From Oscar winners and auteurs to sex therapists and littérateurs, the year’s departed—condensed into one sentence

By George Kalogerakis

Any year’s necrology calls for a cocktail of sadness and celebration, and 2024—which saw the exits of heroes (Alexei Navalny), villains (O. J. Simpson), and an A-to-Z range of notables from Jim Abrahams (co-creator of the uproarious Airplane! and The Naked Gun) to Philip Zimbardo (creator of the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment), with a Kennedy (Ethel) right in the middle—was no exception, as the departed included such entertainment-industry mainstays as Teri Garr, Alain Delon, Bob Newhart, Shannen & Shelley (Doherty & Duvall), Donald Sutherland, Richard Lewis, Chita Rivera (that voice), Maggie Smith (actually, that voice), James Earl Jones (no, wait, READ ON

The courtly Time-magazine essayist who described the American Century with wit, outrage, and wry wisdom

By Roger Rosenblatt

A few days after Lance Morrow told me he learned that he had but six months to live, I had a dream about the two of us.

We were tennis doubles partners, and we proceeded from match to match creaming every pair of challengers who came our way. Dressed in old-fashioned whites, we beat professionals as well as preppies who goaded us into games. We rallied with street kids too, hitting balls over invisible nets in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. I played net, and Lance played back, positions that fit with our different writing styles when we took turns writing the Time READ ON

An insightful critic and a skilled jazz pianist in his own right, David Yaffe had the rare ability to parse both the mechanics and the mysteries of a song

By Matthew Gasda

The summer I graduated from Syracuse University, I walked around Syracuse, the town, for several hours one day, with my friend David Yaffe. David was an English professor at the school whose classes I never took, but whom I had met at a coffee shop a few months earlier, through a friend who had taken his class on criticism. We talked about Radiohead’s new album, King of Limbs, among many other things.

I was 22, a lapsed Catholic and aspiring novelist. David was 38, Jewish, married. The difference in our ages was the same as that of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in READ ON

Betty Halbreich, the personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman, offered guidance to the doyennes of New York. Lena Dunham, her friend and client, pays homage to the legend, who recently died at 96

By Lena Dunham

For nearly 50 years, Betty Halbreich ran a personal-shopping office on the third floor of Bergdorf Goodman. Dubbed “the most famous personal shopper in the world” by New York magazine, she worked with people—from Betty Ford and Babe Paley to Lauren Bacall and Meryl Streep—as well as productions, such as Sex and the City and Gossip Girl. In her office, Halbreich kept a board with photos of her friends and clients, including Lena Dunham. Before Halbreich’s death, on August 24, she completed her third book, No One Has Seen It All, which will be published on April 8. Excerpted here is Dunham’s loving foreword. READ ON

The Scottish author created a new genre of literature—historical crime—and sold more than two million copies of his captivating Shardlake series

By Antonia Senior

In 2003 (but really, 1537), a weary, hunchbacked lawyer on the trail of a killer stumbled into our bookshops for the first time and an entire genre of fiction — historical crime — was spawned. The lawyer, Matthew Shardlake, inhabited a vividly re-created Tudor world, investigating, dodging political intrigue and becoming embroiled in questions of faith, heresy and high treason. His creator, CJ Sansom, who died last month at the age of 72, was that rare thing: a writer who changed the literary world.

There was a scattering of historical crime novels before Shardlake. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose READ ON

A princess by birth, the Italian socialite, who modeled and acted, sashayed between aristocratic, jet-set, and show-business worlds

Princess Ira von Fürstenberg, who has died aged 83, was an Italian socialite, B-movie actress and fashion model, whose “profile of Renaissance beauty and fascination, like the portraits of young noblewomen in the Uffizi” was celebrated in 1960s Vogue.

A niece of Gianni Agnelli and the epitome of the jet set, Ira von Fürstenberg had, by the time she was 20, already been married to two of the 20th century’s most notorious playboys, Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe, the so-called “King of Clubs” who invented the resort of Marbella (and jealously refused Salvador Dalí’s request to paint Ira naked), and the Brazilian industrialist Francisco “Baby” Pignatari. READ ON

The investigative journalist made a career of questioning accepted narratives, from the Kennedy assassination to the Black Panthers to the diamond industry

By Ash Carter

I first met Edward Jay Epstein at a birthday dinner for a mutual friend in 2013, 10 days before the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.

On my way to work that morning, I had listened to a radio interview with the author of a new book about the Warren Commission. My only previous exposure to the subject was the Oliver Stone movie JFK, so I knew less than nothing.

At some point during the meal, the subject of national security came up. Sensing an opportunity, I deployed a couple of facts from the interview to make a sweeping declaration READ ON

Born in England and adopted by France—the singer, model, and muse, as seen through the eyes of her longtime friend and compeer

By Charlotte Rampling

Jane and I were contemporaries. Born the same year in 1946. Me in February, she in December. We had the same kind of upbringing too – her mother was an actress, mine an artist, and we both had military fathers. And we were just pretty girls living in London in the 60s with all those 60s changes flooding in, the 60s dream, being spotted and brought into films, enjoying free love and all the new ideas for our creative expression. We were suddenly so much freer than our parents who were just bemused by it all. But there was no stopping us, the world was ours for those few years. READ ON