Jamaica had become an institution of the type that has vexed city policymakers and educators: one charged with serving a majority-minority student body, most of whose members qualified as poor, and whose record was defined by chronic underachievement and academic failure. Even so, word of the school’s closure angered students and their families, the community, and alumni. I was among them—I graduated with the class of ’87—and for me, as for many former students, the school was a figment of recollection, frozen in its academic glory. George Vecsey, the former Times sports columnist and a member of the class of ’56, accused Joel Klein, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s schools chancellor, of “cooking the books,” to make schools slated for closure appear worse than they were, and compared the Department of Education’s closure policies to the nihilism of Pol Pot. Vecsey later apologized for having slighted the suffering of Cambodia, but he held to his contention that Klein ruled by dictatorial fiat. He wrote, in a blog, “The city destroyed a piece of history because of its own failure.”
Towards better stock photos of black people:
“I couldn’t really find the images that invoked the messaging behind the brand visually,” Wiggins told me. “There are other resources out there that have images of black people…but just the attitude and the emotion I was looking for behind the pictures, I couldn’t find.”
Within days of his initial post, photographers had chimed in, eager to be part of the kind of platform Wiggins was proposing: a stock photography site dedicated to providing nuanced, varied images of black people. Catalyzed by the positive response, BlackStockImages took shape rapidly, its pace matching the urgency of its mission.
If you are lucky enough to be in Kingston, Ontario this summer, you HAVE to go see this show, because it is SO much fun, and also, my cousin Anna is a writer/star/visionary in the production.
Mr. Nikki Chung has a brilliant retrospective on Ingrid Bergman (he SPOKE to her KIDS):
“Once, I remember I went on stage with her when the theater was empty and I asked her how she could do what she did,” says Ingrid. “I said I couldn’t do that, go on stage and have all those eyes on you. I’m very shy, and she was very shy, too, she was painfully shy. And she told me, ‘Because I am someone else when I go on stage, I’m another person.’ She was so shy, and she was insecure about things she didn’t know, or things that were not her job. She was completely natural. She just intuitively did it. She was very good at understanding people, and that’s another form of intelligence. She’d talk to someone and in two seconds, she’d have it, she’d understand them. It’s like another form of language and expression.”
My friend Carrie’s new puppy is practically a TEENAGER now:
Vulture has the best parts of the new Joan Didion bio (which is on my desk, uncracked, so thanks, service journalism!)
Didion didn’t take failure very well.
According to Parmentel, she once had a nonfiction article on “grand old hotels” rejected by American Heritage. “She cried and cried and cried. I couldn’t believe how hard she was taking it. She said this made her feel like when she hadn’t been admitted to Stanford. I felt so bad for her that I sent the piece to somebody I’d met at Esquire and said, ‘For Christ’s sake, publish this thing — it’s breaking her heart.’ And they did.”John Dunne once caught the clap.
Possibly at the Graben Hotel in Vienna, while on assignment for Time.
