“His life’s work was as a critic and he was for four decades one of Canada’s great observers, interpreters and explainers of art and architecture.”

“The 74-year-old is suffering from primary progressive aphasia, which affects his ability to communicate. As well as appearing in the BBC TV shows and films, Jones also directed the features The Life Of Brian and Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life, and co-directed Monty Python And The Holy Grail with Terry Gilliam.”

“Abramović and Ulay, born Frank Uwe Laysiepen, had been lovers and co-creators for more than a decade before their separation in 1988 … Ulay launched a lawsuit last year in which he claimed that Abramović has violated a contract they signed in 1999 covering works they had created together.” On Thursday, a Dutch court agreed.

Jazz critic Tate’s essays for the Village Voice were poetry. “For a generation of critics, Tate’s career has served as a reminder that diversity isn’t just about a splash of color in the group photo; it’s about the different ways that people see, feel, and move within the world. These differences can be imperceptible, depending on where your eye lingers as you scan the newsroom.”

“The honorees include relatively well-known figures in the arts like the poet Claudia Rankine, 53, whose book Citizen, (2014) which explored racism in everyday life …; the essayist Maggie Nelson, 43, who won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for The Argonauts;” sculptor Vincent Fecteau; composer Julia Wolfe; graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang; playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins; cultural historian Josh Kun; and video artist Mary Reid Kelley.

From Ahilan Arulanantham to Jin-Quan Yu.

“There are a lot of groups that trace their origins. But there are few that can actually point to genealogical records from the Song [Dynasty] that are then kept up and recompiled pretty continuously up to the present.”

“Throughout his career, Hanson strived to re-create the level of actor-director intimacy and trust that he felt [Humphrey] Bogart and [Nicholas] Ray enjoyed, and which produced such raw on-screen emotion. As a result, Hanson developed a reputation among actors as a director who was particularly intuitive.”

“Few personalities – particularly as one as protean and occasionally as brilliant as Reed’s – can be summed up in two syllables. But if you were to do a word cloud of memories of Reed in the various volumes that have been published on his life, the word asshole would turn up in surprisingly large type.”

“Grand Central Terminal, the main building on Ellis Island and the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden – all among the greatest New York City landmarks – look better today than they have since their earliest years. Many hands were responsible. John Belle was the common denominator. Mr. Belle, the retired founding partner of Beyer Blinder Belle, … died last week at 84.”

“[Domingos] Montagner played the leading role in Velho Chico, a soap opera named after the São Francisco river where he died. The 54-year-old had gone for a swim with an actress after a day of shooting in the north-eastern state of Sergipe. … The actress, Camila Pitanga, cried for help but local people failed to act initially as they believed the drowning was a scene in the soap opera.”

“Davis became known as “the sorcerer” because of his alchemical flair for transforming the humblest of materials—a Tin Pan Alley song, a simple bass line, even another musician’s wrong note—into an exalted form of expression. Shy to the point of taciturnity, he rarely spoke to his sidemen, except to offer the occasional cryptic instruction—“play [guitar] like you don’t know how to play the guitar,” he told the guitarist John McLaughlin—yet he knew how to inspire their best playing.”

“Even at his ripe age — he is now 87 — Habermas’s passion remains undiminished. As a public intellectual, however, he may seem an unlikely hero. We live in an age when what some of us still fondly call ‘the public sphere’ has grown thick with personalities who prefer the TED Talk to the printed word and the tweet to the rigors of rational argument. For Habermas, it’s clear that without the constant exercise of public deliberation, democracy will collapse, and this means that citizens must be ready to submit their arguments to the acid bath of rational criticism.”

“By the last few months, I realized I had been engaging — like most addicts — in a form of denial. I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life, an add-on, as it were. Yes, I spent many hours communicating with others as a disembodied voice, but my real life and body were still here. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. “

“Mr. Buchla was an instrument builder, musician and composer. He conceived his instruments, including a voltage-controlled modular synthesizer, as tools for creating previously unheard sounds and gave them names like the Music Easel, Thunder or simply the Buchla Box.”

“She fully embraced audiences’ reverence for the musical, frequently appearing at singalong performances at the Hollywood Bowl. ‘I tell people that they should consider singalong ‘Sound Of Music’ like going to a therapist,’ she said before a 2005 appearance.”

“The annual Praemium Imperiale recognizes career achievements in five categories: painting, sculpture, architecture, music and theater or film.”

“Kinsella began writing ‘Shoeless Joe’ as a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City near where the story was set. The story, which was published in 1982, follows a farmer who is coaxed in a dream to build a ballpark in a corn field and is visited by the ghost of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, the White Sox star who was banned from baseball over the 1919 World Series betting scandal.”

“All art should be useful,” he said. “If it’s merely decorative, it’s a waste of time. You know, if you’re going to spend a couple of hours of your life, listening to string quartets or being at plays or going to a museum and looking at paintings, something should happen to you. You should be changed.”

“The diagnosis came out of a meeting of experts sponsored by the Van Gogh Museum [in Amsterdam], in connection with its current exhibition, ‘On the Verge of Insanity.’ It included 35 international psychiatrists, other doctors and art historians weighing in on evidence about van Gogh’s medical case. The debate was lively and sometimes ‘fierce.'”

Among the 24 honorees: musicians Wynton Marsalis and Santiago Jimenez; composer Philip Glass; actor Audra McDonald; and authors Sandra Cisneros, Ron Chernow, Rudolfo Anaya, and James McBride.

When he won a Tony in 1979, at age 28, for The Elephant Man, his career kicked into overdrive – until he was paralyzed in a diving accident in 1985. But, after a long recovery and a period of depression, an invitation from the Berkshire Theater Festival restarted what would become a long career.

Carla Hayden is about to take over as the Librarian of Congress. She’s “aware of but undaunted by the library’s challenges, including outdated technology, a storage crisis for its rapidly growing collections and a demoralized staff. A 2015 government report found widespread mismanagement of its IT systems, which wasted millions of dollars and hampered operations at the Copyright Office and elsewhere.”

“In the 1990s, if you wanted to see a trans actor on the big screen, you had remarkably few options. Despite a plethora of films with large transgender roles, … trans actors were almost entirely sidelined from major productions. … But that wasn’t even a conversation in the 90s, when Arquette and Chablis became two of the first trans actors to play trans roles in major mainstream films.”

“As the longest-running current longitudinal survey of intellectually talented children, SMPY has for 45 years tracked the careers and accomplishments of some 5,000 individuals, many of whom have gone on to become high-achieving scientists. The study’s ever-growing data set has generated more than 400 papers and several books, and provided key insights into how to spot and develop talent in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and beyond.”

“Creativity is often thought of as individualistic. In Seattle, though, with its game companies, design firms, and rapidly closing art galleries, creativity is becoming more corporate. The health of the arts in the region is increasingly tied to the health and success of artistic organizations. There are successful arts organizations, but not necessarily successful artists. In this context, the corporations often charged with pricing artists out of the area become not threatening, but part of the same business partnership.”

“Wells is an unassuming man who has become used to causing a stir, and this can be disorienting: it’s odd to hear him wonder, not unreasonably, if restaurants ever think of bugging his table. But a restaurant can’t openly acknowledge him. … Experienced for the first time, this covert cosseting feels slightly melancholy, like an episode of Cold War fiction involving futile charades and a likely defenestration.”

“[She] could have coasted by on her famous surname … Instead, this playful and likeable performer, who was born male but identified in the latter part of her adult life as transgender and ‘gender suspicious’, carved out a career of idiosyncratic and often uncommercial character work before concentrating on promoting awareness of trans issues.”

“I got to have the most amazing birthday party ever courtesy of Danny DeVito and his family. I got to travel. And, on a pragmatic level, it helped me pay for college.”

“It struck me a long time ago that it didn’t really matter on what level people were working on anything, it was just as important to them as the people working on what’s perceived as a higher level. The major leagues as opposed to the minor leagues or off-off-off Broadway as opposed to Broadway. It really is all the same.”