People

“A longtime New Yorker staff writer and the author of several books, the Prague native practiced a kind of post-modern style in which she often called attention to her own role in the narrative, questioning whether even the most conscientious observer could be trusted.” – AP

“Austen’s personal values — namely, whether she supported slavery — have been debated by literary enthusiasts and experts who read her work like a cipher. A new discovery [reveals that her] brother Henry was sent as a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840.” What’s more, one of Austen’s letters “mentions her love of the work of Thomas Clarkson, an abolitionist author.” – CNN

Through his 60-plus books, including The Mechanism of Mind (1969), Six Thinking Hats (1985), How to Have A Beautiful Mind (2004) and Think! Before It’s Too Late (2009), as well as seminars, training courses and a BBC television series, De Bono sought to free us from the tyranny of logic through creative thinking. – The Guardian

“The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.” – The Guardian

He is the intellectual of the moment, this soft-spoken biographer of great men. Meacham whispers in the president’s ear and appears on TV constantly. – Harper’s

The author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, fractured his ribs in the fall. – BBC

Among the unconventional books that he took on when other publishers wouldn’t were The Armies of the Night, the first of Norman Mailer’s “nonfiction novels”; James Baldwin’s Another Country (Baron let Baldwin stay in his country house while he finished it); and Report from Iron Mountain, an antiwar satire which he and editor E.L. Doctorow marketed as a secret, leaked government study detailing the necessity of constant war to maintain power. As Doctorow later said, “If anyone was the perfect publisher for the 1960s, it was Richard Baron. He was totally fearless, and he backed us in every crazy thing we wanted to do.” – The New York Times

With each subsequent decade, Wolf has injected a little more madness into the cesspool of weird that we sometimes call “the discourse.” – The New Republic

Beatty’s roles “captured the full spectrum of humanity — from sincerity to villainy, buffoonery to tragedy — and made him one of the most versatile performers of his generation.” Beatty: “My great joy is throwing curveballs. Being a star cuts down your effectiveness as an actor, because you become an identifiable part of a product and somewhat predictable. … But I like to surprise the audience, to do the unexpected.” – Washington Post

He was one of postwar German’s most prominent architects, and had been the country’s only living Pritzker Prize winner. “His most revered works resemble jagged concrete mountains, among them the town hall in Bensberg in western Germany that he shaped as a grand fortress and crown of the city. So too the massive pilgrimage church in Neviges, near Düsseldorf, seems to have been hewn out of the rock and built to last for eternity. What looks so heavy from the outside yet appears almost weightless inside.” – Deutsche Welle

“As the inventive design director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art [under director Thomas Hoving] in the 1960s and ’70s, [he] turned the presentation of art into a gasp-inducing genre of theater” — most famously in the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition of 1978-79 — “giving the staid institution mass appeal and inspiring widespread changes in the style and spirit of museum exhibitions.” – The New York Times

After he and his brother-in-law, Roman Kroitor, created documentaries for Expo 67 in Montreal that used multiple screens and projectors, they decided to invent a single large-format projector. By the mid-1970s, they had established the technology and made and shown a few highly praised nature documentaries, but it took many years to overcome producer and exhibitor skepticism and get IMAX accepted as the popular spectacular it ultimately became — and Ferguson was the top creative mind behind the company that whole time. – The New York Times

“[His] nearly five decades at the head of the company shaped it into one of the world’s most prominent and recognizable publishers of children’s literature” — including the Baby-Sitters Club, Captain Underpants, Hunger Games and Harry Potter books — “and an influential education and media company.” – Publishers Weekly

Wada wrote and performed music that “was characterized by dense, sustained sounds that could create mind-bending acoustic effects. He borrowed widely from different musical traditions — Indian ragas, Macedonian folk singing and Scottish bagpipes — all while supporting his musical life by working in construction” – which meant that sometimes, tools of the trade (like plumbing pipes) became instruments. – The New York Times

Rivera began by asking her neighbors to be her subjects. “The images she made were majestic four-by-four-foot prints of everyday New Yorkers of all ages. They were time-stamped by their hair styles and clothing as citizens of the 1970s and ’80s, but they were made eternal by their direct gazes, formal poses and the nimbus of light with which Ms. Rivera surrounded them. Vivien Raynor of The New York Times likened these Nuyorican Portraits, as they were known, to the portraits of Édouard Manet; The Times’s Holland Cotter described them as incandescent.” – The New York Times

Mayröcker, an Austrian, earned acclaim as a formally inventive poet, but her writing “ranged far more widely, producing an immense body of work that encompassed nearly every literary genre: novels, memoirs, children’s books, drama and radio plays as well as poetry. (Only a handful of her works have been translated into English.)” Perhaps that should change. – The New York Times

Olivia Rodrigo has figured out something that few have before her. There’s” a shift within the Disney sphere, which has apparently evolved enough to allow its stars to curse while still holding down jobs on PG-rated television.” – Washington Post

Biasotto was the co-founder of Grupo Krapp with his longtime artistic partner, Luciana Acuña, who wrote, “Luis moved comfortably in the abyss. The emptiness, besides giving him panic, gave him peace of mind. A brave being, by nature. A contemporary hero out of a Marvel comic book. To rehearse with Luis was not being able to stop admiring him, to be surprised at every moment, to burst out with laughter and to be certain of sharing the world with a being from another planet.” – Dance Magazine

He started in 1961 with one AM station, which he ran while working as a high school principal, in small-town North Carolina. Sixty years on, his Beasley Broadcast Group is one of the five largest radio groups in the U.S., with 62 stations and 20 million listeners a week. – Billboard

He shepherded the work of a remarkable group of authors ranging from Cormac McCarthy to Jill Lepore to Oliver Sacks and beyond. Perhaps his two biggest coups were seeing the potential of graphic narrative to be an enduring genre beyond Art Spiegelman’s Maus (he worked with Spiegelman on subsequent books, and also with Marjane Satrapi and Ben Katchor) and coaxing Joseph Mitchell into publishing a book (Up in the Old Hotel) after 27 years of silence. (Click here for a tribute to Frank by James Fallows.) – The New York Times

As an artist, “Luz was best known as an artist who liked to use spare lines and dramatic compositions in his practice that included painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture and photography.” But he was much more. “As an art administrator and curator from the 1960s onwards, he championed a modernist visual language in sharp contrast to prevailing fashions favouring classic European painting and sculpture.” – The Art Newspaper

Elvin, a Russian dancer who also performed with the Bolshoi, “gave London audiences one of the first tastes of Russian style. … Elvin created roles in Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella (Summer Fairy, 1948), Daphnis and Chloe (Lykanion, 1951), Homage to the Queen (1953), and Birthday Offering (1956), as well as Roland Petit’s Ballabile (1950).” – Gramilano

The prison was closed to the public in 2013 on “health and safety grounds,” but actors including Kate Winslet, local politicians, and more want to preserve the area, and turn the prison into a museum. Will Reading let them? – The New York Times

Oberlander, who died at the age of 99 in May, had a long, rich career whose influence continues to grow. She was “an early proponent of rewilding, community consultation, pedestrian-friendly accessibility and creative playgrounds for children,” and her devotion to green spaces and the influence of greenery on humans “tell a story of a great mind that spearheaded change and championed excellence in her profession.” – Wallpaper