Tobias (Τοβίας) is a Greek version of the Hebrew biblical name "Toviyah" (טוביה), meaning "Yahweh is good"^[1]. It is a popular male given name in Germany, Scandinavia, the United States and amongst Jewish people. In English-speaking countries it is often shortened to Toby. Other diminutives are Tobi (English, Germany), Tobsen (Germany) and Tobbe (Sweden). Tobias has also been a surname.

Biblical[link]

Several people are called Tobias in The Bible:

• Tobias, son of Tobit; "Book of Tobias" is an older name for the Book of Tobit
• Tobias the elder
• Tobias, father of Hircanus
• Tobiah (Ammonite)
• Tobias, brother-in-law of Onias II, father of the Joseph who succeeded in pacifying Ptolemy III Euergetes.
• Tobbe, son-in-law of Onias III, son of Onias II

As a given name[link]

Middle name[link]

• Abraham Tobias Boas
• Albert Tobias Clay
• Antonio Tobias Mendez (born 1963), American sculptor
• Ferdinand Tobias Richter
• J. Tobias Anderson
• Johan Tobias Sergel, Swedish sculptor
• Johann Tobias Beck
• Johann Tobias Bürg (astronomer)
• Johann Tobias Krebs (composer)
• Johann Tobias Mayer

Derivative name[link]

• Tobey Maguire
• Tobiah ben Eliezer

As a surname[link]

Places[link]

• Tobias, Nebraska, A US village
• Tobias Barreto, Sergipe, a municipality in Brazil
• Tobias Fornier, Antique, a municipality in the Philippines
• Tobías Bolaños International Airport in Costa Rica
• Tobias-Thompson Complex, a US National Historic Landmark

Companies[link]

• Tobias (bass guitar company)
• Michael Tobias Design bass guitar company

References[link]

This page or section lists people that share the same given name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change that link to point directly to the intended article.

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2011)

Tobias John Harris (born July 15, 1992) is an American basketball player ^[1] who plays for the Milwaukee Bucks. In May 2011, he declared his intention to enter the 2011 NBA Draft. The Long Island native was selected 19th by the Charlotte Bobcats and was later dealt to the Milwaukee Bucks.

High school and recruitment[link]

Harris attended Half Hollow Hills High School West and joined the varsity basketball team as an 8th grader. He played at Half Hollow Hills High School West until transferring to Long Island Lutheran Middle and High School in Brookville, NY for his junior year. He then transferred back to Half Hollow Hills High School West in Dix Hills, NY for his senior year and was eventually named the 2010 Mr. New York Basketball.

He was named a 2010 McDonald's All-American.

Name	Hometown	High school / college	Height	Weight	Commit date
Tobias Harris F	Dix Hills, New York	Half Hollow Hills West HS	6 ft 8 in (2.03 m)	210 lb (95 kg)
	Scout:   Rivals:   ESPN grade: 97
Overall Recruiting Rankings: Rivals: #7 Scout: #4 ESPN: #6

College[link]

Harris played for the Tennessee Volunteers as a freshmen for coach Bruce Pearl. He played a point forward position in Pearl's unique offense, a mix between power and small forward. As a freshman, he averaged over 15 points per game and over 7 rebounds. In May 2011, he announced that he would enter the NBA Draft. He was selected 19th overall by the Charlotte Bobcats and immediately traded to the Milwaukee Bucks in a trade involving the Bucks, Bobcats, and the Sacramento Kings.

NBA career statistics[link]

Regular season[link]

Personal[link]

His brother Tyler Harris plays for North Carolina State University.^[2] NBA player Channing Frye is his cousin.^[3]

References[link]

Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff at Kepler's in Menlo Park, California
Born	(1945-06-19) June 19, 1945 (age 67)  Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Occupation	Writer
Genres	memoir, short story, novel
Influences Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, Guy de Maupassant, Raymond Carver[1]
Influenced Tom Perrotta, David Sedaris, James Franco, Tucker Max, Stephen Elliott, Laura Moriarty

Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (born June 19, 1945) is an American author.^[2] He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Life (1989), and his short stories. He has also written two novels.

Biography[link]

Wolff was born in 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama. After attending Concrete High School in Concrete, Washington, Wolff applied to, and was accepted by, The Hill School under the self-embellished name Tobias Jonathan von Ansell-Wolff, III.^[1] He was later expelled.^[3] He served in the US Army during the Vietnam War era.^[3] He holds a First Class Honours degree in English from Hertford College, Oxford (1972) and an M.A. from Stanford University. In 1975 he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford.

Wolff is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, where he has taught classes in English and creative writing since 1997. He also served as the director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford from 2000 to 2002.

Prior to his current appointment at Stanford, Wolff taught at Syracuse University from 1980 to 1997. While at Syracuse he served on the faculty with Raymond Carver and was an instructor in the graduate writing program. Authors who worked with Wolff while they were students at Syracuse include Jay McInerney, Tom Perrotta, George Saunders, Alice Sebold, William Tester, Paul Griner, Ken Garcia, and Paul Watkins.

Writing[link]

Wolff is best known for his work in two genres: the short story and the memoir. His first short story collection, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, was published in 1981. The collection was well received and several of its stories have since reappeared in a number of anthologies. Its publication coincided with a period in which several American authors who worked almost exclusively in the short story form were receiving wider recognition. As writers like Wolff, Raymond Carver, and Andre Dubus became better known, many proclaimed that the United States was in the midst of a renaissance of the short story. (The 20th-century North American version of realism these writers used was often glibly labelled Dirty realism).

Wolff, however, repudiates such claims. In 1994, in the introduction to The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, he wrote,

To judge from the respectful attention this renaissance has received from reviewers and academics, you would think that it actually happened. It did not. This is a rhetorical flourish to give glamour, even valor, to the succession of one generation by another. The problem with the word "renaissance" is that it needs a dark age to justify itself. I can't think of one, myself... The truth is that the short story form has reliably inspired brilliant performances by our best writers, in a line unbroken since the time of Poe.

Wolff's 1984 novella The Barracks Thief won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for 1985. Most of the action takes place at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where three recent paratrooper training graduates are temporarily attached to an airborne infantry company as they await orders to report to Vietnam. Because most of the men in the company fought together in Vietnam, the three newcomers are treated as outsiders and ignored. When money and personal property are discovered missing from the barracks, suspicion falls on the three newcomers. The narrative structure of the book contains several shifts of tone and point of view as the story unfolds.

In 1985, Wolff's second short story collection, Back in the World was published. Several of the stories in this collection, such as "The Missing Person," are significantly longer than the stories in his first collection.

Wolff chronicled his early life in two memoirs. This Boy's Life (1989) concerns itself with the author's adolescence in Seattle and then Newhalem, a remote company town in the North Cascade mountains of Washington State. The memoir describes the nomadic and uncertain life Wolff and his mother experienced after the divorce of Wolff's parents and then his mother's subsequent marriage to an abusive husband and stepfather. In Pharaoh's Army (1994) records Wolff's U.S. Army tour of duty in Vietnam. A third collection of stories, The Night in Question, was published in 1997. Our Story Begins, a collection of new and previously-published stories, appeared in 2008.

Whether he is writing fiction or non-fiction, Wolff's prose is characterized by an exploration of personal/biographical and existential terrain. As Wyatt Mason wrote in the London Review of Books, "Typically, his protagonists face an acute moral dilemma, unable to reconcile what they know to be true with what they feel to be true. Duplicity is their great failing, and Wolff's main theme."

In 1989, Wolff was chosen as recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Wolff has received the O. Henry Award on three occasions, for the stories "In the Garden of North American Martyrs" (1981), "Next Door" (1982), and "Sister" (1985). On March 4, 2009, he was awarded The Story Prize for Our Story Begins.

Film[link]

Wolff's work has found a wider audience through its adaptation to film. This Boy's Life became a feature film directed by Michael Caton-Jones which starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Ellen Barkin.

In 2001, Wolff's acclaimed short story "Bullet in the Brain" was adapted into a short film by David Von Ancken and CJ Follini starring Tom Noonan and Dean Winters.

Family[link]

Tobias Wolff's older brother is the author and University of California, Irvine professor Geoffrey Wolff. A decade before Wolff wrote This Boy's Life, Geoffrey wrote a memoir of his own about the boys' biological father, entitled The Duke of Deception.

Wolff's mother, having settled in Washington, D.C., eventually became President of the League of Women Voters.

Tobias Wolff is married and has three children.

Partial bibliography[link]

• Ugly Rumours (1975), a novel.
• In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), a collection of short stories. ISBN 0-88001-497-0
• Matters of Life and Death: New American Stories (1983), editor. ISBN 0-931694-17-5
• The Barracks Thief (1984), a novella. ISBN 0-88001-049-5
• Back in the World (1985), a collection of short stories.
• This Boy's Life (1989), a memoir, later made into a film, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. ISBN 0-8021-3668-0
• Best American Short Stories (1994), editor.
• The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (1994), editor. ISBN 0-679-74513-0
• In Pharaoh's Army (1994), a memoir about his experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War. ISBN 0-679-76023-7
• The Collected Short Stories ISBN 0-7475-3153-6
• The Night in Question (1997), a collection of short stories. ISBN 0-679-78155-2
• Old School (2003), a novel about a student attending an elite boarding school. ISBN 0-375-40146-6.
• Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (2008), a collection of ten new and twenty-one old stories. ISBN 978-1-4000-4459-7
• "Awake" (2008), short story appears in The Sunday Times (online text)

See also[link]

United States Army portal

References[link]

External links[link]

• Jack Livings (Fall 2004). "Tobias Wolff, The Art of Fiction No. 183". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5391/the-art-of-fiction-no-183-tobias-wolff. 
• Stifled Truth, an appreciation of Wolff's publications to date, by Wyatt Mason in the London Review of Books
• Tobias Wolff Speaks on his latest work, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, at a book store in Northern California (April 2008)
• Tobias Wolff reads his short story, "Say Yes" recorded at the Progressive Reading Series, San Francisco 2008
• 'Old School', an interview with Tobias Wolff in the Oxonian Review

Lawrence Bridges (born December 31, 1948) is an American filmmaker, poet, television producer, and entrepreneur.

Personal life[link]

Bridges was born in Burbank, California, the son of Edith Bridges, the daughter of homesteading Friesian (Dutch) immigrants, and Robert Bridges, a mechanical engineer. Bridges has one child and is a graduate of Stanford University and Dartmouth Business School (Tuck).^[1]

Career[link]

Bridges got his start in the early 1980s as an editor of music videos, most notably Michael Jackson's "Beat It."^[2] He founded the post-production company Red Car Inc. [1] in 1982 and has since grown the company to seven locations worldwide with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, and Buenos Aires.

Bridges graduated from Stanford University with an English degree and began his film career as a production assistant on Francis Ford Coppola's film "The Conversation."

In a 1987 Rolling Stone interview Stanley Kubrick, in reference to a series of Michelob commercials that Bridges had edited, remarked that these were "some of the most spectacular examples of film art" and "the editing was some of the most brilliant work I've ever seen."^[3][4]

Red Car[link]

In 1982 Bridges founded Red Car, an editing, production, and graphic design studio. Bridges was named "Best Advertising Auteur" by Connoisseur Magazine in 1989, inspiring the magazine to write, "Whenever you see an ad that verges on art, chances are good that Bridges had a hand in it--as either director, editor or graphic designer." During the ‘80’s Bridges introduced music video techniques to advertising agencies and more or less single-handedly turned the craft of editing into a indispensable item of style for advertising agencies seeking to maximize the impact of their ads on television audiences. He did this through the bold use of film elements themselves; flash frames, roll-outs, whip-pans. No rules were safe in his hands. All television advertising since bears the stamp of this breakthrough style, and no longer could advertising agencies ignore the importance of editing. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Smithsonian Museum.

Cinematographic Work[link]

Lawrence Bridges' wrote, directed, edited, and produced the independent feature film "12"[2] starring Alison Elliott [3] which Variety labeled as belonging to the American tradition of art made by dogged outsiders, like Simon Rodia and Harry Partch and international deconstructionists like Jean-Luc Godard. The film, completed in 2003, was in continuous production for over 10 years, making it the longest continuous production in the history of film. Shot on location in both Los Angeles and the Channel Islands National Park, the story revolves around a half-sister and brother who are illegitimate offspring of Zeus. The two find themselves stranded on an island ranch and, in order to save their lives, must find and perform flawlessly a play by Zeus.

"12", initially projected on buildings from parking lots in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Dallas, began the urban Guerrilla drive-in movement ^[5] in the early 2000s (decade). Robert Koehler of Variety Magazine called the film "A dizzying, unforgettable adventure"^[6] while Dean Treadway of "Filmicability" placed it among his favorite 100 films of all time.^[7] "12" has also played at over 15 festivals worldwide and was honored with a "Best of Fest" award at the Syracuse International Film and Video Festival in 2004. The December 2003 issue of American Cinematographer featured an article on Lawrence's cinematography for the film as well.^[8] "12" continues to play at various midnight screenings across Los Angeles.

Bridges started making documentary films in 2003, making the notable Why Shakespeare?[4] in 2005 with Tom Hanks, Michael York, Martin Sheen, Julie Taymor, William Shatner, Bill Pullman, Michael Richards, Christina Applegate, and Chiwetel Ejiofor. In 2007 he made “Muse of Fire”[5] with Kevin Costner based on the book “Operation Homecoming”, a compilation by the National Endowment for the Arts of writings by US troops and their families about their wartime experiences.

In 2008 Bridges completed "A Conversation with Ray Bradbury"[6] the first in a series of six documentaries about prominent American writers including Amy Tan, Rudolfo Anaya, Ernest J. Gaines, Tobias Wolff, and Cynthia Ozick, completed in 2009.

Television and Internet[link]

In 2006, Bridges produced "StrangerAdventures", which was the first internet/TV game show where players could play anywhere in the world and become participants with the main characters in an adventure story. The participants competed for cash and prizes during the week-long game. The show was nominated for a New Media Emmy award that same year.^[9]

Literary Work[link]

Bridges first poetry appeared in Stanford’s Sequoia Magazine in 1971 and later in Poetry and The New Yorker^[10] while Bridges was starting his career in filmmaking in New York city, balancing jobs in editing TV commercials and driving a taxi cab.

With the publication of Horses on Drums (Red Hen 2006) Bridges was immediately described by Paul-Victor Winters as one of the new "Dissociative Poets",^[11] identified by Tony Hoagland as poets who do not write in traditional forms and who, as Winters writes, "eschew logical syntactical development, suggesting that our visual culture makes the crafting of traditional and linear narrative a difficult and boring task." Bridges' work often displays dream-like psychic landscapes and he places the characters in his poems in a distorted sense of time. It is a poetry equal to the speed and disruptions of culture. It responds to the postmodern situation with a joyful crookedness.^[12]

Films and Books[link]

References[link]