Category: people

Jiayang Fan: “I find a story about my mother and me in the Global Times, a state-controlled Chinese newspaper with twenty-eight million followers on Weibo. It has been picked up by the country’s most popular news aggregator and then energetically disseminated on various platforms. The more I read, the more fascinated I become by the creation of this alter ego. I am watching a portrait of myself being painted, minute by minute, anonymous hands contributing daubs and strokes, the more lurid the better.” – The New Yorker

The tale of the author’s cremains, which would likely have amused her as much as irked her, includes appearances by Martin Luther King and the NAACP (to whom she left her estate), Lillian Hellman (more than living down to Mary McCarthy’s opinion of her), activist lawyer and one-time New York City Council President Paul O’Dwyer, and (the hero of the story) a professional tour guide named Kevin Fitzpatrick. – The New Yorker

Believed to be the first woman to play tuba in a fully professional orchestra in the U.S., she was hired by the Boston Pops in 1955, after her second time at Tanglewood, and went on to hold positions in the North Carolina Symphony, the Netherlands Ballet Orchestra, and the Kansas City Philharmonic. (For a time, she was acting principal tuba for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.) A Florida native, she spent most of her career, more than 30 years, at the University of Miami and the Miami Philharmonic. – The New York Times

The first time that Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s lawsuit against Malcolm and The New Yorker went to court, she writes, the personal manner she and her colleagues at the magazine had cultivated turned out to be disastrous: the jury ruled against her, and it was amazing luck that they deadlocked on how much to award Masson and the judge declared a mistrial. So she went to see speech coach Sam Chwat, and she recounts here how the things he taught her changed everything the second time around. – The New York Review of Books

“His 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years was an anti-capitalist analysis that struck a chord with many readers in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Graeber’s rigorous, readable radicalism was showcased again in the 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.” A longtime activist, he was with the Occupy movement from its very earliest stages; calling themselves, and most of the rest of us, “the 99%” was his idea. – AP

In May 1884, long before the likes of Kim Kardashian achieved celebrity through the careful curation and promotion of self, a young unknown named Marie Bashkirtseff staked her desire for fame on the publication of her personal diary. – Public Domain Review

W. Russell Barry worked as president of 20th Century Fox Television, overseeing production and syndication, and spent two years at Playboy, where he launched the Playboy Channel, before heading to Turner Program Services as president and then chairman. There he was responsible for all TBS programming, including distribution of old MGM films and TV shows, original National Geographic programs, and CNN (yes, he’s the one who did the CNN-in-airports deal). – The Hollywood Reporter

Lanier finds many things fundamental to living in a society hard, like adhering to concepts relating to time, or receiving or sending mail; one ride in his amusement park brain is “a hamster wheel of pain,” as he mentally repeats to himself whatever menial tasks he needs to do until he does them. He is a voluminous talker prone to distraction; interrupt him mid-thought and prepare to find yourself hundreds of years forward or backward in time, talking about factories or Thomas Pynchon or the origins of the word meme. – GQ

He first came to prominence on recordings by Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano, especially their landmark series of Monteverdi’s madrigals. He then broke off to found his own consort of singers and instrumentalists, called La Venexiana, with whom he performed and recorded all of Monteverdi’s operas, madrigals, and major sacred works as well as music of other 16th- and 17th-century Italian composers, winning a pack of awards along the way. – Presto Classical

“He believed, he once wrote, that a mind ‘still inhabiting the flesh’ could reach another mind at great remove. There was an inciting incident in the spring of 1875 (before Twain’s red hair went gray), which he recollected as ‘the oddest thing that ever happened to me.'” – The Paris Review