Zaha Hadid, Superstar

“[The] media has mythologised her as a diva who sometimes uses a megaphone in her Clerkenwell [London] office, and who hobnobs with A-list friends such as Karl Lagerfeld. She encourages it, playfully: today her toenails are the colour of Greek lemons, to match [her] chic canary-yellow coat.”

Roald Dahl: the Shlimazl Behind the Monster

“Dahl had an idyllic childhood until the age of 3, when his older sister suddenly died and was followed, weeks later, by her heartbroken father. This was the beginning of a toxic tsunami of bad luck that would toss Dahl around for the rest of his life. … [It’s] sometimes hard to know … whether to root for Dahl or for whatever angry hell-demon seemed so determined to bring him down.”

“The Accordion Is Not a Punchline”

The maligned old squeezebox and its nearest relatives are indispensable to countless types of music, from Mexico to Ireland to Argentina to Louisiana to France to South Africa – not to forget polka, of course. Why does the accordion get no respect? Pauline Oliveros, doyenne of experimental composers and possibly the world’s first avant-garde accordionist, has some ideas.

The Musical Art Of Revival (Or Mimicry Or Tribute Or Raw Material)

A growing number of artists are drawing “from the music of the sixties and seventies with great fidelity, sometimes from one performer in particular. The goal of these artists isn’t just able mimicry, though a skeptic would say that the work begins there. But the method accepts a certain pragmatism of pop–that enough work has been done that starting from scratch is just plain inefficient.”