"With an acting career that began in the 1960s with a string of roles in Japanese martial arts films and TV shows and went on to include more than 100 films, Chiba became widely known in the west after being name-checked in True Romance" - and being featured in Kill Bill. - The Guardian (UK)
"'Five-thousand-year-old culture on my back; late-twentieth-century world in my face' is how Ms. Liu described her life-changing arrival in the United States from China in 1984, when she was 36 and already an accomplished painter." - The New York Times
Upson, "one of the most significant artists to emerge from the vibrant Los Angeles art scene this century, won early attention for The Larry Project, an open-ended phantasmagoria," and she continued with resin sculptures that merged Americans' bodies with their houses and possessions. - The New York Times
Murphy, who dreamt up The Worst Witch series at age 18 (the first book was published when she was 24), refused to sell the rights to Disney because they wanted far too much control. - BBC
Loewen had no patience for the commonly used anti-Black model of the history of the South in the U.S., and his books made it abundantly clear where the deliberate misconceptions - you might call them lies - got started. - The New York Times
Greenfield wrote nearly 50 books for children, stories told with joy, rhythm, melody, and enlightenment. Her "expressive poetry and prose illuminated the lives of Black people, including those of midwives during slavery and the Southerners who, like her family, moved north during the Great Migration." - The New York Times
Morgan "made his international debut at the Vienna State Opera in 1982, conducting Mozart’s Abduction From the Seraglio in the city where the composer spent much of his life, before an infamously fastidious and unforgiving audience. He later said his only goal was to get in and out of the State Opera without being booed. As it happened, he...
Lady Mary Wroth, a noble at James I's court, had two bastard children with an Earl who ignored them and dumped her. The cream of London society was horrified when she put those secrets, and many of theirs as well, into a novel and play. - Smithsonian Magazine
"(His) larger-than-life portraits, some composed of thousands of small but intricate paintings that served as pixels, made him one of the most renowned artists of the past half century." - The Washington Post
How a bored young rabbi named Yacov Moshe Maza became a Borscht Belt comic, came to Hollywood and got famous, alienated Ed Sullivan and got eclipsed, then came back to become Broadway's most proficient stand-up comedian. (The article skips his right-wing phase.) - Vulture
He was hired in 2015 to revivify the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV and make Las Vegas a literary destination. He seemed to be succeeding — until the camera incident in February. Yet, staffers say, that was just one of many cases of bad behavior. - Los Angeles Times
This may now seem, to younger generations, a corny, indulgent, and completely irrelevant form of grandstanding. But when you go back and watch Leonard Bernstein do it in the galvanizing documentary “Bernstein’s Wall,” it’s still cathartic. - Variety
He doesn't do smartphones, thinks talk shows are nonsensical, and reports: "Music is rapture, it’s not understanding. Go home all you music critics!" - Gramilano
"Kaji created the puzzle to be easy for children and others who didn't want to think too hard. … Sudoku championships have drawn some 200 million people in 100 countries over the years." - AP
"We live in this digital universe. Digital life has been emancipating and liberatory but at the same time it’s haunting and damaging and punishing and everything in between. It’s enabled the best and the worst of us." - The Art Newspaper
