“Television was a one-way medium, its audience tending to become passive. … I wanted to show the aggressive conditioning forced upon viewers by these programs.” - The New York Times
“Shapiro’s best-known sculptures are easy to recognize. Constructed from wooden beams jutting in different directions, they typically suggest a human figure with outstretched arms, a blocky head and a torso shaped like a cereal box.” - NPR
“It had been more than a decade since we lived together … a straight man with an affinity for collectible sneakers, basketball, sports cars, anime and first-person-shooter video games coming to live with his nerdy gay professor brother in a house full of books.” - The New York Times
After what were reported to be extremely contentious deliberations, the jury found the disgraced producer guilty of one count of sexual assault and not guilty of a second count. The judge declared a mistrial on a count of rape after the jury deadlocked and the foreman refused to continue deliberating. - AP
“In his art work, seemingly endless numbers of nails, which would by themselves perhaps be perceived as potentially aggressive and hurtful, turned into harmonic, almost organic creations. His reliefs with the tightly hewn nails are reminiscent of waving grasses or fields of algae in a marine landscape.” - AP
“There was an abiding pathos in his best records — not merely the idealized scenes the songs depicted, but also that they were created by a depressed, socially awkward, partially-deaf young man who never surfed or much liked the beach and spent his time alone in his room.” - The Washington Post (MSN)
Khaby Lame, a 25-year-old Senegalese-Italian influencer with 162 million followers on the video app, was detained at Las Vegas airport for (as an ICE spokesperson put it) “overstaying the terms of his visa.” He was allowed to depart the country without being held to wait for a deportation order. - AP
“Ms. Holdridge, along with her best friend, Marianne Mantell, built the label, Caedmon Records, into a recording industry dynamo by releasing LPs of such notable authors and poets as T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Eudora Welty, and Ernest Hemingway reading their own words.” - The New York Times
“As Frey sees it, the public has gotten increasingly comfortable with falsehoods, without getting fully comfortable with him. He finds it all a bit absurd. ‘I just sit in my castle and giggle,’ he said.” - The New York Times
You’ve probably had the experience where you’ve written something, it feels really great and, the next morning, you read it and think, “Who wrote that? Not me. I would’ve written something much more intelligent.” One tends to disappoint oneself, and that split is very common in the studio. - The New York Times
“A mega-selling British novelist of political thrillers, cunning spy craft and globe-trotting intrigue, (he) used his own background as a foreign correspondent to inspire such page-turners as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs of War.” - The Washington Post (MSN)
Ever since Hirst burst on the art scene in the 1990s with his macabre readymades (or “objets trouvé”) of dead animals in vitrines, he has divided art critics and the public alike. - The Conversation
Ask Jesse Collins: “‘Credibility with your word’ is what makes a great producer. ‘If something goes wrong, nobody knows me — they’re just going to look at the artist,’ he said, so it’s imperative to deliver or to make it clear when you can’t.” - The New York Times
Some of her PR tactics were terrific even by today’s standards, and she achieved a level of fame in America that’s astonishing, then or now, for an avant-garde writer, let alone an expatriate. That fame got her just about everything but the one thing she really wanted. - Prospect (UK)
“Unlike many of his contemporaries, the poet collected an ‘abundance of photographs’ of himself. And like many people today who snap and post thousands of selfies, Whitman, who lived during the birth of commercial photography, used portraits to craft a version of the self that wasn’t necessarily grounded in reality.” - The Conversation
