Category: people

Attenborough stated the reason he decided to join Instagram simply: “The world is in trouble. Continents are on fire, glaciers are melting, coral reefs are dying, fish are disappearing from our oceans. The list goes on and on,” he said. “But we know what to do about it, and that’s why I’m tackling this new way of communication.” – NPR

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and her family are facing a 35-million-pound ($60 million Cdn) hit from the coronavirus pandemic, partly due to a shortage of tourists, the monarch’s money manager said Friday. – CBC

Sited on a woodsy 7.5-acre lot, the spacious 6,200 sq. ft. residence was directly inspired by a trip to Japan Brubeck took on tour nearly 60 years ago — one might say he was impressed. Upon his return to the states, the jazz master commissioned his friend, architect Beverly David Thorne, known for his expert ability to build beautiful homes on challenging terrain, to create a Japanese-inspired midcentury modern estate. There are 8 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms. – Variety

“[She] stars in upcoming Netflix drama The Life Ahead, which is directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti. In the film, Loren plays Madame Rosa, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who helps raise the children of deceased sex workers with whom she once walked the streets. She then strikes up an enduring friendship with Momo, a 12-year-old Senegalese orphan who tries to steal her candlesticks.” – The Guardian

“Crouch was a fervent American who was an even more fervent African American. He loved to perturb all comers by arguing that in the end the Middle Passage was good for Africans, but nowhere near as much as he loved to praise the richness and diversity of the Black cultures that the horrors of slavery made possible. For him, the peak of these cultures was jazz — from Armstrong to bebop, please, post-’60s not so much.” – Los Angeles Times

Over a seven-decade career, Evans exposed major political and business scandals (above all, Kim Philby’s hidden career as a Soviet spy and the abandonment of children deformed by thalidomide by the drug’s manufacturers), edited The Sunday Times and The Times of London (which he left after a battle with Rupert Murdoch), wrote several books, founded Condé Nast Traveler magazine, and served as president of Random House; he became a Reuters editor-at-large at age 83. In a 2002 British Journalism Review poll, he was voted “the greatest newspaper editor of all time.” – Reuters

“An acclaimed French chanteuse whose sensual stage mystique and doleful voice bewitched audiences for more than six decades and made her an international recording and concert star, … [Gréco] was one of the last links to Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialist intellectuals who made her their raven-haired, black-clad muse in the post-World War II bohemia of Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood.” – The Washington Post

A Mississippi native who began studying dance at age 2, she settled in West Palm Beach in her late 20s and began teaching. In 1973, she founded Ballet Arts Theater of Palm Beach, which grew to a four-productions-per-season schedule and a school with 300 students and a record of placing graduates in some of the world’s top troupes. In 1986, Hale reconstituted BAT as Ballet Florida, one of the few fully professional dance companies in the state. – Dance Magazine

“While best known for his observant, insightful and often hilarious magazine stories about the real Texas — its people and places — [in GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and especially Texas Monthly], Reid authored such works as Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards and The Bullet Meant for Me, his moving account of being shot and almost killed by a robber in Mexico City in 1998.” – The Dallas Morning News

The poet completed 16 poetry collections and won prestigious prizes, including from the Lannan Foundation for lifetime achievement. But she’s most well-known for a biography of Sylvia Plath, which veered from the accepted narrative of Plath’s husband, poet Ted Hughes, “portraying Ms. Plath as ‘a wall of unrelenting rage’ prone to outrageous behavior, while depicting Mr. Hughes as generous and caring.” – The New York Times