Quote Investigator is a website that fact-checks the reported origins of widely circulated quotations. According to Wikipedia, the website was started in 2010 by Gregory F. Sullivan, a former Johns Hopkins University computer scientist who runs the site under the pseudonym Garson O’Toole. Many of the quotes examined on the site are emailed to him by readers.
Sullivan “tries to track down correct information about the provenance of sayings by utilizing the massive text databases that are being constructed right now along with other quotation history resources.”
The site reports that it had more than 4.2 million visitors between June 1, 2021 and May 31, 2022. It’s a free site.
The Library of Congress also hosts a list of quotation reference websites. However, many of these websites, unlike Quote Investigator, do not cite an original source. Even so, it is a good resource.
The Washington Open is the only professional tennis tournament in the nation’s capital. It takes place every summer at the William H.G. FitzGerald Tennis Center in Rock Creek Park, a venue chosen at the urging of Arthur Ashe, an early supporter of the event.
As one of the key lead-up tournaments to the US Open in New York City, the Washington Open holds an important place on the tennis calendar. It is an ATP 500 event on the ATP Tour and a WTA 500 event on the WTA Tour.
The tournament dates back to 1969, when it was called the Washington Star International. It was played on clay courts until 1986, when the surface changed to hard courts. In 2011, the event added its first women’s tournament, held separately in College Park, Maryland. The following year, the men’s and women’s events were consolidated at the Washington venue. In 2023, with the discontinuation of the WTA’s Silicon Valley Classic, the event merged into the Washington Open — creating the first and only joint-500-level event on the ATP and WTA tours.
Notable men’s singles winners include Ken Rosewall, Jimmy Connors, and Andre Agassi. Agassi (1990–91, 1995, 1998–99) holds the records for most titles (five) and most finals (six, including runner-up in 2000). He also shares the record for most consecutive titles (two) with Michael Chang (1996–97), Juan Martín del Potro (2008–09), and Alexander Zverev (2017–18).
On the women’s side, champions have included Sloane Stephens, Jessica Pegula, and Coco Gauff. Magdaléna Rybáriková (2012–13) holds the record for most titles (two) and co-holds the record for most finals (two) with Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova (runner-up in 2012 and 2015).
I began attending in 2016 as my interest in tennis grew. Over the years, I have watched and photographed many outstanding players at the Washington Open. They are all remarkable athletes and a joy to see compete in person.
Laura Pausini is an Italian singer who rose to fame in 1993 with her debut single “La solitudine“, which became an Italian standard and an international hit.
Over the years, she has released fifteen studio albums, two international greatest hits albums and one compilation album for the Anglophone market only. While she primarily sings in Italian and Spanish, her versatility extends to recordings in English, French, Portuguese, and Catalan.
What draws me most to Pausini is her glorious voice—powerful yet beautiful, with a resonance that seems to project straight into my soul.
A great narrator can elevate an audiobook, while the wrong voice can ruin the experience. Over the years, I’ve come across narrators whose performances consistently add depth, clarity, and emotion to the books they bring to life.
Here is a list of exceptional narrators, in no particular order. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have. Please feel free to suggest other favorites in the comments—I’m always looking for new voices worth listening to.
Stacey Kent is an American jazz singer with a glorious voice. She was born in 1965 in New Jersey and is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College. Her paternal grandfather was a Russian who grew up in France. He later moved to the United States where he taught Kent French. Once she learned French, it was the only language she spoke with her grandfather. Kent travelled to England after college to study music in London, where she met saxophonist Jim Tomlinson, whom she married in 1991.
Kent has also faced serious health challenges. In a 2004 interview with Robert Kaiser of The Washington Post, Kent recounted that she’s been in comas three times caused by brainstem encephalitis:
Each time, baffled doctors were not certain they could bring her back. The last coma was in 1999, and Tomlinson nursed her through it. On doctors’ advice, he brought records to her hospital room. When she awoke he was playing Mildred Bailey, one of the great jazz singers of the ’30s. “There’s just so much emotion in that voice,” Kent says. “It’s a cry - even when she’s singing a happy song.”
Jean-Jacques Goldman is very popular in the French-speaking world. Since the death of Johnny Hallyday in 2017, he has been the highest grossing living French pop rock act. He was born in 1951.
In the film, a beautiful American-born Israeli spy Helen Mason (Mariel Hemingway) is sent to Iraq to coerce an Iraqi pilot into hijacking a Soviet-made fighter jet for Israeli defense research. She seduces Munir Redfa (Ben Cross) in order to blackmail him. There are unexpected results when Helen finds herself falling in love with him, endangering the mission, while he is torn between his love for her and his loyalty to Iraq.
Sadly, Ben Cross, best known for playing a runner in the 1981 Academy Award-winning film Chariots of Fire, died in 2020 in Vienna, Austria. He was 72.
The film follows a French boy and an American girl who meet at the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte — 50 minutes south of Paris — and begin a romance that leads to a journey to Venice where they hope to seal their love forever with a kiss beneath the Bridge of Sighs at sunset.
Diane Lane portrays an affluent, intelligent and charming teenager living in Paris. The scenes of Paris are glorious. Thelonious Bernard does a great job portraying the street smart French boy Diane Lane falls in love with. And Laurence Olivier adds a lot to the film.
The Americans is an American television period drama series created and produced by former CIA officer Joe Weisberg. It premiered in the United States in 2013 on the FX network and concluded after six seasons and 75 wonderful episodes.
The Americans is about the marriage of two KGB spies posing as Americans in suburban Washington D.C. shortly after Ronald Reagan is elected President. The series centers around the arranged marriage of Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell), who have two children – 14-year-old Paige (Holly Taylor) and 12-year-old Henry (Keidrich Sellati). The children don’t know about the true identity of their parents. The spies live next door to Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI agent working in counterintelligence. From there it gets complicated.
This is one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen. What makes it special is the interplay between the spying and what’s going in the family of the Russian spies and the family of the FBI agent next door. In the end, I was more interested in the personal relationships than I was the spying. I easily connected with the relationship issues.
The relationship between the more practical Philip and the rule-following Elizabeth makes for some fascinating issues. Keri Russell’s beauty enters the plot in many different ways. The spying was just plain fun to watch, partly because of the now dated technology of the the era (the 1980s) in which the series takes place.
The New York Times said “The Americans” is “one of those rare series that actually has gotten better every season.”
If you want insider information about the show, Slate has a podcast about the show featuring cast, crew and creators.
Michel LeGrand (1932-2019) wrote the scores for more than 250 films including The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) starring Catherine Deneuve and Yentl (1983), a creation of Barbra Streisand.
Ever since I was a boy, my ambition has been to live completely surrounded by music. My dream is not to miss out anything. That’s why I’ve never settled on one musical discipline. I love playing, conducting, singing and writing, and in all styles. So I turn my hand to everything – not just a bit of everything. Quite the opposite. I do all these activities at once, seriously, sincerely and with deep commitment.
Michel LeGrand
He recorded more than 100 albums, with Maurice Chevalier, Kiri Te Kanawa, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne among others. Others who recorded his music included Frank Sinatra and Sting.
He died on January 26, 2019. He was 86 years old. He was laid to rest at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
