[barmar]

Stephen Sondheim. Is a link necessary?

[kenberg]

Absolutely right, no link is necessary. 91 very good years.

[y66]

Susan Rosenblatt, who with her husband and law partner, Stanley Rosenblatt, took on Big Tobacco in a Florida case that seemed an absurd mismatch for their small firm, but that resulted in a record $144.8 billion jury award in favor of people sickened by cigarettes.

[y66]

Fred Hiatt, longtime leader of The Washington Post’s opinion section.

[y66]

Dr. Margaret Giannini, a pioneer in treating developmental and physical disabilities.

Quote

She received scores of honors and awards throughout her life before retiring from federal service in 2009 at age 88. But she never really stopped working. A week before she died, she was pressing Congress to establish a federal holiday for people with disabilities.

[pilowsky]

Joan Didion. 23 Dec 2021 age 87.
Her time come round at last.
Slouching towards Bethlehem.

[barmar]

E.O. Wilson

Considered the Darwin of the 21st century.

[Lovera]

David Sassoli: protection declaration.

Advertisement
NEWS

European Parliament President David Sassoli dies after hospitalization
The 65-year-old had been seriously ill in hospital for more than two weeks. He died at a hospital in Aviano in northern Italy.



Sassoli had spent more than two weeks in hospital

The president of the European Parliament David Sassoli has died, his office announced early on Tuesday morning.

He passed away after a "serious complication" related to his immune system.

"The president of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, passed away at 1.15 a.m. on January 11 at the hospital in Aviano, Italy," his spokesman, Roberto Cuillo said on Twitter.

"The date and place of the funeral will be communicated in the next few hours," he added.

On Monday, the EU parliament confirmed he had been admitted to hospital in Italy on December 26.

In September 2021, during a plenary session of the parliament, the 65-year-old came down with a bad case of pneumonia.

He was married with two children.


Tributes to David Sassoli
Tributes soon poured in for Sassoli, an Italian social democrat.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lamented his loss, saying "Europe has lost a dedicated parliament president, Italy a shrewd politician, and Germany a good friend."

Germany's Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock praised Sassoli for "always
succeeding in bridging divides."

She wrote on Twitter that "we will not forget his commitment to dealing humanely with
refugees,"



EU Council President Charles Michel called the fellow politician a "sincere and passionate European. We already miss his human warmth, his generosity, his friendliness and his smile.''

President of the Euopean Commission Ursula von der Leyen said she was "deeply saddened by the terrible loss of a great European and proud Italian." In a post on Twitter, she described Sassoli as a "compassionate journalist, an outstanding President of the European Parliament and a dear friend."

"What a big shock and a big loss. I am deeply saddened. He left us too early. My condolences to his family! Dear David, Rest In Peace," tweeted German MEP Ismail Ertug.

Another MEP, Italian Paolo Borchia, said he was "stunned" by the news as it was so "sudden."

A former journalist, Sassoli was first elected as a member of the European Parliament in 2009. He won another term in 2014 and served as the Parliament's vice-president.

He then became president of the 705-seat legislature in 2019.

The parliament sits for a five-year term between elections, but the president of the body serves for half that time, and Sassoli had indicated he would not seek reelection.

jsi/aw (EFE, dpa, AFP, Reuters)

[Winstonm]

Ronnie Spector, be my baby now.

[Cyberyeti]

Meat loaf, one of the voices of my teenage years. It's unclear but I really hope we don't have to add him to the "Parade of morons" thread, but I'm fearing the worst. Wish I could play the 7" vinyl copy I have of Dead ringer for love really loud right now.

[mycroft]

Probably not appropriate, but certainly my first reaction to the above:

Little Nell said:

EDDIE!

(maybe now there are those who know more about how I spent a number of midnights in my growing up years than they did before, or wanted to).

More seriously, this is a blow. From what I heard, one of the people who always ensure the rest of the team was being considered, even if he did believe his own hype more than he should have.

[Cyberyeti]

 mycroft, on 2022-January-21, 13:57, said:

Probably not appropriate, but certainly my first reaction to the above:



(maybe now there are those who know more about how I spent a number of midnights in my growing up years than they did before, or wanted to).

More seriously, this is a blow. From what I heard, one of the people who always ensure the rest of the team was being considered, even if he did believe his own hype more than he should have.

I spent many nights at college watching RHPS. Can remember going tooled up with all the gear to the city centre cinema in Cambridge (no longer there) where more people queued for RHPS than for the first night of Ghostbusters. I also remember the (new) manager in tears, head in his hands saying "What have they done to my cinema" as the staff who'd seen it before were quietly laughing at him.

A huge loss.

[mycroft]

Yep. Plaza theatre in Calgary, long weekend (bank holiday weekend for you) midnight shows.

Had a wheelchair for about 5 years back in Ontario (no points for working out who I came as). Got it for free from a bridge partner who really didn't want it in her house any more (it wasn't a *good* wheelchair - even before it had been used to let her maintain her garden for a few years). Donated it to a local theatre company, on the rule that "if it isn't being used for a show, and mycroft wants it, he gets it, no rental fee." They used it for shows, I used it a couple more times before I moved back.

All the shows I was at had a props policy made *very clear* in advance; with bag searches to ensure compliance. And there was compliance - we all knew that we were there on sufferance, and if a full house on a midnight show *still* lost money from the cleanup, they wouldn't run it again.

[barmar]

 Cyberyeti, on 2022-January-21, 11:24, said:

Meat loaf, one of the voices of my teenage years. It's unclear but I really hope we don't have to add him to the "Parade of morons" thread, but I'm fearing the worst. Wish I could play the 7" vinyl copy I have of Dead ringer for love really loud right now.

He was outspoken against vaccine and mask mandates, but his actual vaccination status doesn't seem to have been made public. That suggests the worst.

[y66]

Jason Epstein

Quote

Mr. Epstein could be described as a man of letters with a feel for commerce or as a man of business with a taste for fine literature, and both would be correct. His major publishing achievements owed much to an uncommon mix of literary and marketing instincts.

They came together momentously in the winter of 1962-63, when he and his first wife, the editor Barbara Epstein, had the poet Robert Lowell and his wife, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick, over for dinner one evening at their Upper West Side apartment.

At the time, Mr. Epstein was a top editor at Random House, where he was guiding and helping to shape the work of a formidable roster of writers, among them Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Jean Strouse, E.L. Doctorow, W.H. Auden and Jane Jacobs. Newspapers had all but disappeared from the streets because of a grueling strike that had shut down The New York Times and six other New York papers.

Mr. Epstein observed to his guests that in the absence of The New York Times Book Review on Sundays, the book-reading public was being underserved. It was a familiar theme for him. He had long seen a potential market for an American version of The Times Literary Supplement of London (now known as TLS), an independent weekly publication.

“There’s only one person in the country who could do it,” he had been fond of saying, “and I’m busy.”

But at the dinner table that night, he revived the idea. The time was ripe, he proposed, to introduce a new book review. His guests agreed.

“Jason was, like, ‘Kids, let’s put on a show,’ ” Ms. Epstein later recalled.

The next morning, Mr. Lowell took out a $4,000 bank loan, secured by his own trust fund, and cajoled his moneyed friends into investing in the project. Ms. Epstein and the editor Robert B. Silvers, who was persuaded to leave his job at Harper’s Magazine, became co-editors. Ms. Hardwick took the title of editorial adviser.

The first issue of The New York Review of Books, dated Feb. 1, 1963, was star-studded. There were articles by Dwight Macdonald (reviewing Arthur Schlesinger Jr.), Mary McCarthy (on William S. Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch”), Philip Rahv (on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), Susan Sontag (on Simone Weil), Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Nathan Glazer, Midge Decter, Ms. Hardwick and Mr. Epstein. There were poems by Mr. Lowell, W.H. Auden, John Ashbery, John Berryman, Adrienne Rich and Robert Penn Warren.

Quote

Mr. Epstein saw the digital universe as a potential ally in that pursuit, whether through electronic books or on-demand printing. In 2000, he said in an interview on the PBS program “The Open Mind” that publishers “throw a book out into the retail marketplace without any idea where it’s going to go.”

“Barnes & Noble orders a book from Random House, we print 10, 15, 20 thousand copies,” he continued, “but who knows where and on what shelf and what clerks are going to open the package and whether they’re going to know what the books are about or whom they’re intended for? We don’t know that.

“That explains,” he continued, “why so many books are returned unsold from booksellers to publishers. And why it’s so hard, sometimes, to find the book you’re looking for in a bookstore. And why it’s so hard for authors to find their way to their appropriate readers. But in this other system, you will have targeted markets for each author. The technology makes that possible, and therefore it’s going to happen. Not today, but eventually. That’s going to make a whole new world.”

Mr. Epstein saw book publishing as more than a business, though. For him it was almost a calling, one that might struggle to turn a profit. Publishing, he said in the same interview, was “more comparable to what priests and teachers and some doctors do than to what people who become lawyers or businessmen or Wall Street brokers — what they do.

“It is a vocation, you feel you’re doing something extremely important, and it’s worth sacrificing for, because without books we wouldn’t know who we were.”

[y66]

Patrick Jake O’Rourke

[kenberg]

 y66, on 2022-February-16, 00:17, said:

Patrick Jake O’Rourke

My reaction was: Patrick Jake who? Oh, P. J. O'rourke.
The cited obit ends with a quote from Michael Kinsley
“He’s an anarchist with a heart of gold.”

I rarely read obits, I am glad I saw this.

[y66]

Paul Farmer

[paulg]

Two legends of the game, from different eras.

Rod Marsh

Shane Warne

[eagles123]

Totally shocking about Warne, the greatest bowler in cricket history. Absolute genius.