"Quite suddenly, I lost most of the hearing in my left ear, and nobody has an explanation for it," he said. As if that weren't bad enough, a case of COVID left him frail. He's not necessarily sorry if this means he can no longer perform, though. - The Hollywood Reporter
"He wrote a stream of reviews but refused, to the displeasure of bosses, to rate films by a star system. 'He always defended that by saying 'If we give stars, no one will read the review. And movies are more complicated than that', said (his wife,) Pat." - MSN (Chicago Tribune)
In a dizzying fall from grace, Lisa Schiff was accused by a close friend and client of running a “Ponzi scheme” and misappropriating millions of dollars from art deals. Her website quickly disappeared from the internet, and on May 17, she filed a notice with New York Supreme Court that her business was defunct. - The Daily Beast
The actress was basically terrified of audiences. "Now and again she’d puke in the wastebasket, because she was so wired and scared and 'Oh my God, what’ll they think? I’ve got to do a good job.'" - The Guardian (UK)
Amis "was among the celebrated group of novelists including Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, whose works defined the British literary scene in the 1980s." - The Guardian (UK)
"Salman Rushdie made an emotional and unexpected return to public life Thursday night, attending the annual gala of PEN America and giving the event's final speech as he accepted a special prize, the PEN Centenary Courage Award, just nine months after being stabbed repeatedly and hospitalized." - AP
Sources close to him report that Gergiev—who, before the war, would drop by the theater three or four times a month—now spends most of his time in St. Petersburg. - Van
While he got that nickname for making his fortune by buying distressed real estate cheap, he earned his greatest notoriety for his leveraged buyout of the Tribune Group (Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, others), where his bankruptcy declaration, savage cuts and layoffs caused havoc. - Fortune
The great French actress wasn't the first to be famous solely for being famous (that phenomenon came later), but she was the first to consciously use the media to gain worldwide fame and the first to use that fame to get rich from ancillary self-branded business ventures. - Smithsonian Magazine
"Nine months after being stabbed and seriously injured onstage, (he warned) that freedom of expression in the West is under its most severe threat in his lifetime. Rushdie delivered a video message to the British Book Awards, where he was awarded the Freedom to Publish award." - AP
"Pema Tseden rarely depicted Tibet’s Chinese population, which swelled after the Red Army seized Tibet in 1951. To elude Chinese censors, he eschewed references to the Dalai Lama. ... This allowed him to avoid overtly political critiques while still tackling broader themes." - The New York Times
Isaac Butler gives a hearty smackdown to the "anti-Stratfordians" he calls "Shakespeare Truthers," pointing out how they use the same techniques that 9/11 Truthers, Obama Birthers, anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists use to wave away actual evidence and rationalize their own lack of it. - Slate
"To Frédéric Jousset, our most irrational ideas can sometimes be our finest. That thinking has led the 52-year-old thrill-seeker ... to build a giant museum-boat, deploy a fleet of buses to bring 100,000 kids to the British Museum, and tour museum masterpieces around the country in a truck." - Artnet
Paik once said, “It’s an artist’s job to think about the future.” This compelling film underscores why Paik should be considered the progenitor of video art, his work prophesying an “electronic superhighway…where everybody will have his own TV channel” a decade before the internet even existed. - ArtsFuse
A 2017 MacArthur fellow, Sorey is a musical universalist who has little use for categories and labels. He feels they are reductive and irrelevant in a post-genre world and often attaches a wary prefix to them: “so-called jazz,” “so-called classical,” “so-called hip-hop.” Nor does he care for the word “improvisation.” - Columbia Magazine
