Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

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Obit watch: May 6, 2026.

Wednesday, May 6th, 2026

Screenshot

NYT.

Mr. Turner put together a top-notch crew that helped him win the 1977 America’s Cup races off Newport, R.I. But he did so only after coming close to being thrown out of the races once he had been accepted. “During the Cup eliminations,” Time magazine reported, “he flirted with every girl in sight, crawled pubs with his crew, got tossed out of chic clubs and restaurants for boozy behavior and turned Newport’s blue bloods positively purple.”
The Cup organizers forced Mr. Turner to apologize publicly to one elite club, the Spouting Rock Beach Association, for accosting female members. “I wish to apologize profusely because I certainly did have a couple drinks too many that Saturday night,” Mr. Turner wrote to the club president.
But on winning the Cup, he surrounded himself with young, attractive women and was too drunk to finish a victory speech at a nationally televised news conference.

…

Still crushed by debt, Mr. Turner sought to squeeze profits from his MGM library by colorizing classic black-and-white movies in what turned out to be a misguided attempt to increase their appeal among younger viewers. He was attacked by the press, filmmakers, movie buffs and politicians as a cultural philistine. Stung, he ended up colorizing only a few films, among them the 1941 Humphrey Bogart detective movie “The Maltese Falcon,” before abandoning the plan amid condemnation by many actors and directors, including the filmmakers Billy Wilder and Woody Allen.

…

He wooed [Jane Fonda – DB] — just after her divorce from the liberal activist and California state legislator Tom Hayden — by emphasizing their similarities, including as the children of a suicidal parent (in Ms. Fonda’s case, her mother) and their friendships with icons of the far left, like Mr. Castro. She later wrote in a memoir that she had been dazzled by his charisma, which she likened to “a 3-D stereophonic, Shakespearean-level, sound-and-light show.”
The couple married in 1991 — the third marriage for each — and in subsequent years, Mr. Turner devoted more of his time to environmentalism and global peace, while Ms. Fonda virtually retired from Hollywood to devote herself to Mr. Turner and his new causes.
Their marriage lasted 10 years, with Ms. Fonda saying his insatiable need for other women and her own deepening spirituality, including an embrace of Christianity, were underlying causes.

Posted in Boats, History, Media, Movies, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: January 23, 2026.

Friday, January 23rd, 2026

James Bernard, “founding editor and star writer” of the hip-hop magazine “The Source”.

His sister, Emily Bernard, who confirmed the death, said he died by suicide. His body was discovered on Dec. 29 in a wooded area in Pemberton Township, N.J., near his home.
Mr. Bernard is believed to have died around the time he was reported missing, in March 2024. He would have turned 60 last August.

…

His career at The Source unraveled in 1994, when he and other staff members organized a walkout after Mr. Mays published a laudatory article about the little-known group Almighty RSO, with which he was close, without consulting other editors. When calls for Mr. Mays’s resignation went nowhere, Mr. Bernard and others left the magazine.
In 1997, he and Mr. Dennis started a rival magazine, XXL. The founders conceived the quarterly as both a hip-hop tastemaker and a broader lifestyle magazine, like Playboy in its 1960s and ’70s heyday.

The Wikipedia entry on ‘The Source” goes into more detail about this and other issues.

Posted in Media, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 19, 2025.

Friday, December 19th, 2025

Peter Arnett, noted war correspondent.

From Vietnam’s jungles to Iraq, where he interviewed President Saddam Hussein, Mr. Arnett broke news and rules, infuriated national leaders and inspired generations of journalists. He was twice among the last Western TV broadcasters in Baghdad — as the Persian Gulf War began in 1991 and as an American-led coalition invaded in 2003.
Over 45 years, by his own account, he covered 17 wars in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America, first for The Associated Press and later for CNN and other television and print organizations. He made television documentaries, wrote two books, lectured widely and in 1997 interviewed Osama bin Laden, the leader of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, somewhere in Afghanistan.

…

Late in his career, he ran into trouble for crossing journalistic lines of propriety. He left CNN in 1999 after reporting a Vietnam War atrocity that apparently never happened, and was fired by NBC in 2003 for claiming on Iraqi state television that the war plan of the American-led coalition against Iraq was failing.

…

Mr. Arnett left CNN in 1999 after anchoring “Operation Tailwind,” a documentary broadcast that claimed that the United States used poison sarin gas in a Laotian village in 1970 in an attempt to kill American defectors in the Vietnam War. After denials and protests by Washington, a CNN investigation found the allegations to be largely unsupported. CNN issued a retraction and fired nearly everyone involved in the program.

Sue Bender, author.

In Ms. Bender’s 1989 book, “Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish,” she recounted how she learned from her hosts to recognize the beauty in the everyday, the peace that comes from slowing down and the dignity of ordinary work. The book became a best seller and one of the go-to texts of an anti-materialist movement of the 1990s known as voluntary simplicity.

Greg Biffle, former NASCAR driver. He, his wife and two children, and three other passengers were killed yesterday when their small plane crashed on approach to Statesville Regional Airport.

Posted in Amish, History, Media, Obits, Planes, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 15, 2025.

Monday, December 15th, 2025

Dave Ward, legendary Houston newscaster.

My family was a KPRC/Channel 2 family when I was growing up in Houston, but everyone was familiar with Dave Ward. Of course, this was back when there were only three channels…

For those in Houston, Ward was the chronicler of some of America’s most important history, including the space walk, the Vietnam and Middle East wars, and the “Luv Ya Blue” era of the Houston Oilers. He also interviewed five U.S. presidents.

Rob Reiner. I don’t know what to say about this: it seems to be a still breaking story, and the circumstances seem awful.

THR. IMDB. Roger Ebert’s review of “North”.

Posted in 1970s, Media, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 10, 2025.

Wednesday, December 10th, 2025

Madeleine Wickham, also known as “Sophie Kinsella”, author. (Confessions of a Shopaholic). She was 55: a brain tumor got her.

John Noble Wilford, former science reporter for the NYT and Pulitzer Prize winner. He was most famous for covering Apollo 11, but he did a lot of other science reporting as well.

In 1976, he covered an expedition to Scotland to explore the longstanding mystery of the Loch Ness monster. With sonar probes and underwater television cameras, the expedition, partly funded by The Times, scanned the murky depths of the 23-mile-long lake for a month, but turned up no trace of the creature, said in legend and in many unverified accounts of sightings to be an undulating serpent.

Posted in Books, History, Media, Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: special dying media edition.

Tuesday, November 4th, 2025

A reliable source has informed me that the NRA is ending publication of Shooting Illustrated and America’s First Freedom. I have not found a link for this, and when I checked the NRA website earlier today, I still had a choice of these magazines with my membership.

The same source also informs me that the NRA is switching to quarterly print publication for American Rifleman and American Hunter. Again, I have no link for this. I’ve checked the NRA’s website and done a lazy Google search. But this is not a person prone to misinformation or falsehood, so I trust them implicitly. If I find a link, I will update here.

I think this is just another example of what Roy Huntington is talking about: the gun, ammo, and gun accessory manufacturers are dropping print advertising in favor of the Internet, and the print market just isn’t sustainable any longer. Of course, nobody’s considered what’s going to happen when the big companies that effectively control the Internet start hating guns again.

Edited to add: link from Bearing Arms, dated October 30th. It doesn’t name the magazines, but my source tells me they are named in the linked Cam and Company interview.

Link from News2A, also dated October 30th.

On a happier note, “Teen Vogue” has snuffed it. More or less.

“Teen Vogue”, the print publication, actually ceased publishing in 2017, but it continued on as a website under the Condé Nast brand until yesterday. Condé Nast is folding the website into the regular “Vogue” website. I’ve seen one report that says 75% of TV’s staff was fired, “including its entire politics team”.

I would be happier about this if they had snuffed regular ‘Vogue”, too, but you take your victories where you find them.

And, finally, Gannett announced today that they are changing the name of the company. The new name? USA Today Company.

Gannett’s name change will take effect on Nov. 18, when the company’s stock will switch to trading under the ticker symbol TDAY on the New York Stock Exchange.

Posted in Guns, Media, Obits | 2 Comments »

Noted.

Friday, October 31st, 2025

“50 Years Ago, My Father Wrote the Headline That Refuses to Die” in the NYT.

Is it “Headless Body in Topless Bar”? No, but that does get a shout-out in the article. In this case, it is the other one.

(A tip to headline writers: Avoid commas, semicolons and the word “castigate,” if you want to have impact. The Times’s corresponding headline that day — “Ford, Castigating City, Asserts He’d Veto Federal Bailout; Offers Bankruptcy Bill” — stands as a verbose counterpoint to “Drop Dead.”)

Posted in Media | Comments Closed

Random gun crankery, some filler.

Thursday, October 30th, 2025

Smith and Wesson has a new series on their YouTube channel: “Tales From the Vault”, with Jerry Miculek.

The first episode dropped Tuesday, and it covers the Smith and Wesson Model 76. You may remember the Model 76 from various movies, such as…

As we like to say around here, “If the future was bad, CHeston was there.”

There was a gentleman at one of the S&WCA symposiums some years ago who had a display of Model 76s. As I recall, at the time, you could get a transferable one for about $8K. I checked GunBroker, and it looks like they are going for $18K to $20K now.

My brother sent me an interesting note yesterday: the revived Marlin (a division of Ruger) introduced a new lever gun in their Trapper series. Short barrel, compact, probably quick handling…and chambered in best mil.

I have not seen any lever guns chambered in 10mm until now, but it does kind of make sense. (There may have been some custom or semi-custom low production 10mm lever guns that I don’t know about.) Heck, I don’t even feel like I have a use case for a pistol-caliber carbine, and I find the 10mm Trapper an interesting proposition. I bet this would be a great gun for hog hunting.

I promised a couple of weeks ago to post photos of my old 1911 with the Battleship Texas grips.

I do think they look nice. Of course, I kept the grips that came with the gun, in case I ever want to restore it back to the original config. The gunsmith did have to do some hand fitting on these grips, so I’m not sure they’d go on any other gun.

Preview of coming attractions. As my regular readers know, I am a bore. Either a small bore or a big bore, depending. In this case, I am a small bore.

But: I am also PC.

Over at RevolverGuy.Com, Mike Wood has a nice piece up about the demise of the print editions of Guns and American Handgunner (previously), which includes reviews of several FMG Publications books. Some of those I’ve written about here. There’s also an appearance in the comments by Editor Roy Huntington, who explains the economics: “With the loss of print advertising, it was simply not sustainable to keep the presses rolling.”

RevolverGuy also has an after-action review of Revolver Fest 2025. I wanted to mention that because I thought this, from the comments, was interesting:

We had one gun (out of 7) go down (frozen action) at the Diamondback booth, and one gun that occasionally had a light strike that couldn’t be traced back to ammo. I heard from a number of shooters who experienced problems with multiple guns at S&W (sights, barrel clocking, frozen action, etc). The best place to shoot S&Ws was actually over at the Lipsey’s booth, where the guns were reportedly doing well. Maybe Lipsey’s did some inspections, cleaning and maintenance on the samples they brought?

So was this:

Smith & Wesson didn’t show up with anything all that interesting. I shot a 3-inch, Performance Center Carry Comp Model 19, which was neat, but a variation on an old theme. Smith also brought out their .357 Magnum and .44 Magnum 1854 rifles. I somewhat regret not shooting them, but I did handle them and they looked sharp. Frankly, Smith seemed a tad tone-deaf to the nature of the event; also on their table was a Bodyguard 2.0, a Shield X, and an AR. I get it: get your products in front of customers any way you can, but also, read the room, Smith!

As your resident unabashed Smith and Wesson fanboy: guys, do better, please.

Posted in 1911, Guns, Media, Ruger, Smith and Wesson | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 17, 2025.

Friday, October 17th, 2025

The archiving service I use has been having issues all day, so I’m going to put this up without some links. If they fix the problems in the next day or two, I’ll go back and add them.

Kanchha Sherpa has passed away at the age of 92. (Paywalled link. Sorry.) He was the last surviving member of the Hillary-Norgay team that climbed Mount Everest.

Mr. Kanchha carried 60 pounds of gear, fixed ropes and scouted the trail for the team. Despite injury, cold, illness and hardship, “I got good work,” he told Climate Wire in 2011. “I got good clothing. It was good for me.”

…

More recently, he expressed concern about the large numbers of people climbing Everest and the environmental damage they caused.Still, as a mountain guide, he told Climate Wire: “If we stop the tourists to save the mountains, we don’t have anything to do. Just grow potatoes and eat and sit.”

Ace Frehley, of KISS. NYT (share link, should be free).

I don’t have much to say about Mr. Frehley, and I feel a little bad. But I was never a fan of Knights In Satan’s Service.

Susan Stamberg, NPR host famous for her “cranberry relish” recipe. Recipe here. NYT (non-archived, paywalled link. Sorry.)

American Handgunner, the print edition. The brand is going to continue in the form of online “newsletters”, and I think Guns is still going to be around.

But to me, this is awful news. AH is one of the few gun magazines I subscribed to, and I’m not sure if signing up for all the newsletters will get me the content I want. Sure, Dr. Dabbs will still be around, but what about the “Ayoob Files” and Ayoob’s monthly column? Will the “Guncrank Diaries” still exist? If not, who’s going to tell me stories, like the one about Elon Musk’s dad killing three cannibals with two bullets? And what if I want to go back and refer to something? The website is a little skirty about pulling up older articles, even if you are a paid subscriber.

I think I understand the reasons, and I still support the AH staff. But the older I get, the more change stinks.

Posted in Guns, History, Media, Music, Obits, Radio | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 29, 2025.

Friday, August 29th, 2025

I know I’m drawing heavily from the NYT, but that’s where the interesting obits are today.

Jim Murray. He was the general manager of the Philadelphia Eagles from 1974 until 1983, including during their Super Bowl run in 1981. But that’s not what I think is notable.

The first facility opened in Philadelphia in 1974, the year Mr. Murray became, at 36, the National Football League’s youngest general manager. The daughter of Fred Hill, a tight end with the Eagles, had been diagnosed with leukemia. The team raised money for her; Mr. Murray was delegated to prolong the giving by looking for a related charitable cause.
He found a local pediatric oncologist, Dr. Audrey Evans, who told him that the most pressing need was to provide accommodation for families who brought their sick children to a hospital and often had to sleep in the corridor or in their cars.
Mr. Murray understood immediately. “He saw the way they were struggling and said, ‘We have to figure something out,’” his godson, the Philadelphia sports broadcaster Rob Ellis, said in an interview. “Then the idea bloomed and progressed. It started with the motivation to help his player.”

Know your stuff. Be a man. Look after your people.

Mr. Murray reached out to a Philadelphia advertising executive who handled the region’s McDonald’s account. Local McDonald’s restaurants agreed to donate money from a promotional drink — the Shamrock Shake — as long as the house could be named after the company’s emblematic clown.
The first Ronald McDonald House opened on Oct. 15, 1974, at 4032 Spruce Street in Philadelphia. There was room for seven families. Mr. Murray took to calling it the “McMiracle.”

Joan Mellen, biographer. She wrote 25 books about all sorts of subjects (Japanese film, the JFK assassination) but I wanted to highlight her because…one of her biographies was about Bobby Knight.

In early 1987, the irascible and authoritarian college basketball coach Bobby Knight called Temple University looking for Joan Mellen…
Mr. Knight was fuming about “A Season on the Brink,” a recent best-selling biography by the sportswriter John Feinstein that portrayed him as vulgar, sexist and out of control. Professor Mellen had just reviewed the book for The St. Petersburg Times, faulting it for misunderstanding its subject.
“Knight is, above all, a teacher,” she wrote. “Aggressively he gives his all. In this he is no different from the dedicated English or math teacher. The basketball players, like all students, are recalcitrant. They fight against learning. Knight’s advantage over other teachers lies in his access and control.”
On the phone, Mr. Knight was charming.
“You’re a professor of literature?” Professor Mellen later recalled him asking her. “I just wanted to tell you I really liked what you wrote.”
Professor Mellen began compulsively watching his games. She arranged to write a profile of him for The New York Times, which she later expanded into a best seller of her own: “Bob Knight: His Own Man.”

Bob Knight: His Own Man was negatively reviewed by many people, some of whom saw it as a shot across the bow of Mr. Feinstein. One of those people was Rick Telander in the New York Times Book Review.

Professor Mellen’s response was vintage Professor Mellen.
She castigated The Times in a letter to the editor, saying that Mr. Telander should not have reviewed her book because he worked for Sports Illustrated, which had published several negative articles about Mr. Knight. He was among the writers who had criticized the coach.
“Such breaches of journalistic ethics on the part of some sportswriters are a central theme of my book,” Professor Mellen wrote. “My focus, however, was Mr. Knight as a teacher, a topic not touched upon once by Mr. Telander, who is obviously adhering to some other agenda.”
The Times published an Editors’ Note saying that Mr. Telander should not have been chosen to review the book.

A.K. Best, fly tying guy.

Mr. Best was renowned for his mastery of the meticulous art of professional fly tying. He produced nearly weightless artificial lures that mimicked the midges, caddisflies and other bugs that fish eat; his specialty was dry flies, which float on the water’s surface.

…

Mr. Best also wrote books and magazine articles, spoke at seminars and made instructional videos with the professorial tone of a pipe-smoking teacher, which he had been. (Pipe smoke helped keep the mosquitoes away while he fished.) Fly Fisherman magazine said, in a tribute after his death, that he “shaped the soul of modern fly fishing.”
For hours at a time, Mr. Best sat in his basement workshop in Boulder, using a vise, pliers, tweezers, a toothbrush, sprigs of feathers and other tools of the trade. He made the wings and tails of insect replicas by hand, for personal use and at a commercial pace of roughly 40 lures an hour and 36,000 a year for companies like Orvis, Umpqua Feather Merchants and Urban Angler. He was said to have attached a shoulder rest to his phone so he could keep tying while taking a call.
As he worked, he listened to classical music and jazz, accompaniment that dated to his earlier career as a music teacher and high school band director. He considered the precision required for tying flies similar to the exactitude of creating music.
“There’s no such thing as an unimportant detail in music,” Mr. Best told The Gazette of Colorado Springs in 2024. “The composer put that dot on the paper with an ink pen for a specific reason. Just like when you look at a picture of an insect, every dot is important.”

…

His great skill was creating flies of a size and color that appeared natural, rather than store-bought, using the knowledge that no adult aquatic insects have fuzzy bodies; that flies should appear shiny and waxy, not translucent; that hair from a white-tailed deer could be used if elk hair was not available.
“You don’t need a fly so big you’re going to scare the hell out of a fish,” he said in a 2015 interview for the Montana State University Angling Oral History Project. In the same interview, he said, “If it’s the right color and floats, it’ll catch fish.”

There’s a Montana State University Angling Oral History Project? Awesome! President Trump, I want some of my tax money going there, please.

We fished some when I was a child, by which I mean we dangled lines in the water from fishing poles. I’ve never been fly fishing, but I find myself becoming more interested in both the sport itself and the literature surrounding it as I get older. Callahan and Company has fly fishing and angling books as one of their specialties, so I see a lot of fly fishing literature advertised in their catalogs. Much of it sounds fascinating.

I am seeing reports (especially from McThag) that Randall “Duke” Cunningham, Navy ace, former Congressman, and convicted and pardoned felon, has passed away. But I don’t have anything I can link yet.

Burning in Hell watch: Tran Trong Duyet, chief warden of the Hanoi Hilton.

Posted in Books, Fish, History, Media, NFL, Obits, Planes, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 18, 2025.

Monday, August 18th, 2025

Terence Stamp. THR. Tributes.

Other credits include “Big Eyes”, “The Limey”, “Bowfinger”, and “The Hit”.

Dan Tana, who ran one of those famous LA hangouts for the stars (until he sold it in 2009). NYT (archived).

Dobrivoje Tanasijević was born on May 26, 1935, in Cibutkovica, a small town outside Belgrade, where he grew up. His father, Radojko, was a restaurateur. His mother, Lenka (Miloseviv) Tanasijevic, resourcefully kept the family afloat during World War II, when Radojko was arrested. He was considered an ally of the old ruling classes by the Yugoslav Communists, and he wound up becoming an accountant at one of the restaurants he had owned.
In the early 1950s, Dan, still a teenager, was on the farm team of Red Star Belgrade, a professional soccer club. The team traveled to Belgium, where he got into a fight with the chaperone. He and a couple of friends promptly defected.

…

Regulars during the 1970s described a particularly rowdy era: the musician Nils Lofgren serenading strangers with an accordion while high on acid; a fight between an agent and a producer over a third man’s wife that left enduring blood stains on the restaurant’s carpeted floor.
“Our best clients are the regulars who come at least once or twice a week,” Mr. Susser told The New York Times in 2005. “Even a studio chief might not get a booth at the last minute if they haven’t been in for a while.”

…

The restaurant’s hipness depended somehow on its orthodoxy. The interior and the menu remained locked in midcentury America’s imagination of an Italian restaurant — including after a fire in 1980, when customers pleaded with Mr. Tana to exactly replicate the old saloon, and after Mr. Tana sold it to a friend in 2009.

…

The average experience of a night at Tana’s went something like this:
You walked under a green awning into a space so dark your eyes took a second to adjust. The décor was repeatedly described as “bordello red”: red Naugahyde booths, red-and-white checked tablecloths, red Christmas-tree lights on the ceiling and, everywhere, mounds of marinara sauce.
Your table, lit by candlelight, would generally occupy a dark, recessed corner. Your waiter would not be the Los Angeles archetype — a beautiful but incompetent aspiring young actor — but instead, dressed in black bow tie, a professional, courteous gentleman from the former Yugoslavia.
Mr. Tana himself, though frequently attending to his international soccer interests in London or Belgrade, where he had homes, might also stop by your table to greet you. He had an athlete’s build — six feet tall, broad shouldered — but also the sophistication of a confident speaker of Russian, German, French, Italian, English and Serbo-Croatian.
“His manners are old world: He is one of the few men who can carry off kissing a woman’s hand,” Los Angeles magazine reported in 1997. “He does it swiftly, smoothly and without hesitation, the same way he lights your cigarette.”

Ronnie Rondell, stuntman. He has a pretty massive body of credits, but would be known to many people as “the guy on fire on the cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here'”. He also did stunt work on “The Night Stalker”, “To Live and Die in L.A.”, and one of the movies based on a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

On May 23, 1969, Mr. Rondell married Mary Smith in Palm Springs, Calif. The couple had two sons, R.A. Rondell and Reid Rondell. Both children became involved in the stunt industry.
In 1985, Reid Rondell, 22, was killed when his helicopter crashed during the filming of the CBS television series “Airwolf.” A producer, Donald Bellisario, informed Mr. Rondell of the death, according to a news report at the time. “He was obviously broken up by it, but he told me, ‘You know, it goes with the territory,’” Mr. Bellisario said.

Tristan Rogers, actor. Other credits include “Cover Up“, “Mancuso, FBI”, “Delgo“, and “Fast Track”.

Jules Witcover, political columnist and reporter.

From the days of manual typewriters to the age of laptop computers, Mr. Witcover interpreted America’s political scene as an analyst and eyewitness to history. He swapped tales with presidents; covered presidential campaigns, beginning in 1960; recorded the rise and fall of Richard M. Nixon; and was steps away when a gunman killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel in 1968.
Mr. Witcover’s column, “Politics Today,” written five days a week for years with Jack Germond, appeared in The Washington Star from 1977 to 1981, when The Star folded. It then ran in The Baltimore Sun and up to 140 other papers from 1981 to 2005, when it was terminated in a cutback, and was later syndicated three times a week by Tribune Media Services. Mr. Germond died in 2013, but Mr. Witcover continued writing it until he retired in 2022.

…

He was featured in “The Boys on the Bus,” Timothy Crouse’s 1973 book about pack campaign journalism, the old road show of poker games, pounding typewriters and all-night boozing. He fit right in, but he was one of the heavyweights.
“Witcover was deadly serious about his craft,” Mr. Crouse wrote. “He had given a great deal of thought to his own role as a political journalist, and was extraordinarily sensitive to the role that the whole press corps played, to its problems and failings.”

Posted in Food, Media, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 14, 2025.

Monday, July 14th, 2025

Martin Cruz Smith passed away over the weekend. The Rap Sheet has a short item, but I haven’t seen any other coverage.

I find the Arkady Renko books fascinating in the abstract, but I’ve never actually gotten around to reading any of them. (I did, however, see the film version of “Gorky Park”, but I don’t find it really memorable.) I guess he’s another one of those series authors where, now that there’s a defined end to the series, I can start reading…

Samuel Abt, writer for the NYT and The International Herald Tribune. Anong other work, he covered the Tour de France for the papers for close to 30 years.

For his first decade at the paper, Mr. Abt was assigned to cover the Tour; after that, he used his own vacation time and was paid as a freelancer.

I remember reading his coverage, back in the Lance Armstrong days when I followed the Tour.

In an Opinion article in The Times published shortly before Armstrong lost his titles, Mr. Abt expressed sympathy for the cyclist, whom he had known since the early 1990s and with whom he had had a sometimes friendly, sometimes strained relationship.
“The internet and mass media are in a frenzy of condemnation now,” he wrote. “I have not read or heard any sorrow or compassion about a man stripped of his honor.”

Posted in Books, Cycling, Media, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 17, 2025.

Tuesday, June 17th, 2025

William Langewiesche, writer.

He wrote a fair amount of stuff about aviation, especially a famous piece on EgyptAir 990.

Mr. Langewiesche’s account of the EgyptAir crash in 1999, which was profoundly enriched by his own aviation background, blamed a suicidal co-pilot. Egyptian officials refused to accept that conclusion, a response, he wrote, that was rooted in political and cultural chauvinism.

I used to be an admirer of his work, especially his aviation stuff. I generally try to avoid speaking ill of the dead when I write these obits, but there are some things I think need to be said about Mr. Langewiesche’s work.

Writing about Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III’s famous landing of a commercial airliner in the Hudson River in 2009, Mr. Langewiesche made the case that that injury-free belly flop was a testament more to modern airplane technology than to the heroism of the pilot.
Captain Sullenberger took issue with that account, telling The New York Times that Mr. Langewiesche’s book about the episode, “Fly by Wire,” contained “misstatements of fact.”

…

His 2002 book, “American Ground: Unbuilding The World Trade Center,” based on a three-part series in The Atlantic, was reported over six months at ground zero as he meticulously covered the cleanup after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Unmentioned in the obit: his accusation that members of the NYFD looted stores at ground zero before the towers collapsed. I think it is fair to say that accusation has been refuted.

Mr. Black, who sent his report to Mr. Langewiesche’s publisher, included a letter in which he asserted that Mr. Langewiesche ”passed off demonstrably unfounded rumor as plain fact, with a reckless disregard for both elementary procedures of verification and the likely harm his reporting would cause.”

Also unmentioned in the obit: his involvement in the Chevron Corp. v. Donziger pollution case.

Posted in Media, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 24, 2025.

Monday, March 24th, 2025

Max Frankel, former executive editor of the New York Times.

Former Congressional representative Mia Love (R – Utah).

Brian James, of The Damned.

The Damned never shook British society, or the rock world at large, like the Sex Pistols, who sneered at the queen, hurled obscenities on television talk shows and had pundits mulling the collapse of Western values. Nor did they play the part of political revolutionaries like the Clash, who were billed as “the only band that matters.”
Nevertheless, the Damned made history. They were the first British punk band to release a single: “New Rose,” written by Mr. James, in October 1976 (the Sex Pistols’ anthemic “Anarchy in the U.K.,” soon followed); the first to release an album, “Damned Damned Damned,” in 1977; and the first to tour the United States.

Posted in Media, Music, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

Wednesday, March 19th, 2025

This could also be an “Art, damn it! Art!” watch, but I decided to go this way.

Jackson Arn was the art critic for the New Yorker.

Arn’s last work for the magazine was a highbrow essay entitled: “Should We View Tatlin As A Russian Constructivist Or A Ukrainian,” which was published on March 10.

Note the past tense. Mr. Arn has been canned by the magazine. And not because the New Yorker has money troubles.

The New Yorker had a big 100th birthday celebration in February at some trendy place in NoHo.

Jackson Arn was accused of making “inappropriate overtures” at some of the party guests and appeared to be drunk at the shindig, whose attendees included star editor Tina Brown and author Zadie Smith, the New York Times reported Tuesday, citing anonymous sources with knowledge.

…

Writers including Smith, Jennifer Egan and Jeffrey Eugenides rubbed shoulders with former New Yorker editrix Brown, longtime art editor Françoise Mouly, staff writers Calvin Trillin and Adam Gopnik.

I almost wish I had been there, just so I could walk up to Calvin Trillin and ask him, “Do you want to blow this Popsicle stand and go get some dumplings in Chinatown?”

Here’s the NYT article, but it doesn’t add much detail.

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