Names and faces
■ Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor sat down with Grammy Awardwinning singer Gloria Estefan in Miami and told a crowd of hundreds about the idea for her next children’s book, which will be about civic participation. Sotomayor said her preferred title would be
How To Be a Hero, and the book will portray acts of civic participation as heroic. “People think of citizenship as a formal title of belonging to a country,” she said. “Citizenship with a small ‘c’ is what we are in every community that we choose to live in: whether it’s your building, your block, the community of the church, the community of your school.” Appointed to the court by President Barack Obama in 2009, Sotomayor said she wants to use her platform as a justice to inspire children through books. “Everyone of us has a responsibility to make that community better. And that’s what makes heroes— it’s those people who see something wrong in their community and say ‘I will work to change that,’” she said. Sotomayor has kept busy writing content for kids, and she notes that her works come out simultaneously in Spanish because she grew up in New York City to Puerto Rican parents speaking the language but not finding enough literature in her mother tongue. After her 2013 memoir, My Beloved World came out, she wrote an abridged version for middle school readers. Then she wrote an autobiographical picture book, Turning Pages, in 2018, and her most recent picture book, Just Ask!, published last year, about children with “life challenges” such as attention deficit disorder, autism, blindness and diabetes. Sotomayor was diagnosed with diabetes at age
7. Sotomayor sat for only a few minutes with Estefan, and then both women walked along the rows of the Temple Judea synagogue in the Coral Gables suburb. She shook hands with many but only took written questions— and hugs— from children.
■ Rapper Fetty Wap, whose real name is Willie Maxwell, entered into the agreement with prosecutors Monday to toss misdemeanor battery charges stemming from a fight last year at a Las Vegas hotel, court records show. Fetty Wap was arrested Sept. 1 after he was accused of hitting a security officer who arrived to break up a scuffle at a valet area of The Mirage resort on the Las Vegas Strip. The rapper known for his hit “Trap Queen” had performed at the MTV Video Music Awards on Aug. 26 in Newark, N.J. In March 2018, the rapper was fined in Brooklyn, N.Y., and ordered to attend safe driving programs after pleading guilty to driving while intoxicated and reckless endangerment. Police said he had been caught drag racing on a New York City-area highway.