Category: people

The Smithsonian’s new secretary wants the Institution to be involved in ‘the great issues of the day.’ “The stakes are high for a man who has had 39 successful years at educational institutions. And the stakes are perhaps higher for the Smithsonian, which has recently suffered from administrative mismanagement, congressional outrage and low staff morale.”

“The generation of young literary types who were inspired, moved, and entertained by Wallace’s work certainly felt that stomach-level sadness this weekend as news of his death spread. Wallace was the type of mind that should have been pumped until its last drop.”

A new biography depicts the monarch who came to embody stuffy English rectitude as an endearing but hot-tempered and headstrong girl who fought endless battles with a controlling, power-hungry mother.

“The composer of an opera who was left bankrupt after unsuccessfully suing the London Evening Standard for libel says he has lost the rights to his musical works. Keith Burstein said the Performing Rights Society had told him the intellectual property on his work belonged to the receiver, which would collect royalties on behalf of the Standard.”

When Kaiser ran the Royal Opera House in London, the newly-renovated building suffered myriad technical glitches. “I was so frightened that the only public performances I saw in full from the audience were the opening gala and the last night of my tenure … I was simply too frightened to sit in the house.”

Mark Rothko “was one of America’s most successful and famous artists when, in 1970, he killed himself. His tragic death sparked a bitter legal battle between his daughter, aged 19, and her father’s estate.” During the fight, Kate Rothko turned down several lucrative settlement offers, insisting that she wasn’t out for cash, but for the return of her father’s artistic legacy.

“David Foster Wallace, the author best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, was found dead in his home, according to police. He was 46. Wallace’s wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home about 9:30 p.m. Friday.”

“A prose magician, [David Foster] Wallace was capable of writing about everything from tennis to politics to lobsters, from the horrors of drug withdrawal to the small terrors of life aboard a luxury cruise ship, with humor and fervor and verve… He once wrote that irony and ridicule had become ‘agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture’ and mourned the loss of engagement with deep moral issues that animated the work of the great 19th-century novelists.”

Crime novelist Gregory McDonald, creator of the snarky reporter/detective Fletch, has died of cancer at his Tennessee home. “A former reporter and editor for The Boston Globe, Mr. Mcdonald was considered a master of the comic-mystery genre.”

Flynn led the orchestra since 2004. He raised “attendance to more than 1,000 from 300 a concert as he programmed familiar classics and unusual pieces.