New York-born, South Carolina-raised and Curtis-trained, she became one of the top American coloraturas of her generation and one of the stars of New York City Opera, where she was a protégée of Beverly Sills. She later went on to direct the young artists' program, the Ryan Opera Center, at Lyric Opera of Chicago, where her husband, conductor Andrew...
At a time of entertainment industry upheaval, David Ellison has transformed Skydance into the rarest of Hollywood businesses — a thriving, built-from-scratch, all-audiences, independent studio. - The New York Times
The far-ranging interview was a resounding success... When the reporter inquired about the delay in airing it, ABC reported that it had been scrapped, because, “Who wants to listen to a Black gay has-been?” - Esquire
"A longtime New Yorker staff writer and the author of several books, the Prague native practiced a kind of post-modern style in which she often called attention to her own role in the narrative, questioning whether even the most conscientious observer could be trusted." - AP
"Austen's personal values — namely, whether she supported slavery — have been debated by literary enthusiasts and experts who read her work like a cipher. A new discovery brother Henry was sent as a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840." What's more, one of Austen's letters "mentions her love of the work of Thomas Clarkson, an...
Through his 60-plus books, including The Mechanism of Mind (1969), Six Thinking Hats (1985), How to Have A Beautiful Mind (2004) and Think! Before It’s Too Late (2009), as well as seminars, training courses and a BBC television series, De Bono sought to free us from the tyranny of logic through creative thinking. - The Guardian
"The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene." - The Guardian
He is the intellectual of the moment, this soft-spoken biographer of great men. Meacham whispers in the president’s ear and appears on TV constantly. - Harper's
Among the unconventional books that he took on when other publishers wouldn't were The Armies of the Night, the first of Norman Mailer's "nonfiction novels"; James Baldwin's Another Country (Baron let Baldwin stay in his country house while he finished it); and Report from Iron Mountain, an antiwar satire which he and editor E.L. Doctorow marketed as a secret,...
With each subsequent decade, Wolf has injected a little more madness into the cesspool of weird that we sometimes call “the discourse.” - The New Republic
Beatty's roles "captured the full spectrum of humanity — from sincerity to villainy, buffoonery to tragedy — and made him one of the most versatile performers of his generation." Beatty: "My great joy is throwing curveballs. Being a star cuts down your effectiveness as an actor, because you become an identifiable part of a product and somewhat predictable. ......
He was one of postwar German's most prominent architects, and had been the country's only living Pritzker Prize winner. "His most revered works resemble jagged concrete mountains, among them the town hall in Bensberg in western Germany that he shaped as a grand fortress and crown of the city. So too the massive pilgrimage church in Neviges, near Düsseldorf,...
"As the inventive design director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1960s and '70s, turned the presentation of art into a gasp-inducing genre of theater" — most famously in the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition of 1978-79 — "giving the staid institution mass appeal and inspiring widespread changes in the style and spirit of museum exhibitions."...
After he and his brother-in-law, Roman Kroitor, created documentaries for Expo 67 in Montreal that used multiple screens and projectors, they decided to invent a single large-format projector. By the mid-1970s, they had established the technology and made and shown a few highly praised nature documentaries, but it took many years to overcome producer and exhibitor skepticism and get...
