People

“[He was a] million-selling adventure writer and real-life thrill-seeker who wove personal details and spectacular fantasies into his page-turning novels. … In real life, Cussler … participated in dozens of searches for old ships, including one that turned up a steamship belonging to Cornelius Vanderbilt. He also had a long history of questionable claims — some admitted, some denied.” – Yahoo! (AP)

In 1961, Fred Adams — then a theater professor with two years of experience at the College of Southern Utah (now SUU) — and Barbara Gaddie, his girlfriend (they married in 1963), were in a laundromat when they hatched the idea for a Shakespeare festival in Cedar City. Adams went to Ashland, Ore., to study how the Oregon Shakespeare Festival worked. He came back to Cedar City, and cajoled the Lions Club to donate $1,000 — the entirety of the first festival’s budget in 1962. Townspeople and students built sets, props and costumes. – Salt Lake Tribune

“[She] fled Hitler’s Germany as a teenager and became a [multiple-]prize-winning poet in the United States, drawing on her family history for lyrical works about love, art, nature and loss, acknowledging pain even as she looked outward with joy.” – The Washington Post

Actresses and activists celebrated Monday when a New York jury found the producer guilty on two counts, in a decision that could send him to jail for up to 25 years.  – The Daily Beast

“Born Peggy-Jean Montgomery, she became one of the country’s youngest self-made millionaires by age 4, then suffered a devastating reversal of fortune and fame in her adolescence. In adulthood, she rebounded with a new name, Diana Serra Cary, and became a respected author of books on Hollywood film history. In her autumnal years, at screenings of her few extant films, she found herself embraced as a movie pioneer.” – The Washington Post

Two days before Weizman, a professor at London’s Goldsmiths College, was due to fly to the US from Britain, he received an email from the US Embassy telling him that the visa waiver on his British passport had been revoked. When he went to the embassy in London last week, an official would only tell him that an algorithm had identified a related “security threat. That association could involve any aspect of his work with Forensic Architecture, which painstakingly pieces together evidence from a variety of sources when investigating human-rights violations and miscarriages of justice, often challenging the official versions of fatal events. – Artnet

Cerny, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., was “the proverbial dean of American genealogical research, … [whose work was] transforming raw data into narratives and metaphors about diversity and our common humanity.” Gates, the Harvard prof who hosts and produces Finding Your Roots on PBS, began working with Cerny in 2006, and their work on personal (and social) histories flowered from there. – The New York Times

Take one cane, add whiskey, then gather a “mood” pitch for movie financiers, decades of photography, years of moving pitching, and presto! A new Emma. Miranda July on the director: “If there were more female directors, Autumn’s story wouldn’t be such a rare and precious thing to us. … Basically a single mom who worked so hard and at this age is coming into her own. I think we all feel really tender because it’s a very powerful example.” – Los Angeles Times

“As a critic Ms. Tobias did not pull punches. In the early 1980s, for instance, when other critics were tiptoeing around the decline in the dance skills of Rudolf Nureyev, who was then in his 40s, she declared, ‘His groupies refuse to believe it, but Nureyev really can’t dance anymore.'” (You can see two pieces about Tobias, who wrote for ArtsJournal, on ArtsJournal.com here and here as well.) – The New York Times

A researcher and executive over the years at Xerox, Apple, Yahoo, and Amazon, Tesler had enormous influence over the experience most people have when using a personal computer today: in addition to cut-copy-and-paste, he developed such basics as WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get, meaning what you print out should look like what was on your screen), double-clicking, and how hard you need to press a mouse button. Indeed, he was a pioneer in simply asking regular users, as opposed to programmers, how they wanted their computers to work. – The Washington Post

The Wrights became known as “the Medicis of Seattle,” especially renowned for their marvelous art collection. – Seattle Times

He has a history of handling thorny issues like cybercrime and data privacy. As a Parliamentary Secretary in Theresa May’s cabinet office, Dowden was the Minister for Implementation of the Government’s technology strategy.  Though the new BBC licence fee and rolling out gigabit broadband will be pressing tasks, Dowden’s expertise and interest in digital matters could be good news for the creative industries. – Arts Professional

She began her professional career in her native Melbourne at age 9, went to England and joined the RSC at 26, and was a founding member of Tyrone Guthrie’s theatre company in Minneapolis. Though she appeared occasionally in TV and film, she was most famous for her stage performances. She won Tonys for playing Miss Jean Brodie, Medea, Maria Callas (in Master Class), and (her first) for a double-bill of Tennessee Williams one-acts that ran for a week. – The New York Times

“[He] was a master of shaggy-dog stories set on the American frontier or just beyond the Southern border, where his characters journeyed to recoup a debt, mete out justice or track down a runaway spouse. … By 1998, when author and journalist Ron Rosenbaum called him ‘our least-known great novelist,’ four of his five books were out of print.” – The Washington Post

When the ever-provocative protest artist put online sexual images and messages sent to a woman by former Macron aide Benjamin Griveaux, thus driving him from the race for mayor of Paris, Pavlensky was violating France’s revenge-porn law, which carries penalties of up to two years in prison and a €60,000 fine. Pavlensky, who is in France on political asylum from his native Russia, and his girlfriend (the alleged recipient of Griveaux’s sexts) are being held by police. – Deutsche Welle

A conductor, pianist and composer who became the Netherlands’, and one of Europe’s, leading specialists in new classical music, de Leeuw founded what is now the Asko | Schönberg ensemble in 1974, recorded a landmark LP set of Satie’s piano works, had a remarkable late-life artistic partnership with soprano Barbara Hannigan, and worked closely with composers from Ligeti and Kurtág to Ustvolskaya and Knussen and, above all, Louis Andriessen. – Presto Classical

Yuval Noah Harari did not invent Big History, but he updated it with hints of self-help and futurology, as well as a high-altitude, almost nihilistic composure about human suffering. He attached the time frame of aeons to the time frame of punditry—of now, and soon. His narrative of flux, of revolution after revolution, ended urgently, and perhaps conveniently, with a cliffhanger. “Sapiens,” while acknowledging that “history teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise,” suggests that our species is on the verge of a radical redesign. – The New Yorker

Its abstract questions provoked some surprising insights into the singer’s mind. Viewers learnt that Eilish used to dream of working at Jamba Juice or Trader Joe’s, and once wore a wig out to dinner to avoid attracting attention — but she doesn’t want to go back to being anonymous. – TheNextWeb

Waligwa was diagnosed with a brain tumor the same year she starred in the movie with David Oyelowo and Lupita Nyong’o. Oyelowo wrote on Instagram, “We mourn the loss of our beautiful Nikita Pearl Waligwa. … She was a ball of light in @queenofkatwemovie and in life. Her battle with a brain tumor was humbling to witness. Her light will live on.” – The Hollywood Reporter

Cullinan was hired as a typist at The New Yorker when she was 22, but soon the magazine started publishing her stories as well. “Ms. Cullinan helped redefine Irish-American literature, veering away from the male tradition of ‘ward bosses and henchmen, larger-than-life political fixers, tavern social life and father-son relationships,’ Patricia Coughlan, who taught Irish literature at University College Cork, wrote in a 2017 essay in The Irish Times.” – The New York Times

Casei “in the 1960s and ’70s could be reliably heard as Suzuki, Maddalena, Lola and other bread-and-butter mezzo-soprano characters at the Metropolitan Opera before transforming herself into a pathbreaking labor leader.” She performed at the Met for 20 years, starting with Maddalena in Rigoletto and ending as Larina in Eugene Onegin. Then she became president of the American Guild of Musical Artists – and she was a transformational labor leader for the performers’ union. – The New York Times

Hotchner was “a novelist, playwright, biographer, literary bon vivant and philanthropist whose life was shaped and colored by close friendships with two extraordinarily gifted and well-known men, Ernest Hemingway and Paul Newman.” – The New York Times

Cohen was a veteran stage and screen actor who found extra fame late in life as Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon)’s housekeeper and nanny on Sex and the City (and both movies). “On Broadway, she appeared in Orpheus Descending and Ivanov, and received Lucille Lortel and Drama League award nominations, as well as the New Dramatists’ Bowden award, the Fox Foundation’s Lilly award and the Richard Seff award from Actor’s Equity Association.” – Variety

Remington famously hadn’t read the books when she created the covers, leading to missteps including lions on the original cover. “While working as a freelance illustrator, she also did whatever else she could to make ends meet. She designed costumes for the theater, did holiday store window displays for Tiffany, ushered at Carnegie Hall and, she told Andwerve, ‘worked on a yacht to go on free trips to Martha’s Vineyard. … It was,’ she added, ‘a great deal of fun.'” – The New York Times

Pyotr Pavlensky — who gained notoriety in Russia for sewing his lips shut in solidarity with Pussy Riot and nailing his scrotum to Red Square, and who, having received political asylum from the French government, proceeded to set fire to the Bank of France — obtained, posted online, and gave to the newspaper Libération sexting messages and images sent to a woman by President Macron’s former spokesman, who is — make that was — running for mayor of Paris. – Yahoo! (AP)

“[She] began her career in the 1960s performing with the Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey and Donald McKayle dance companies … [and] became a leading black performer on Broadway … and later turned to supporting roles on film and television, playing one of TV’s first black lesbian characters.” (And no less than Bob Fosse called her “the best dancer I’ve ever seen.”) – The Washington Post

“[Her work] did nothing less than heighten the stakes of what we expect from a photograph, expectations that persist. … She was an artist under the guise of a journalist and an activist under the guise of a dispassionate civil servant, and it would be impossible to think of any of these roles today without her influence.” – T — The New York Times Style Magazine

“Aha, a Viking!” he shouted and gave a chuckle. I said it was an honor to meet him. He waved it off and said something to Forelli in German, turned to me and, speaking English, said that we would soon be seeing each other for lunch. Then he sat down on his bicycle and rode off. – New York Times Magazine