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Straight Skinny Epitaph: Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012
Most revolutionary children’s book illustrator of the 20th century. New Yorker. Mensch. Everyone who ever read In the Night Kitchen understood it was a love song to Brooklyn, to the democracy of the...
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Straight Skinny Epitaph: Charles Louis Brown, 1936-2012
Brown invented go-go music, which defines the independent alt. culture history of Washington D.C. as the capital of the African diaspora. Music theorist and visionary. Culture czar of Chocolate City....
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Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, 1925-2012
Wehrmacht stable boy on the Russian front, P.O.W. entertainer, baritone, most-recorded singer, transcendentalist. The German character, which has been under scrutiny since Luther advised his princes...
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Straight Skinny Epitaph: Gitta Sereny Honeyman, 1921-2012
Gitta Sereny Honeyman Journalist, biographer of Treblinka commandant and genocidaire of 900,000, Stangl, Hitler architect Speer, child murderer Mary Bell, child prostitutes. U.N. welfare officer for...
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Straight Skinny Epitaph: Nora Ephron, 1941-2012
Nora Ephron and her then-husband, Carl Bernstein Warrior. Funny girl. Foremother. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/27/movies/nora-ephron-essayist-screenwriter-and-director-dies-at-71.html?hp She shocked...
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Ripeness Is All
My friend’s apocalypse, in which [redacted], has real resonance for those of us who decided years ago, not to breed. One lesson of that is work, with more courage, vision and innovation. The second is,...
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Straight Skinny Epitaph: Lia Lee, 1982-2012
Lia Lee, the little Hmong girl whose epilepsy was forcibly treated in the Western way by California doctors, has died after nearly three decades in a vegetative state....
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Straight Skinny Epitaph: Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, 1917-2012
Eric Hobsbawm, by Karen Robinson for the Guardian. I was having dinner recently with the assistant to the Macondo state historian, a man of the people, who was the first in his family to have attended...
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Straight Skinny Epitaph: Oscar Niemayer, Stalinist, Architect of Brasilia,...
Saul Friedlander has famously defined death kitsch as the bedrock of Nazi aesthetics, an effectively staged transfiguration by fire and klieg lights like the Gotterdamerung of Wagner’s imagining...
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Straight Skinny Epitaph: Doris Lessing, 1919-2013
Doris Lessing may have been — but for her acceptance of the Nobel Prize — the first of the feminist breed for whose existence Virginia Woolf called in *Three Guineas*. The non-secessionist outsider....
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