April 26, 2011 All Things Considered [ 3 min. 58 sec. ] Phoebe Snow had one of the most distinctive voices in pop music. It went silent Tuesday morning, more than a year after Snow suffered a brain hemorrhage. She was 60. By Tom Cole, Neda Ulaby April 26, 2011 All Things Considered   Snow was born Phoebe Ann Laub. She actually thought she’d never be a singer because she was so shy. She told NPR in 1998 that she’d made up a name for the hammy part of herself — the part unafraid to get up on stage in Greenwich Village coffeehouses. Snow was 22 when “Poetry Man” reached…

In Memory Of A Mentor: ‘So Long,’ William Maxwell By William Lychack April 27, 2011 William Maxwell was in his 80s when I first wrote to him. An award-winning novelist and short story writer, he’d also been an editor at The New Yorker for 40 years, had worked with everyone from Nabokov to Welty, had once sat on the porch of his house as Salinger read a draft of The Catcher in the Rye to him. Thank goodness I never stopped to appreciate any of this at the time. I was in my early 20s, had just started to write, and I remember Maxwell’s advanced age gave me a sense…

source  By PAT EATON-ROBB THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: 5:35 p.m. Tuesday, April 26, 2011   Hubert “Hub” Schlafly, a key member of the team that invented the teleprompter and rescued decades’ worth of soap opera actors, newscasters and politicians from the embarrassment of stumbling over their words on live television, has died. He was 91. Schlafly died April 20 at Stamford Hospital after a brief illness, according the Leo P. Gallagher & Son Funeral Home, which handled the arrangements. A funeral was held Tuesday at St. Mary Parish in Greenwich, where he was a longtime resident. He did not use a teleprompter himself until he was 88, while rehearsing his speech for induction into the Cable…

Has The Last Typewriter Factory Closed? Not Really April 26, 2011 by MARK MEMMOTT EnlargeFox Photos/Getty ImagesA Remington International, circa 1961. Way back when we first got into the reporting business, an editor (or perhaps several), said that you’d better be absolutely, positively sure if you ever use phrases like “best ever” or “last ever” or “only one in the world.” You’re almost surely going to be proved wrong, the crusty old newshounds would say. Well, when we saw the Daily Mail headline declaring that the “Last Typewriter Factory Left In The World Closes Its Doors,” we were suspicious. And there was this nagging feeling that we knew that wasn’t right. Well, we…