“A comedic actress with a high-beam smile who often played sidekicks both wisecracking and wise, (she) scowled her way to pop-culture fame on the comedy-variety show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In playing a matron who wields her purse like a cudgel.” - The Washington Post (MSN)
Former British diplomat Claire Smith argues that, if you look carefully at correspondence from Pym’s wartime work as a censor, you’ll see evidence that she was secretly working for MI5. - The Guardian
Even when he was at the height of his literary powers, the title “businessman” might have suited Twain better than “author.” Not that avidity bred success. - The New Yorker
He was the COO of Focus Features beginning in 2002 and became president and co-CEO in 2006. In 2014 he left Focus to found the independently-financed distribution and production company Bleecker Street, which has released roughly 70 films since. - IndieWire
“Originally titled ‘I Await the Devil’s Coming’, The Story of Mary MacLane records four months in the life of its author. Nothing much happens in the outside world, … but her inner life is full of action, as she desires, dreams, and rants against the injustices of youth and sex.” - The Public Domain Review
Vargas Llosa “has replaced Gabriel García Márquez” as the South American novelist North American readers must catch up on, Updike wrote in 1986, four years after García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature and 24 years before Vargas Llosa himself would. - The New York Times
Riefenstahl, who was full member of the Nazi propaganda machine, spent her entire very long post-WWII life using every tool she had “to deflect from her ideological affinity with nazism.” - The Guardian (UK)
As a baby, Adiarte was imprisoned by the Japanese during WWII. After his family moved to the U.S., he played a little prince and, eventually, the crown prince of Siam to Yul Brynner in The King and I, on both stage and screen. - The New York Times
“Her most recent film, The Cowboy and the Queen (2023), examined the unlikely friendship that blossomed between a Texas cowboy and Queen Elizabeth II after she learned of his unconventional approach to rearing horses.” - The New York Times
Davis wrote for The Atlantic for more than three decades, from 1984 to 2016, and was a contributing editor for much of that time. He also had a high-profile stint at The Village Voice, where he originated an annual jazz critics’ poll that continues today elsewhere and now bears his name. - The Atlantic
“(Her) bold paintings of male nudes challenged ideas about feminism, art and sexuality — although, like many of her peers, she was not recognized as a pioneer until her later years.” - The New York Times
For more than 200 years it has been believed that Shakespeare left his wife in Stratford-upon-Avon when he travelled to London and that a decision to leave her almost nothing in his will meant he probably felt bitterness towards her. - BBC
Since 2020 there have been 32 exhibitions of his work, staged everywhere from the National Gallery in London to Washington DC, Tokyo, California, Ontario, Istanbul and across Europe. The world is currently Hockney mad. - New Statesman
Artist Ogechi Chieke sued under New York City’s Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law, filing the day before the window closed. The suit claims that Wiley committed a “crime of violence motivated by gender” which “would not have occurred if Plaintiff was male.” (Wiley is an openly gay man.) - Artnet
