“At 55, facing his largest live audience ever, [Jimmy Tingle will] stand in front of 32,000 people at Harvard’s commencement and deliver the graduate student oration…. ‘He’s clearly got a media presence,’ said Kennedy School professor and political commentator David Gergen, who had Tingle as a student in a leadership development class.”
Tag: 05.27.10
General Anxiety at BookExpo America
“As the book industry gathered for its annual convention in New York this week, it had plenty to be nervous about: the threat of piracy, the decline of brick-and-mortar stores and the perhaps-too-low price of e-books. There was also the fact that the scandal-ridden Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, had been booked as the master of ceremonies for one of the convention’s most prominent events.”
Renzo Piano Unveils Design For Kimbell Art Museum Addition
“It’s fair to ask if Renzo Piano was fully sane when he agreed to design the addition to Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum. … [He] is likely to be vilified by both architecture fans and art world purists no matter what he comes up with. … But Mr. Piano has managed to find that magical and elusive balance between respecting a great work and adhering to one’s own aesthetic convictions.”
Mikhail Shatrov, 78, Daring Soviet Playwright
He “was best known for his plays on Lenin [and Stalin]. These ‘dramas of fact,’ as he called them, turned a lens on pivotal events in the revolution and the early years of the Soviet state, when economic and political freedoms still loomed as possibilities.”
Versions of Raymond Carver
Will the “real” Raymond Carver please stand up?
America’s New Cultural/Political Reality
“For half a century now Americans have been rebelling in the name of individual freedom. Some wanted a more tolerant society with greater private autonomy, and now we have it, which is a good thing–though it also brought us more out-of-wedlock births, a soft pornographic popular culture, and a drug trade that serves casual users while destroying poor American neighborhoods and destabilizing foreign nations. Others…”