism and gay studies – most notoriously ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’.”

“Charles Teitel’s World Playhouse Theater on Michigan Avenue was the first foreign art house in Chicago, screening such seminal films as The Bicycle Thief and Z as well as movies that city censors tried to ban for racy content.”

The native New Yorker, an expert on percussion and the timbales, infused Latin jazz with the típico Cuban rhythmic style.

Jon Andrew, once a regular at houses like Covent Garden, La Scala and Munich, is coming out of retirement to sing the punishing Verdi role in England this June. (He last sang Otello in 1979.) Whatever the state of his cords, he’s physically strong enough to do it: “Andrew looks at gym equipment as Pavarotti once looked at dinner.”

“Judith F. Krug, who led the campaign by libraries against efforts to ban books, including helping found Banned Books Week, then fought laws and regulations to limit children’s access to the Internet, died Saturday…. As the American Library Association’s official proponent of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech since the 1960s, Ms. Krug (pronounced kroog) fought the banning of books, including ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ ‘Mein Kampf,’ ‘Little Black Sambo,’ ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and sex manuals.”

You know, the one where you’re about to do something important in front of people and you realize that you’re wearing no clothes. It wasn’t quite that bad for the Welsh baritone, who had set out from his hotel for a concert in Seoul wearing a pair of shorts, only to arrive at the hall and discover that he had forgotten to pack his concert slacks.