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The Lives They Lived

Bill Withers Was a Working Man Who Became a Star

He went from manual labor to musical phenomenon in a matter of months, but his struggles were always there in the music.

The Lives They Lived

Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year.

Bill Withers at the Rainbow Theater in London in 1973. Fin Costello/Redferns, via Getty Images

The Lives They Lived

Bill Withers
b. 1938

He went from manual labor to musical stardom in a matter of months, but his earlier struggles were always there in the music.

Bill Withers sang like a man who knew something. Born in Slab Fork, W.Va., he grew up during the years when Brown v. Board of Education was decided and Emmett Till was murdered. Plus, no one would claim that being a child in coal country is easy. In a 2005 video interview that accompanied the rerelease of his first album, “Just as I Am,” Withers describes his world as a young boy with asthma: “I’m Black. I stutter. But I’m a little yellow boy, and so some Black folks is pissed off about that. And white folks is pissed off period.” He wanted out of West Virginia and at 17 left for the Navy. Withers enrolled in aircraft-mechanic’s school to show that he was no fool. He became the first Black mechanic most of his peers would know. Nine years later, in 1965, he left the military. To get by, he toiled in a factory making toilets for Boeing 747s. And then, everything changed.

As the story goes, Withers overheard a club owner complain about paying Lou Rawls $2,000 a week just for him to show up late. Withers had never written a song and couldn’t play an instrument. Yet, he explains in “Still Bill,” a 2009 documentary about his life, that after hearing the story, he “decided it would be awfully nice to get in the music business.” He bought an acoustic guitar from a pawnshop and composed songs in his head while working at a Weber Aircraft factory; the resulting demo would lead Clarence Avant, a Black record executive and the founder of Sussex Records, to sign him. Withers was past 30 and nothing could have predicted what happened next.

One single off his 1971 album “Just as I Am” would guarantee that he had worked on his last airplane. “Ain’t No Sunshine,” originally a B-side, won a Grammy. Withers’s sound reaches back to the austere roots of the blues and country music. “Ain’t No Sunshine” is quiet with a stripped-down 15-second riff on the phrase “I know” that turns Withers voice into an instrument performing its own solo. Withers stuttered until he was 28, and as he chants “I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know,” the lovers’ rift becomes singular — a lament you might carry with you to a cold shower or the factory line or walking down the street on a fall day thinking about somebody who won’t answer your calls no more.

On the cover of “Just as I Am,” Withers leans against a brick wall with a metal lunch pail in his right hand. The pail belonged to him, part of the working man’s life he lived before he sang a song about a woman who’d gone away. The music critic and essayist Greg Tate tells me that Withers arrived on the music scene as “a full-grown worldly-wise Black working man,” simply “sitting in a chair summoning up the emotional depth of everyday Black humanity.” But by 1985, after a run of songs that would be playing on repeat in American households decades later, Withers, through with what he called the music industry’s desire to shape his sound and intentions, walked away. In that 2005 interview, Withers explains why he left, leaning forward and speaking as if to a record exec back in 1985: “You gonna tell me about the history of the blues? I am the goddamn blues.” He continued: “I’m from West Virginia. I’m the first man in my family not to work in the coal mines. My mother scrubbed floors on her knees for a living. And you gonna tell me about the goddamn blues?”

I was once incarcerated in a Virginia prison 141 miles from Slab Fork, the home of Withers and the coal-mining people who inspired his most well-known song, “Lean on Me.” I must have been 22 when I met this brother whose name I can’t remember. He was older, but like me he’d been inside since his teenage years and read books as if they would heal something. One afternoon, in the middle of dozens of other men who were paying us no mind, we got to arguing about something I would bet neither of us now remember. Because every disagreement in prison can lead to violence, friendship is a precarious thing. After our argument, we never spoke again. I thought I’d left those memories in prison, but when I recently stumbled on “Bill Withers Live at Carnegie Hall” and heard the song “For My Friend” for the first time, I remembered the story. “One of us has to say he’s sorry/or we will never be friends again,” he sings. Withers’s lyrics describe the kind of vulnerable we were too tough or fragile to be. It’s a subtle thing, but Withers’s lyrics help us notice how the smallest of moments trouble the heart.

In “Still Bill,” Withers says “my real life was when I was just a working guy.” Maybe, because he believed this, he wrote songs that turned the regular loves and struggles and regrets and joys of working people into art. That gutbucket quality of Withers’s voice is how, I think, my father or my mother, my uncle, aunts or any of my cousins would sound if they could sing the songs that they carry around inside them.

[Read the Times’s obituary of Bill Withers.]

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, a lawyer and the poetry editor for the magazine.

Coach John Thompson in March 1985. Associated Press

John Thompson
b. 1941

A stern disciplinarian with a white towel on his shoulder, he was every Black boy’s longed-for coach.

When John Thompson Jr. was enshrined into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999, he began his speech wiping away tears with a white cotton towel, a commemorative version of the one Thompson wore his entire career as coach of the Georgetown University Hoyas. Thompson had just been surprised onstage by Dikembe Mutombo and Patrick Ewing, two of his former Georgetown players, when they placed the towel over Thompson’s left shoulder and the audience erupted.

“This is not my image,” Thompson said, referring to his tears and to his reputation as a stern disciplinarian who confronted his players, fans, reporters and hustlers with equal funk.

Before I knew the story behind the towel Thompson carried — or, really, wore — during games, I watched Thompson, a husky 6-foot-10 Black man from Washington, lead Georgetown to the N.C.A.A. championship in 1984. I remember wondering how Thompson was able to break the most essential rule of racial representation in my grandmother’s house.

In and around our shotgun house in Forest, Miss., we were taught to never look or appear disheveled at work, especially after proving yourself undeniably twice as good as the white workers at your job. More specific, we were taught that sweat rags, even glistening white sweat rags like the one Thompson routinely wore on the sidelines, must never ever be worn or used where white folks could see and judge us, unless we worked outside and/or our job required it.

“My mother used to wear a towel hanging over one shoulder when she worked in the kitchen,” Thompson wrote in his just-published memoir, “I Came As a Shadow.” “She’d use it to wipe her hands or dry a dish. When I started coaching at St. Anthony’s [high school], I draped a white towel over my shoulder during games as a tribute to her. She and my father didn’t come to hardly any of the games, but I felt them with me when I wore that towel.”

As a child, I never had a towel like Thompson’s, or a blanket like Linus’s from “Peanuts.” I had my Uncle Jimmy’s huge duffel bag from Vietnam. The bag made me feel closer to my uncle, but it also let anyone curious enough to care know that I was a Black child longing for ancestral connection and safeness on my own terms.

Surrounded by my aunts, mother and grandmother, I watched Thompson’s Georgetown team win the national championship and come in second the following year. I remember assuming Georgetown was a Historically Black College or University like Jackson State University, the school in the city where I was conceived and the school where my mother now worked. I didn’t assume Georgetown was an H.B.C.U. simply because Thompson was one of the few Black coaches “allowed” to teach basketball to his Black players. I wanted Georgetown to be an H.B.C.U. because of the style with which Thompson coached and the style he allowed his players to actively explore.

To me, as a child, those styles felt so Black. In addition to playing tenacious defense and mesmerizing offense, Thompson’s all-Black Georgetown teams innovated with bald heads, box fades, full-bodied high fives and T-shirts underneath jerseys. While most of the kids I played ball with were terrified of trimming our curly shags, we happily mimicked Georgetown handshakes and wore T-shirts under our jerseys, no matter how tattered or snug those jerseys were. In Mississippi, it was rarely cold enough for a Starter jacket, yet there was no one more envied than the kid who wore — or the kid who knew someone who wore — a dark blue jacket with “Georgetown” blazing across.

While no one I played ball with as a kid ever admitted to dreams of making it to the N.B.A., we all admitted to dreaming of playing for Thompson at Georgetown. John Thompson was an actual father to John III, Ronny and Tiffany, his children. He became an actual coach to Othella Harrington, a phenom we grew up playing ball against in Jackson, Miss..

“He used to always tell us, all the time,” Harrington said in a 2020 interview when talking about Thompson’s influence, “ ‘a man who knows how will always have a job; a man who knows why will always be his boss.’” He went on, “In terms of Coach Thompson preparing me for the N.B.A., more than anything he prepared me for life.”

From a distance, I saw Thompson as representative, our imaginary coach who was once a decorated player, who backed up Bill Russell for the champion Boston Celtics. That decorated player who backed up Bill Russell was once a scared Black child, like every Black child I’d met in the universe, just longing to have a fair shot at gracefully winning and graciously losing.

The day after Thompson and Georgetown won that national championship, my grandmother let me begin reading Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” a book I’d been forbidden from reading because my mother thought that Black children could be safer from white Mississippians if they immersed themselves in the canonical classics of white writers. Halfway through the book, Angelou writes of being in an all-Black store and listening to a Joe Louis fight against a white boxer in 1935 when she was a child.

“My race groaned,” Angelou writes about the radio announcer’s describing Louis being pummeled on the ropes and starting to go down. “It was our people falling.” As the fight continues, and more shameful groans of Black loss flood the store, Louis regains control. When Louis eventually knocks out his white opponent, Angelou writes that, as happy as the race was for Louis’s win, “It wouldn’t do for a Black man and his family to be caught on a lonely country road on a night when Joe Louis had proved that we were the strongest people in the world.”

Thompson’s national championship and his subsequent loss in 1985 made real for me the representative possibilities and consequences of publicly winning and losing in America while Black. Though Thompson was our imaginary coach, in this eerie way we were his real team. If Thompson lost, and Georgetown lost, it felt as if my race lost. Even at 9 I knew there should have been more Black coaches in all the sports I watched since nearly all the best players were Black. I knew that there was nothing as joyful as publicly beating white Americans in anything simply because white Americans were allowed to play, cheat, coach, referee, own and win whether they actually showed up or not. I didn’t have the words then, but I understood that Thompson’s coaching virtuosity and, really, our valuing of Thompson’s virtuosity, were shaped by the world Angelou described. In that world, which is absolutely our world, Thompson did far more than represent us. Yet representing us is exactly a part of what Thompson did.

During Thompson’s Hall of Fame speech, I expected him to talk about his singular experience of toting that heavy sack of Black dreams, Black nightmares. Instead, he offered sincere thank-yous to all the folks who made his journey possible, and an evocative reminder that none of us, not even our giants, can win, lose or represent alone. We all need humans who love us. Some of us need white cotton towels to wipe up the sweat, the tears and the bruising terror that comes with winning, losing and representing while Black in the United States of America.

[Read the Times’s obituary of John Thompson.]

Kiese Laymon is the Hubert H. McAlexander Chair in English at the University of Mississippi. His memoir, “Heavy,” won the Carnegie Medal for nonfiction.

Diane di Prima at Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village in 1968. Peter Moore / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Diane di Prima
b. 1934

A rare woman among the Beatniks, she forged a path toward her own desires.

It might have pleased Diane di Prima that we can’t get our hands on her “Revolutionary Letters” by capitulating to the rapacity of Amazon Prime. The book is out of print. Instead, after her death, individual poems from her lifelong series pop up on my social media feeds, between presidential tweets and images of police violence. This is not unlike how the poems first circulated in the late ’60s and early ’70s with the Liberation News Service, as one-offs in free papers. Di Prima always loved Ezra Pound’s formulation — “all ages are contemporaneous” — and lately her poems have seemed perfectly present tense: The “Revolutionary Letters” warn against “the tale, so often told” in times of crisis, “that now we must organize, obey the rules, so that later/we can be free.”

Di Prima wasn’t one to wait for history to authorize the freedoms she desired. She came of age before the women’s movement, in a middle-class Italian family governed by traditional gender roles. She escaped Brooklyn for Hunter, the magnet high school for gifted kids in Manhattan, where she fell in with a crowd — “maverick and mostly gay” — that included Audre Lorde. In 1953, when she was 18, she moved to East Fifth Street to write, taking odd jobs to pay the bills.

Di Prima is best remembered as a Beat poet, one of few women in a scene associated with the headlong, half-mad incantations of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs — a bohemian rebellion in lifestyle and syntax more than a decade before hippies made counterculture mainstream. Di Prima’s detailed life writing (“Memoirs of a Beatnik,” from 1969, and “Recollections of My Life As a Woman,” from 2001) describe how she found a place for herself in the downtown labyrinth of jazz clubs and dyke bars, happenings and protests.

Di Prima entered what had mostly been a conversation among men through sheer audacity, when she sent her first book — “This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards” — to the poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who wrote the introduction and whose indie press, City Lights, had recently issued Ginsberg’s world-piercing “Howl.” Di Prima recalls in “Recollections” that she was not often invited to read alongside her peers, despite her central role in that community as poet, theater director and editor. In 1961, she started a mail-order mimeograph with Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), and for two and a half years they were lovers. The editorial vision was truly collaborative, but she remembers that she was always the one left with the manual labor of cutting and pasting.

These inequalities seemed like “a matter of course” to di Prima, so she worked around them. When she was 22, she had a child out of wedlock. “To my mind, ‘father’ was a mythic, insubstantial relationship” that did little to inspire responsible behavior in the men she had known. Therefore, she wrote in “Recollections,” “the child I bore” — Jeanne di Prima — would be mine and mine alone.”

It’s tempting to see di Prima as an extraordinary exception to the midcentury rule, but she carefully reminded us that there have always been exceptions: She was especially drawn to “the women blues singers: Sara Martin, Trixie Smith,” who often had to “mother, disappear, get sick” in the windy breaks between verses, quotidian struggles they would weave back into the music. She learned to write “modular poems, that could be dropped and picked up” between literary commitments and child care. When called upon to articulate an aesthetic statement, di Prima wrote: “The requirements of our life is the form of art.”

Even traumatic episodes were opportunities for creative discovery: Baraka wanted her to have an abortion the first time they conceived — he was still married to Hettie Jones. She reluctantly agreed, ultimately deciding she “had to experience being the betrayer” of her own impulse to sustain the pregnancy. She thought of the abortion as a bitter but necessary experiment, a way “to continue to write” into uncharted psychic territory. Framing the choice as artistic helped her alchemize the lonely bus ride to an underground clinic in mining country, and the life-changing grief that came after. But one experiment was enough. The next time she conceived with Baraka, she would give birth to her second daughter, Dominique.

Misogyny continued to structure her life among artists, but she behaved as though mutual aid, free love and poetry itself would pave her way forward. Remarkably often, that’s what happened. She moved to California in 1968, where she stayed for the rest of her life, establishing a crucial link between the New York avant-garde and San Francisco’s emergent counterculture. For a while, she kept a “Free Bank” on the top of her refrigerator — just “a shoe box full of money” for anyone who needed it.

In “Revolutionary Letter #46,” she warned the skeptics: “As you learn the magic, learn to believe it/Don’t be ‘surprised’ when it works.” But di Prima’s faith in the power of poetry to produce solidarity and social change was also a kind of performance — not false at all, but a way of rehearsing, repeatedly, for the world she wished to live in.

[Read the Time’s obituary of Diane di Prima.]

Carina del Valle Schorske is a writer and translator living between San Juan, P.R., and New York City. Her first book, “The Other Island,” is forthcoming from Riverhead.

Imahara at a birthday party in Los Angeles in 2014. Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images

Grant Imahara
b. 1970

He was in love with engineering and robotics before it was cool to be that sort of geek.

In a 2011 episode of the Discovery show “Mythbusters,” the robotics expert Grant Imahara procures the skull of a German shepherd and outfits it with a pneumatic cylinder, giving him full control of both the speed and force of the bite. Imahara and his castmates are trying to test one of many urban myths submitted by the show’s fans: Bedliner, the coating used to protect pickup trucks, was veritably indestructible — if it was sprayed on fabric, could it render clothing dog-bite proof? To begin investigating this question, Imahara sets an apple between the jaws of his robot, hits the switch and is delighted to be splattered with applesauce as they snap shut. “I’d call that successful,” he tells the camera through rounds of laughter. He calibrates his new pet to deliver 400 pounds of pressure while his co-hosts apply bedliner to the sleeves of several jackets, then stuff a fake arm inside each one to be offered to the teeth of Imahara’s machine. Robo Chomp performs his only trick, the jaws clamp around the trial sleeves and when the team inspects the results, their fake arms survive unmaimed — evidence that this myth had merit (though the coated jacket looks too stiff for natural movement, really only good to stand waiting around for angry dogs).

When Imahara was a kid, Legos provided his gateway to engineering. At 7, his got his first computer. (After that there was “no more going outdoors. Ever. For anything,” he said.) Around the same time, his mother took him to Mann’s Chinese Theater, where “Star Wars” was on the big screen, and by the time the credits rolled, Imahara was head over wheels for C-3PO and R2-D2. Engineering came easily to him — he earned a degree from U.S.C. and was soon making electronic wonders for film and TV. He worked on the Energizer Bunny; created an animatronic skeleton named Geoff Peterson to serve as sidekick on “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson”; and was hired by George Lucas’s effects house, Industrial Light & Magic, to upgrade and operate his beloved R2-D2 for the “Star Wars” prequels.

Despite his mounting accomplishments, Imahara was sensitive about being seen as a nerd. His biggest passions were regarded as geeky — essentially kid stuff. Fon Davis, a close friend and a colleague at ILM, remembers they both hid the fact that they attended conventions for sci-fi, comics and cosplay on the weekends. Adam Savage, one of the two founding stars of “Mythbusters,” said that whenever he made a particularly deep-cut dork joke, he could see chagrin in Imahara as he clocked the reference. To be a superfan of science and fantasy was considered, well, lame. Imahara, like a lot of young Americans, wanted to be cool.

On the show, he shone as a natural science communicator and a hotshot engineer. He was obviously stoked to be doing what he was doing — mounting a laser sight to a bamboo blowgun, flipping over a car with a nitrogen cannon or building a dummy with frangible bones to be dropped from a helicopter. He grinned even when it wasn’t his turn to talk, often broke into unscripted giggling when his castmates teased him. Sometimes when he was really surprised or excited, his eyebrows shot up and then shot up even higher a beat later, like a two-stage detonation. For Imahara, science wasn’t something to be draped in pristine lab coats and Latin names — science was for off-roading. It was goofy and irreverent and full of explosions.

The show became a surprise hit for Discovery. A generation of future engineers, tinkerers and roboticists leaned into the screen, enamored with the model of what they could become. And as Imahara’s star rose, he grew into his skin. He made time to answer fans’ questions about 3-D printers and coding, volunteered with a high school robotics team, cut a handsome figure in a suit on red carpets and began to worry less about seeming like a nerd. The world was changing — ComicCon went mainstream, Target started selling maker kits — and Imahara helped catalyze that change. Imahara’s wasn’t the story in which the kid in the science lab takes off his glasses to become suddenly recognizable as prom king material. His is the story that has the popular kids shrugging off their Starter jackets and scrambling to put on safety googles.

Adam Savage remembers the day Imahara came over to show off his new “Battlestar Galactica” flight suit as a particular triumph. Imahara had the thing custom made in Ohio (the serpentine green-blue fabric was tough to get just right), complete with a bank of glowing lights on the right forearm and the scaled body armor. He did a half spin for Savage before striking a hero pose. This was Imahara in full glory. “And that was like, Yeah, dude, we’re here now. This is what you do. And I’m going to exalt with you.” Grant Imahara didn’t become cool. He helped expand the definition of cool, to make room for more people like him.

[Read the Times’s obituary on Grant Imahara.]

Dessa is a writer and a musician; her most recent album is “Sound the Bells.”

Courtesy of Allison Tripp Foley

Linda Tripp
b. 1949

She was cast as the ultimate villain during the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Late one night in February 2004, a pregnant horse dropped into Linda Tripp’s swimming pool. The horse’s name was Oksana. She had wandered into Tripp’s backyard and, mistaking a pool covering for solid ground, fell in. Tripp, the former civil servant whose audiotapes of Monica Lewinsky led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton six years earlier, was at home. She and her husband, Dieter Rausch, ran out and found Oksana thrashing near the deep end. Tripp called for help, but her property sits at the end of a series of gravel roads in rural Virginia. If they waited, Oksana could drown. After Rausch cut the pool cover, Tripp’s daughter, Allison, dived in to rescue Oksana. Eventually the fire department arrived and pulled Oksana out of the pool. A month later Oksana gave birth to a healthy foal.

Before Allison told me this story, I’d heard it from Leon Neyfakh, who interviewed Linda Tripp in 2018 for his podcast, “Slow Burn,” but ended up not using the anecdote. Like the ducks that once landed in Tony Soprano’s pool, the horse story seemed to contain some key symbolism — but what was it exactly? To review: In 1996, Lewinsky, a former White House intern, found her way to Tripp’s cubicle at the Pentagon and soon began confiding in Tripp about her affair with the president. But the ground was not solid. Tripp made secret recordings of their conversations, which she then gave to Ken Starr, an independent counsel investigating the president. She said she did this to help Lewinsky. So who was the horse? And who was drowning? Did anyone actually get saved in that story?

Tripp was portrayed not as the hero but as the villain of the impeachment scandal at the time. The tapes confirmed the affair, but they also revealed Tripp’s sustained deception. It was Tripp who had encouraged Lewinsky to not dry-clean the blue Gap dress; to ask the president for a job; to use a messenger service to send him letters — all to build a body of evidence.

Recent years have been kinder to women once judged harshly. See Hollywood’s rehabilitation of Tonya Harding, Marcia Clark and Lorena Bobbitt. Lewinsky, everyone now seems to agree, was taken advantage of by her boss and slut-shamed by the country. Tripp is unlikely to ever get the same redemption. But now that there is a better understanding of how stories are told and by whom, reducing her to a one-note villain feels like lazy storytelling. “Restoring humanity to her doesn’t in any way let her off the hook,” the filmmaker Blair Foster told me. “It only makes her more interesting.” With her A&E documentary series “The Clinton Affair,” Foster set out to return full personhood not only to Lewinsky, but also to Paula Jones, who described Clinton inviting her to his hotel room, where he exposed himself to her; and to Juanita Broaddrick, who accused him of rape. (Clinton has denied both allegations.) Like those women, Tripp was eviscerated in the press. On “Saturday Night Live,” she was played by John Goodman, who screwed his face into a rodentlike grimace and shoveled fast food into his mouth. The crux of the joke was her weight and her looks. “The president got to be a fully formed human who’s flawed and complex,” Foster said, “but the women were always reduced to stereotypes, and that includes Linda.”

Allison told me that to understand her mother you have to begin with her childhood in New Jersey, in the 1950s. Tripp’s father was an American soldier when he met her mother, then a teenager, in Germany, where he was stationed. He was unfaithful and physically abusive, and, according to Allison, Tripp received regular beatings. “A raging bully,” is how Tripp later described him. “It is probably a good part of the reason that I could not tolerate the behavior of Bill Clinton, the supreme bully, all those years later,” she wrote in her book, “A Basket of Deplorables.” Eventually her father ran off with another woman, leaving Tripp with no money for college. She attended a secretarial school and at 21 married an army lieutenant. Once they divorced in 1990, Tripp’s career thrived. She got a job in the Bush White House and stayed on for the Clintons. In 1993, she was transferred to the Pentagon, where Lewinsky arrived three years later.

One of the great mysteries is why Tripp did what she did. The reasons given at the time — mostly not by her — were myriad: She was an opportunist after a book deal, seeing how it was the book agent, Lucianne Goldberg, who advised her to record Lewinsky; she was part of that “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary was always talking about; she loathed the Clintons, whom she saw as hippies invading the White House (among the offenses she lists in her book were their jeans, takeout boxes and “rings left by soda cans”). But according to Tripp, it was none of the above. She felt it was her moral duty to expose the president and rescue Lewinsky from a man she considered a sexual predator.

It’s plausible that Tripp wanted to hold someone she saw as a bad man accountable. But that doesn’t feel like the whole story. Was publicly humiliating Lewinsky the best way to save her? Or to entrust the matter to a special counsel and a book agent? Did Tripp not see that or did she choose not to? “That’s the ultimate question, Did she believe that herself?” Neyfakh said. “And the answer to that, I think, is yes.”

Tripp was deeply hurt by how she was perceived. Starting in 1999, she had extensive plastic surgery, including a nose job, a chin implant and a face-lift. “I did not realize how ugly I was until I saw the pictures,” she told “20/20.” Then she mostly retreated from public view. She moved to Middleburg, Va., and married Rausch, a childhood friend from summers she spent visiting her mother’s family in Germany. Together they opened the Christmas Sleigh, a year-round holiday store. “Lovely gal” was how Joanne M. Swift, the owner of the shop next door, described her. Punkin Lee, who owns Journeymen Saddlers, where Tripp shopped sometimes, told me: “People are people. We take them as people. Not what you read about them.”

A few years ago, Tripp’s granddaughter, Payton, learned about her grandmother in school. “Omi … were you a bad person?” Payton asked. And so Tripp set out to clear her legacy. She began writing a book, but died before she could finish it. Her co-writer finished it without her, giving the book its title, which Allison described as “a slap in the face.” (It is out this month, posthumously.)

It’s hard to know how Tripp saw her story in the end. On “Slow Burn,” she sounded regretful about deceiving Lewinsky. “To this day I have enormous guilt about doing that,” she said. I expected more of this when I picked up her book. But that’s not what it is. Tripp’s ire for the Clintons in it is boundless. Her writing on Lewinsky — whom she calls narcissistic, a flake and a pampered princess — is unkind. She says they were never really friends, and so hers wasn’t really a betrayal, and anyway Lewinsky’s betrayals of other people were far worse. Part of what makes it all hard to read is the obvious hurt and anger of someone who felt so fundamentally misunderstood. The more evidence Tripp mounts to clear her name, the more it is like watching a thrashing animal unable to escape a trap of her own making.

[Read the Times’s obituary of Linda Tripp.]

Irina Aleksander is a contributing writer for the magazine. She last wrote about the unraveling of the fashion industry.

Hoare in Congo in 1965. Don McCullin/Camera Press/Redux

Mike Hoare
b. 1919

He made a career out of being a mercenary, but this was no way to run a coup.

It was the fruit in the French tourist’s suitcase that set everything off. Until then, the operation was going smoothly. Mike Hoare and dozens of burly men were swaggering through the Mahé airport in the Seychelles islands, just a friendly rugby club on vacation — the Ancient Order of Froth Blowers, with the luggage tags to match. They charmed the airline attendants, showing off their bags of toys collected for orphans, and lined up politely at customs.

No one had any idea that “Mad Mike” Hoare had been a leader of mercenaries in central Africa, that he had dueled with Che Guevara in Congo, that his exploits had already inspired a Hollywood film. Nor that this trim former accountant with the grandfatherly air had been secretly planning this mission for years. Nor that he had outfitted the toy-filled suitcases with secret compartments, which were now packed with assault rifles.

On Nov. 25, 1981, Hoare and his Froth Blowers had come to this far-flung island in the middle of the Indian Ocean to overthrow France-Albert René, the Marxist president of the Seychelles. But then an airport security guard stopped that French tourist in the customs line and found the tropical contraband in his bag, according to “The Seychelles Affair,” Hoare’s memoir about the debacle. Now the same security guard looked more closely at the next suitcase, which happened to belong to a Froth Blower. And, well, so much for the plans.

A fellow mercenary threw the security guard up against the wall; gunfire broke out and tourists scattered. In the mayhem, one Froth Blower fatally shot another. “I had no choice,” Hoare, the group’s ringleader, wrote. “We must start the coup now. At once.”

Hoare was decades removed from his high-flying years as a soldier for hire in Congo when, as he recounted it, a well-dressed gentleman, whom he referred to as Monsieur X, approached him at a dinner party in Durban, got him behind a grand piano and, in hushed tones, made him a proposition: How would he like to overthrow the Seychelles government?

Hoare was a passionate anti-Marxist, but politics were only part of the allure. Hoare lived for adventure, and despite his recent time as an accountant, or maybe because of it, he launched “a cut-price coup,” as he described it in his book. He estimated he would need $5 million to overthrow the Seychelles government. He was able to raise only $300,000, he wrote.

But, resourceful and clever, and with a taste for the theatrical, Hoare pressed on with his D.I.Y. intrigue. He made the false-bottom suitcases and designed the Froth Blowers’ logo himself — a foaming mug of beer with the group’s initials. With assistance from shadowy South African intelligence operatives, he signed up men — “tough, adventurous and ready to take an almighty risk” — who agreed to go to battle for an advance of $1,000 each.

As the plot quickly unraveled inside the airport, a passenger plane whose vacationers were oblivious to the tumult on the ground landed on the darkened Mahé runway. In Hoare’s telling, his own men informed him that the coup was over. They were leaving the Seychelles on that passenger plane, and he was coming with them. Hoare agreed, reluctantly. “There was no point in being a dead hero,” he wrote. (“Hero” was rather generous.)

The captain of the hijacked plane, Umesh Saxena, published his own book about the misadventure. He described Hoare as a “short, lean and old guy in early 60s,” but he said Hoare was very polite, almost apologetic. They came to an understanding: Hoare and his dozens of mercenaries would join the other passengers on the flight; Saxena would spirit them away; no one would get hurt. Hoare and his men debated where to flee — Oman? Mauritius? They settled on South Africa and took their fallen comrade’s corpse with them, wrapped in a makeshift shroud.

Decades later, passengers recalled the locker-room smell of the brawny men as they squeezed down the aisle, weapons in tow, pushing into empty seats. Deepa Narayan and Ron Parker were passengers traveling to India to see her parents. “It was dark, so you couldn’t see, but as the men walked past you could see they were wearing shorts,” Narayan told me. “We got our own hijacker who sat next to me. I said hello to him and he said hello back.”

The men were rowdy — they whooped and hollered as the plane took off, and Narayan recalled one of them waving a pair of women’s underwear as he moved up and down the aisle — but Hoare sat quietly in the front, an isolated figure among his merry pirates. It was past midnight, and the Indian Ocean, some 38,000 feet below, was black as ink. “We were safe now,” he wrote. “Safe to face the stark reality of failure.”

And prison: The old mercenary would be sentenced to 10 years, though he would be released after three, thanks to a reprieve for elderly inmates.

[Read The Times’s obituary of Mike Hoare.]

Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor for The Times.

Konrad Steffen in Northwest Greenland in 2009. William Colgan/CIRES/GEUS

Konrad Steffen
b. 1952

The very ice melt he warned would threaten the planet turned out to be his undoing.

In 1978, Konrad Steffen, the Swiss glaciologist, spent several months doing research on an island in the Canadian Arctic. One evening, returning alone to base camp, he triggered a miniature avalanche that destroyed his snowmobile and left him unconscious. When he awoke, his jaw hung loose from its socket and a bone jutted from his leg. “It was a beautiful view,” Steffen once told me. “I can still remember: I was on a mountain, and I looked down and had no idea what the hell I was doing there.” It took him about four hours, primarily from reading his field book, to figure out where — and who — he was. Ten hours passed before one of his colleagues rescued him. Steffen had written a goodbye letter to his girlfriend at the time, Regula Werner, whom he would eventually marry. He never showed Werner the letter, though he always kept it tucked in future field books, just in case.

Steffen’s role as one of the most prominent voices raising the alarm about the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet would be facilitated, in no small measure, by his throwback image as a scientist-adventurer from a bygone era. He had a thick beard, seemed impervious to the cold and spoke English in a guttural Swiss-German accent that gave even his direst pronouncements a jolly air. He first came to Greenland in 1990 for a planned two-year project to measure how the climate interacted with the ice sheet. But cooler than usual temperatures — the result of a sunlight-blocking volcanic eruption in the Philippines in 1991 — left Swiss Camp, the remote research station Steffen built, buried in snow. At the end of his project, with excavation impossible, E.T.H. Zurich, his university, offered to sell him the station for one dollar. “I called my new program manager,” Steffen recalled, “and said, ‘I have this great deal … ’”

Swiss Camp, three large heated tents atop a wooden platform, was a half-hour helicopter ride from the nearest town. When I arrived in 2008 to report a story for Rolling Stone, I felt like I’d landed on the surface of the moon. A frozen, featureless world stretched in every direction, icy winds blistered any sliver of exposed skin and night never came, only an eerie perpetual twilight. Steffen, however, seemed wholly in his element, the very size of his personality — his booming voice, the bottomless well of amazing stories — perfectly calibrated to reassure less sure-footed newcomers.

For the next several days, I rode around the ice sheet on the back of Steffen’s snowmobile, which he regularly gunned to upward of 50 miles per hour. “It can go much faster, but I didn’t want to give you an uncomfortable ride,” he chuckled. One of the expeditionary goals of Steffen’s annual spring trips to Greenland involved performing basic maintenance on his weather stations. The previous summer, in a stark sign of the increased warming, the melt had been so significant that several of the stations toppled over, only to be buried in the subsequent winter snowfall. At one of the sites, Steffen yanked up his parka, lit a cigarette, jumped into the pit dug by his graduate students and happily announced the weather station was still recording.

The life of the Arctic researcher means weeks of isolation from loved ones spent alternately in vast, inhospitable open spaces or extremely tight living quarters. At the end of each day at Swiss Camp, Steffen insisted on leisurely meals and good conversation. One night he made Swiss fondue, served with shots of kirsch. Everyone called Steffen “Koni,” pronounced to rhyme with “Johnny.” He had a droll sense of humor. Before his graduate students left for Greenland, he had them watch “The Thing,” the horror movie set in an Antarctic research station. Once, he told me, he brought the decapitated head of a polar bear — a gift from Inuit hunters; the bear had been stalking Steffen’s campsite — to an elementary school parents’ day at the insistence of one of his children, only to have the rest of the class burst into tears. “I thought, Oh, this was a mistake,” he said.

Owning Swiss Camp allowed Steffen to return to the same site each year, a rare opportunity in scientific field research. In 2019, June temperatures in Greenland rose to as much as 40 degrees higher than normal. Steffen predicted the melting of the ice sheet could pass a threshold of irreversibility in as little as 50 years, eventually resulting in a global sea-level rise of 16 feet.

Before my own trip to Greenland, Steffen had warned me about crevasses, which remained covered by snow in the spring, but could break under your weight. Assuring me of his ability to spot even buried ones, Steffen said, “I try to go first,” stomping his foot spiritedly.

In August, however, not far from Swiss Camp — an area where, before the accelerated melting, crevasses had been unheard-of — Steffen left his colleagues to do some routine work and never returned. Authorities later determined he had fallen into a crevasse and drowned in the water pooled beneath the ice. Ryan R. Neely III, a climate scientist who had studied under Steffen, told The New York Times: “In the end, it looks like climate change actually claimed him as a victim.” The word “victim,” with its implication of a crime, is entirely appropriate, though Steffen, who understood, and to some degree relished, the risks inherent in his field work, might have stressed another: “eyewitness.”

[Read the Times’s obituary of Konrad Steffen.]

Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote a feature about the filmmaker Frederick Wiseman.

Correction: Jan. 3, 2021
An earlier version of this article misstated a prediction made by Konrad Steffen, a Swiss glaciologist. He predicted the melting of the ice sheet covering Greenland could pass a threshold of irreversibility in as little as 50 years, which would eventually result in a global sea-level rise of 16 feet.

Jones, in front, as the manager pours in a cleaning agent, 1964. Horace Cort/Associated Press

Mimi Jones
b. 1947

From a young age, she understood the power of public resistance.

When Mimi Jones was 17, she leapt into a Florida swimming pool, expecting trouble. It was June 1964 in St. Augustine, a tourist town heavy with humidity and hate. The Ku Klux Klan and others harnessed guns, firebombs, death threats, clubs and fists against Black demonstrators protesting segregation. The police relied on cattle prods and German shepherds. Days before, Jones and at least a dozen other activists traveled 250 miles by bus from Albany, Ga., to take part in the demonstrations. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had labeled St. Augustine — where the Rev. Andrew Young was brutally beaten, where King and hundreds of others were arrested — as the most “lawless” city he had worked in. It was the only place where the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s hospital bills exceeded its food and lodging bills.

Jones (whose name at the time was Mamie Ford) did not scare easily. Serious and determined, a straight-A student, she had just finished her junior year of high school but was already a civil rights veteran. Starting at around 15, inspired by her minister, the Rev. Samuel B. Wells, a formidable leader who oversaw an army of teenage activists, she knocked on doors and chatted on porches, encouraging people to register to vote. She taught reading to illiterate Black Georgians so they could pass poll literacy tests, and she demonstrated at the Dairy Queen and other establishments that either were segregated or refused to hire Black people. Throughout her teens, she was arrested again and again.

In the spring of 1964, the Civil Rights bill, which would end segregation in public places and ban employment discrimination, was stalled in the Senate. Hosea Williams, a brash, fearless S.C.L.C. tactician (King affectionately called him “my wild man”) had an idea: a swim-in at the segregated Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine. It would draw attention and, hopefully, help push through the bill. Civil rights activists had been protesting in the city for weeks, and the police had recently arrested King and others for trying to enter the Monson’s whites-only restaurant. The location was ideal for a movement dependent on public sympathy and outrage: Near lots of foot traffic, the hotel was also a favorite among out-of-town journalists.

The plan was simple: Two white activists would rent a room and then invite Black swimmers as their pool “guests.” But when Williams announced it at a church meeting hall, few Black hands went up. Many of them didn’t know how to swim.

For decades, Black people had been banned from public pools and whites-only beaches. Jones and her 13 siblings, however, grew up near several creeks in southwest Georgia. Jones learned to swim in one and was baptized by Wells in another. Now in St. Augustine, Jones and her younger sister Altomease volunteered.

Around 12:45 p.m. on Thursday, June 18, Jones and a group of Black demonstrators — including 22-year-old J.T. Johnson, who had been a lifeguard in Albany, and Brenda Darten, 21, who was expelled from Albany State College for protesting — climbed out of two cars in front of the pool.

Jones and the others hopped over a low chain fence surrounding the pool and plunged in, joining the two white demonstrators. A few moments later, James Brock, the hotel manager, arrived, in his dark sunglasses, a pencil tie and a brow furrowed in anger. He had just finished waging another battle across the parking lot, shoving rabbis and other protesters in front of his restaurant into waiting police cars.

At the pool, the swimmers chatted and splashed around, ignoring Brock. “The water’s fine, isn’t it?” one of them called out. Brock grabbed two plastic jugs of muriatic acid, a cleaning agent, and began circling the pool, shaking the liquid into it. Drops landed near Jones and Darten’s heads. Jones could feel the fumes in her nose and eyes.

By then a cadre of cops was also trying to rid the pool of Black bodies. A deputy sheriff suggested calling in the dogs. Another police officer smacked his baton against the water, trying to force the swimmers out. Then Henry Billitz, an off-duty cop, jumped into the pool, fully dressed, save for his socks and shoes. He swung at Al Lingo, one of the white protesters; another person hit Peter Shiras, the other white swimmer, as he left the pool. Within minutes the police arrested the entire group. Jones was charged with “deliberate disturbance of the peace,” “malicious trespassing” and “conspiracy.” She was hauled off to jail in her pale checkered one-piece bathing suit with spaghetti straps, soaking wet.

Jones didn’t know it then, but in less than 24 hours photos of her would land on the front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers. One showed Billitz suspended in midleap above the water and the swimmers’ heads. In the other, Jones held onto Lingo as Brock poured acid behind her, her mouth open wide, as if in midscream.

After seeing the photos, President Lyndon Johnson told an adviser: “Our whole foreign policy and everything else will go to hell over this!” That same day, the Senate finally voted to pass the Civil Rights bill.

Jones would leave the South — after helping to desegregate Albany High School in her senior year — for college and eventually to marry and raise a son and to champion education, immigrants and the poor. It wasn’t until her late 60s that Jones returned to St. Augustine, this time for the filming of Clennon L. King’s documentary “Passage at St. Augustine: The 1964 Black Lives Matter Movement That Transformed America.” One of her first stops was the pool. The Monson Motor Lodge was now a Hilton, and the old pool had been replaced with a new one. Standing beside it, she slipped off her boots and dipped her toes in. She wanted to feel the water again. This time without fear.

Maggie Jones is a contributing writer for the magazine and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

Reddy rocks the ’70s. GAB Archive/Getty Images

Helen Reddy
b. 1941

She hit No. 1 with an anthem of female empowerment, and her own life was proof of what it took to get there.

Any appraisal of 1970s pop music usually involves, and in some cases devolves into, some of the following arguments: disco versus punk; sensitive troubadours versus glam gods; Barry Manilow versus Led Zeppelin. Often lost among these discussions is just how rich a time it was for female artists, and especially for fans of female artists. In line at a record-store cash register one night in 1973, I looked down and realized that my selections, all four of them, were by women. These songs included the latest singles by Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield and Melanie; the newest member of the quartet was “Peaceful,” Helen Reddy’s follow-up to “I Am Woman.”

If you know anything about Reddy, it probably starts with that song and its insistent refrain, “I am strong/I am invincible/I am woman.” Reddy wrote most of the lyrics to the future feminist anthem in 20 minutes in 1971, but they were at least a decade in coming. In her early 20s, she left her alcoholic first husband while she was still living in her native Australia, when he became physically abusive during her pregnancy. “Once was enough,” she wrote in her 2006 memoir, “The Woman I Am.” “I would not risk losing the baby I had prayed for.” After winning a singing contest, she moved to the United States in the mid-1960s with a toddler in tow, $230 in her purse and hopes for a career in music, but she was told by one male record executive after another that no one was interested in a “girl singer.” She had to hector her second husband, who was also her manager, to finally secure her a record deal. By the time he did, she was nearing 30, the usual expiration age for pop stardom. Rather than detail her grievances, “I Am Woman” offered a triumphant message of validation, and it landed just as the second wave of feminism was cresting, when Carole King’s “Tapestry” album was ruling the charts, Shirley Chisholm was running for president and Roe v. Wade was being decided. Reddy would claim that of the million or so people who bought “I Am Woman,” eight out of 10 were women. When she accepted a Grammy for her vocal on the song, besting Franklin, Carly Simon, Roberta Flack and Barbra Streisand, Reddy famously thanked God, “because she makes everything possible.”

But you didn’t have to be a woman, or even like “I Am Woman,” to appreciate Reddy. Maybe that’s as sacrilegious as saying you like Franklin but never cared for “Respect,” or Nirvana but not “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Sometimes, though, when a career moment turns into a monument, it can overshadow everything else. In Reddy’s case, “I Am Woman,” and a few of the monster hits that followed, like “Delta Dawn” and “Leave Me Alone,” were far from her best; they could seem squarely on the nose, catchy but kitschy, passing tones on the way to something better on the radio.

Dig a little deeper into Reddy’s catalog, and you’ll find the goods — songs like “Emotion,” “Gladiola,” “What Would They Say” and, especially, “Bluebird.” Written by the great Leon Russell, “Bluebird” had a chill disco backbeat, but the jazzy melody and wistful lyric would have made it welcome on Ella Fitzgerald’s set list. On these tracks, Reddy, like the best vocalists of any era, made musical intelligence sound sexy, and her versatility extended her appeal to, at any given time, rock critics and the cocktail-shaker set.

Reddy placed at least one song in the Top 40 every year for seven years, but then “maybe radio listeners needed a break,” she wrote. “I know I did.” By the time of the next women’s wave in music, with the likes of Madonna, Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson, she had pivoted to theater — I saw her give a strong performance in “Blood Brothers” on Broadway in 1995 — and she left show business altogether for a while to study clinical hypnotherapy. She wondered if “I Am Woman” had been all for naught in the age of “Material Girl.” “I was asked many times if I still believed in feminism! As if it had been a fad like mood rings and pet rocks.”

Reddy did have a last round of concerts in her, and I caught one of those final shows in Provincetown, Mass., in 2014. The draw was clearly the big hits, based on how the audience — women and men, Reddy’s era and younger, mostly gay — practically drowned her out singing along to them. I was hoping she’d include some of my favorite deeper cuts, but as the show went on, my hopes sagged; there was no “Emotion,” no “Gladiola.” Then, near the end, there it was: “Bluebird,” and she sang it with all the heart and salty affirmation she brought to the song 40 years earlier. “I Am Woman” closed the show, and it sounded newly relevant. Its hold-your-head-up message had never really lost currency, and in a town long known to be a gay haven, the song itself seemed a safe harbor, from which songs like “Bluebird,” and probably many other great recordings by women, had set sail. As we poured into the street with “I am strong/I am invincible” fresh in our ears, I found myself thinking of a different Reddy lyric, from “Peaceful”: “Maybe someday you’ll up and say we had a pretty nice time.” Another estimable songwriter, Kenny Rankin, a man, may have written it. But leave it to a woman to make it sing.

[Read The Times’s obituary of Helen Reddy.]

Rob Hoerburger is the copy chief of the magazine and the author of the novel “Why Do Birds.”

Stanley Chera in 2011. Pako Dominguez/Alamy

Stanley Chera
b. 1942

The New York real estate mogul was, in some ways, a foil to Trump — and was on the president’s mind as he went to Walter Reed.

Shortly after his Covid diagnosis — fever spiking, hooked up to an oxygen tank — Donald Trump reportedly wondered aloud to an aide, “Am I going out like Stan Chera?” Like so many things the president has said, the line felt instantly like a catchphrase: the slick choice of “going out” instead of “dying,” the zeroing in on one old New York friend as the face of a massive global pandemic. Coming from a president whose inner self is so deeply intertwined with its media reflection, the question seemed to offer a rare glimpse at something primal — but what did it mean, if anything at all? Stanley Chera, the New York real estate mogul, who died of Covid-19 in April, was only reluctantly a public figure. Quietly strategic and private about his fortunes, he was in many ways Trump’s foil.

Trump entered real estate in 1968, backed by untaxed gifts of family money and his father’s already-vast empire of apartment buildings. Chera got his start about a decade later, using income from his family’s department stores to buy a few retail buildings in Downtown Brooklyn. While Trump began immediately to raise the stakes — rebranding as the Trump Organization and diving headfirst into mountains of debt to buy A-list properties in Manhattan — Chera would wait until 1989 to make his entree into inner-borough holdings. He first appeared in the Times Real Estate section as one participant in a skirmish over four skyscrapers previously owned by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the kleptocratic ex-dictator and first lady of the Philippines. When all the dust finally settled, Chera and his fellow investors walked away with Herald Center, the retail complex across from the flagship Macy’s store, which soon became Manhattan’s first Toys “R” Us.

Over the course of the next four decades, Chera quietly established himself as a key player in Manhattan real estate. His empire grew through collaboration as much as competition, by partnering with the other dynasties of the Syrian-Jewish business community. Buying a skyscraper is a team effort; investors, lenders and tenants must come together, often before any paperwork is signed. Chera had a talent for uniting these three parties. In an age of “shoppertainment,” his own specialty was repositioning retail — renovating an old store to better attract the next hot megatenant. At various points, his firm, Crown Acquisitions, held an interest in the city’s top shopping destinations, from the big Hollister at Broadway and Houston to the bigger Forever 21 in Times Square.

Many of Chera’s most prized properties were located on Fifth Avenue, on the few blocks surrounding Trump Tower. The two men met in the 1980s, almost inevitably. But Chera’s most public entanglement with the Trump extended universe came in the form of 666 Fifth Avenue — a seemingly cursed skyscraper purchased by Jared Kushner’s company just before the 2008 financial crisis for $1.8 billion, a record-setting price at the time. Chera’s Crown was brought in to help develop the retail concern. Partnering with the Carlyle Group, the firm bought the old tenants, including Brooks Brothers, out of their lease and reworked the space for a new Uniqlo flagship.

The deal showed a divide in how the two camps did their business: Kushner, who was then a 26-year-old scion, seemingly bought the tower in a ploy to raise his public profile; it started bleeding money almost immediately. Crown came in quietly, with limited exposure. According to an estimate by The Real Deal, a real-estate trade publication, the firm walked away with $25 million to $50 million in profits. In the years that followed, Chera would return to his roots, joining a multifamily effort to redevelop Fulton Mall in Downtown Brooklyn. He also started buying smaller outer-borough stores and leasing them to Duane Reade and Planet Fitness, two of the more ubiquitous chains in the city’s increasingly redundant landscape.

Chera established himself early on as a fervent supporter of Trump’s political career, hosting a fund-raiser in his home in the summer of 2016. Unlike other Trump compatriots, he wasn’t interested in joining the three-ring circus; his unwavering support seemed to be as much about personal loyalty as it was about politics. “Stanley and I were guests at the White House quite a bit,” says Steven Witkoff, a real estate investor and friend of Trump and Chera. These visits often took the form of dinner parties, where Trump could “decompress” and hang out with old friends. “We were not political people,” Witkoff says. “We were real estate people.”

This rote fidelity is certainly more boring than the striving martyrdom of a friend like Rudy Giuliani, but in most ways it is indicative of how our ascendant class of multimillionaires behaves. Trump may be a singular symbol of our present, but Chera more likely portends what is to come: ultrawealthy investors who treat their friends and family well and keep out of the spotlight. This is, by most accounts, a smarter way to protect your resources — amass them quietly. Trump may have been sick, but he never had a chance of going out like Stan Chera.

[Read the Times’s obituary of Stanley Chera.]

Jamie Lauren Keiles is a contributing writer for the magazine.

Seaver and his Mets teammate Gary Gentry at Shea Stadium after the World Series clincher in 1969. Bettmann/Getty

Tom Seaver
b. 1944

Even the greatest Met ever could have his heart broken by the Mets.

On the morning of June 16, 1978, one year after the Mets traded Tom Seaver to Cincinnati in a deal that came to be known as the Midnight Massacre, Seaver taught his 7-year-old daughter, Sarah, how to fill out a baseball scorecard. He showed her where to write the players’ names and explained what 6-4-3 meant, and BB, and FC, and all those backward Ks. By that night, at Riverfront Stadium, Sarah was putting her new skills to work as her father pitched for the Reds against the St. Louis Cardinals. “We got into probably the seventh inning or so,” she said recently, “and I notice Mom’s crying — every once in a while there’s a tear rolling down her cheek. And obviously I’m missing something, because there was just a weird mood in our section of the stands, and then the entire ballpark.”

Sarah was confused. She thought maybe she’d scored something wrong, but her mother had stopped responding to her questions. “She said: ‘I can’t — I can’t look at that right now.’ I didn’t know what was going on. Finally she said, ‘This is a very big game for Daddy.’ And I was like, Well, it wasn’t in the third inning. Eventually someone in the stands explained to me what a no-hitter was.”

For Mets fans, the sight of Tom Seaver completing the only no-hitter of his Hall of Fame career in front of 40,000 screaming Ohioans seemed to kill what remained of their appetite for baseball. A week later, at Shea Stadium, just 7,800 fans came out to watch a young starter and former Rookie of the Year named Pat Zachry — the centerpiece of the Seaver deal for the Mets — lose to the Montreal Expos. Six weeks later, Zachry was rocked for nine hits, and he took out his frustration on the top step of the Mets dugout, breaking his foot in the process and ending his season.

Tom Seaver will always be the greatest Met of all time, because he is the one who put the franchise on the map — the brilliant ace who led an expansion team to a championship in 1969, during just its eighth year of existence — but the rest of his saga was pure, for lack of a better word, Mets. He won three Cy Young awards in New York, along with two National League pennants and one World Series. He spent his first 10 seasons in Queens, started at least 30 games in all of them and never once had a losing record, despite pitching that whole time for the Mets. And the team showed its gratitude by kicking him in the teeth not once, not twice, but three times before he called it a career. The morning after he was traded to the Reds, The New York Post ran front-page photos of the teary-eyed pitcher and his college-sweetheart wife under the (misspelled) headline “Tom and Nancy Say Goodby.”

The story of Tom Terrific’s arrival in New York is often told as the predestined first act in the story of the ’69 Miracle Mets, but it was more like a series of blunders that culminated in young George Thomas Seaver washing up on the shore of Flushing Bay. He only reached New York because the Mets won a blind lottery held via conference call. But it was like the flipping of a switch: Suddenly the Mets’ blue and orange went bright neon, like Dylan’s going electric.

“We all felt like Seaver was so in command of himself,” his teammate Ron Swoboda said. “He was in control of his thoughts and his ideas and just about everything in his life, it seemed like.” Or, as the pitcher Jim McAndrew put it at the time, “All of us wanted to be Tom Seaver, and we weren’t.”

The World Series triumph that October, in five games over the chest-thumping, smack-talking Baltimore Orioles, elevated Seaver to that rare plateau of New York fame, in which he and Nancy were both on a first-name basis with the city. They starred in gasoline commercials together, and she was a fixture behind home plate at Shea, the former high school diver, as focused and intense in her seat as her husband was on the mound.

The Mets fell out with Seaver over money, of course. The team’s chairman, M. Donald Grant, refused to pay the market rate for the best pitcher in baseball, or really for anyone who was good at the game. Grant was old-school: He believed that players were meant to be seen and not paid. The Yankees’ brash new owner, George Steinbrenner, was meanwhile scribbling a $3 million offer to Reggie Jackson on a cocktail napkin at the O’Hare Hyatt and throwing in a free Rolls Royce to seal the deal. The Rolls alone was worth a third of Seaver’s 1977 salary. Three months after Grant cast Seaver out of Queens, Jackson and the Yankees brought the World Series trophy back to the Bronx.

The trade from New York devastated Seaver. (It did even more damage to the Mets, arguably: Two years later, the widower of the franchise’s founding owner unloaded the team for just $21 million.) But inside the Seaver household, Tom and Nancy sold Cincinnati to the girls as their next great family adventure. “We just packed up our sleeping bags in the back of the station wagon,” Sarah said, “and once school was out, Mom drove us out to Cincinnati.”

Five years later, Cincinnati shipped him right back to the Mets, and for one blissful season, in 1983, everything was right again in Tom Seaver’s world. He pitched the season opener at Shea. “We all cried,” Sarah said. “I think Mom must’ve expected it, but I did not. I was just looking for the hot-dog guy.” And then, that winter, the front office inexplicably left him unprotected in the 1984 free-agent compensation draft — the Chicago White Sox snatched him, and suddenly it was time for another Seaver family adventure.

Sarah was 13 at the time of this second sucker punch, old enough to see how much it hurt. “He didn’t really talk about it with us, but I do remember him being incredulous.” He’d always love his Metsies — that’s what he always called them, the Metsies — but the franchise itself? That was more complicated. From then on, according to Sarah, “there was scar tissue.” Seaver grew up a few hours from Napa Valley and spent summers working at the raisin factory where his father was a vice president; his plan was to retire as a Metsie and live out his days making wine. The Mets bungled the first part, but he did get to spend his last two decades on Seaver Vineyards in Calistoga.

His baseball career ended on the night of Oct. 27, 1986. He notched one last milestone with the White Sox — his 300th career win — and then Chicago traded him to a playoff contender in need of some veteran pitching depth: the Boston Red Sox. Maybe you see where this is going. Seaver hurt his knee in late September, so he didn’t pitch in the World Series, when the Mets faced the Red Sox. Swoboda believes this came as a kind of comfort to Seaver. “Maybe it was convenient that he didn’t have to put that closing on his career,” Swoboda said. “I bet you he didn’t mind that at all.”

He still had to watch it happen, though — the third blow from his former team. When the Mets clinched their only other World Series title since 1969, and the celebration began, and the scoreboard started flashing WE WIN, and the police horses galloped onto the field to turn back the revelers, no one had a better view than Tom Seaver. He was sitting right there in the Red Sox dugout.

[Read the Times’s obituary of Tom Seaver.]

Devin Gordon is a writer based in Brookline, Mass. He is the author of a forthcoming book about the Mets.

Hite in London in 1981. Trevor Leighton

Shere Hite
b. 1942

She explained how women orgasm — and was hated for it.

Shere Hite never set out to discover the female orgasm. As a child, she wanted to be either a classical composer or a person who could figure out how society got to be so “irrational.” But as she once told an interviewer, “How many women have you heard of becoming composers, right?” So she obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history instead, and in 1968, she enrolled in Columbia University’s Ph.D. program, where she ended up studying female sexuality.

Around that time, Hite modeled for extra money. She was booked for a television commercial for Olivetti typewriters that she later discovered was being used for an advertising campaign with the tagline “The Typewriter That’s So Smart, She Doesn’t Have to Be.” Hite was livid. She discovered that the National Organization for Women was protesting the campaign and decided to join them on the street. Soon after she became a member of NOW-NY.

By then she had dropped out of Columbia, disheartened by its conservative standards for her studies. She came up with the idea to create a questionnaire about women’s ability to orgasm for a NOW discussion; she found a printing press that was Quaker during the day, but cheap and agnostic at night, and printed her 58-question survey about female sexuality on pieces of colorful paper, to match the colorful topic. In 1972, she began distributing them via NOW, as well as abortion rights groups, university women’s centers, church newsletters and women’s magazines.

Hite received comprehensive responses: sometimes 14 or 15 pages, often from women who wrote in secret. Without university support, she culled the answers herself over nearly half a decade, surviving on about $10,000 a year.

“The Hite Report,” published in 1976, provoked a sexual revolution — the second smallest thing that year to elicit extensive male anxiety, the clitoris being the first. Subtitled “A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality,” it was based on the responses of more than 3,000 women, ages 14 to 78, who for the first time described how they felt about sex in their own words: what they liked, what they didn’t and, to great male shock, how vital clitoral stimulation was to orgasm.

Being asked these sorts of questions — No. 14, “How do you masturbate? Please give a detailed description”; No. 51, “Do you think your vagina and genital area are ugly or beautiful?” — was clearly the release these women needed. Hite ran pages of women’s responses to every question; the comments on faking orgasms ran over 10 pages, confessional, forlorn and funny: “Sometimes when I hate the partner and feel the state of my mind might lead him to violence.” “I went along for 34 years carrying the burden of not having vaginal orgasms, never telling anyone because I felt something was wrong with me.” “Yes, I always fake orgasms. It just seems polite.”

The book’s bombshell was that women couldn’t reliably orgasm from penetrative sex, contradicting the wildly accepted, Freudian theory that women who didn’t were broken; according Hite’s work, approximately 30 percent of women said they orgasmed regularly from intercourse. Of the 82 percent who said they masturbated, almost all of them orgasmed reliably from masturbation, which meant that women were orgasming all the time — they just didn’t really need men for it to happen. The problem, according to Hite, was our inaccurate expectations for sex. It didn’t have to be a contest or a recipe; instead, bodies should be in communication with each other. Penetration was not the only game in town.

After publication, Hite was lambasted for being a man-hater and berated by the Christian right for destroying traditional family values. Social scientists and book reviewers alike castigated her for using unrepresentative samples of women that didn’t match the census data in order to draw her conclusions, calling her findings flawed and unreliable. Critics started referring to her as “Sheer Hype.” Playboy, the country’s head cheerleader for male pleasure, referred to the book as “The Hate Report.”

She wrote three more reports, on men and sexuality, on women and love and on the family, each laden with new controversies, each receiving similarly vicious attacks. She received death threats and was followed by the paparazzi; she had to redirect her phone calls. It began taking a toll on her psyche: she invented staff members — a publicist and an assistant — and sometimes assumed their identities when she spoke to the press, using them to defend her work.

In 1995, she renounced her American passport and became a German citizen, claiming that the previous decade of intellectual attacks had left her unable to do the work she wanted. She lived in Europe until her death this year, writing one final book: “The Hite Report on Shere Hite: Voice of a Daughter in Exile,” an autobiography published in 2000. The first chapter describes, in innocent detail, the first time she masturbated: feeling a strong, foreign desire come over her and figuring out how to wriggle it out of her body. After all of her studies of women and men, pleasure and pain, of shame and disappointment, she realized that she’d had the ideal experience of discovering her sexuality: on her own. “Not hearing about it first through pornography or seeing naked bodies displayed for profit on every newsstand, but just alone in my room, in my own bed, finding my own sensual self.”

[Read the Times’s obituary on Shere Hite.]

Jazmine Hughes is a reporter for The Times’s Metro section and a staff writer for the magazine.

A mural depicting Breonna Taylor in Annapolis, Md. Julio Cortez/Associated Press

Breonna Taylor
b. 1993

People shared her name and image in grief and solidarity, but why didn’t it feel like enough?

Recently, while biking through Brooklyn, I glimpsed a freshly painted mural of a face that looked so familiar that I felt I knew it. In a way, I did. Breonna Taylor became so recognizable this year that she felt like a friend, a relative. That was the point. Her image — smiling, dimples dug deep, edges laid — was everywhere. I visited her regularly, at the beach, in an underpass that connects the parking lot to the boardwalk. I encountered her in Philadelphia, right in the middle of Baltimore Avenue, flanked by several gentle sentinels, who moved aside respectfully when I approached to pay my respects.

The Grammy Award-winning keyboardist PJ Morton and his daughter sang a dirge for Taylor on Instagram, where you barely needed a full finger-pull to see countless tributes in her honor. Oprah Winfrey devoted the cover of O Magazine to Taylor — the first time that someone other than Winfrey herself was featured. She appeared at the Emmys, on the shirts of the actors Regina King and Uzo Aduba as they accepted their awards, and she was there on the W.N.B.A.’s court, thanks to the player Angel McCoughtry, who inspired all 12 teams to wear Taylor’s name on their jerseys for the playoffs. LeBron James repurposed a MAGA hat in her honor, which he wore to news conferences. Naomi Osaka had seven embroidered masks custom-made for the U.S. Open, each featuring the name of an unjustly killed Black person, but she wore Taylor’s first, she told reporters, “because she was most important.”

The September issue of Vanity Fair. Amy Sherald/Vanity Fair

One name for this phenomenon is a haunting. I like the way the sociologist Avery Gordon considers a ghost to be something that lingers, rather than something that disappeared. Business left unfinished, as they say in the movies. And in this country, that unfinished business can almost always be traced back to slavery, and the way the terrors of the past resurface in the present. Ghosts interfere with our sense of time, confusing the delineation between now and then. Taylor’s death seemed to fold time onto itself, a gory wormhole. Were we in 2020 or 1820? The distortion was bewildering, with many of us asking ourselves: How can this keep happening?

Resharing her image was one way of reminding ourselves, and one another, that although deaths like hers are devastatingly normal in America, they do not have to be normalized. “A haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known,” Gordon writes in “Ghostly Matters.” “Especially when they are supposedly over and done with.” Taylor’s face haunted me this year, and although the social currency of sharing her image faded, her presence remains, still demanding its due.

In our culture these days, an image can be repeated only so many times before it becomes a meme. Memes have become a part of how we express grief and joy, how we make sense of our information-dense time and how we process otherwise-incomprehensible news. They are also a way of redirecting collective attention toward an idea or an issue that deserves it. The efforts to honor Taylor online were a prime example of this.

Taylor’s image projected onto a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Va. Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

Memes are also elastic, though, and difficult to control. They tend to reflect the perspective and behaviors of their creators or their spreaders, who riff on a meme as they pass it along. Even when we’re making or sharing memes in the name of solidarity, we are operating within a framework that “centers the self in an expression of support for others,” as Jia Tolentino deftly observed in her book “Trick Mirror.”

That’s one way to rationalize why the actor Lili Reinhart posted a nude photo of herself on Instagram, along with the caption: “Now that my sideboob has gotten your attention, Breonna Taylor’s murderers have not been arrested. Demand justice.” I’m sure Reinhart thought she was cleverly drawing attention to Taylor’s death, but it felt crude — the effect was more Dana Schutz than Atticus Finch. She wasn’t the only one whose protest was perceived to be in poor taste: There was the unfortunately titled BreonnaCon, organized by Black activists with the support of Taylor’s family, that included a panel on beauty and empowerment called “TaylorMade,” as well as a “Bre-B-Que,” held in Taylor’s hometown, Louisville. And then there were the millions of people who posted black squares on social media to show their outrage at killings like Taylor’s. It was meant to be an act of solidarity and support, but instead managed to drown out information and resources shared by organizers and activists. In some ways, Taylor’s hypervisibility was a relief — a necessary mirroring of pain and outrage — but it was also a relentless reminder of the fragility of Black life in America.

A billboard in a Louisville campaign sponsored by Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine; the campaign featured 26 billboards, one for every year Taylor was alive. Jon Cherry/Getty Images

By late August, as Taylor’s image entered peak circulation, the line between memorial and meme seemed discomfortingly thin. The internet felt full of feral attempts to prove that Black lives mattered — at least for the time being. The feeling was pervasive when Vanity Fair dropped its September cover, a regal portrait of Taylor painted by Amy Sherald, online. It quickly blanketed the internet, shared by admirers and critics alike. A popular observation on Twitter was that Taylor, alive, never would have been considered for the cover — raising a criticism that her death made her marketable, desirable. I myself felt a bit queasy thinking about the sick lottery that favored her rather than, say, Layleen Polanco, or Dominique Fells, or any of the other Black women who died horrifically and deserved the same amount of attention and fury. When I went to see the painting at Sherald’s studio, I was still unsure how I felt about its popularity.

Sitting face to face with the portrait, in a silent and empty room, I recognized the care that Sherald put into restoring Taylor’s agency post-mortem. In person, it was unmistakable. Online, it’s almost impossible to see that Taylor doesn’t just receive your gaze; she meets and returns it. I came to see Sherald as something like a mortician. She lovingly styled Taylor’s baby hairs, glossed her lips and painstakingly painted her French tips. The portrait helped me understand the function of memorials, even when they become memes. There’s an entire discipline of Black artists and academics who study the way Blackness operates online, and specifically through social media. The critic Aria Dean is among them. “The meme’s structure is at once its potential energy, its possibility and its limit,” she writes in a 2016 essay, “Rich Meme, Poor Meme.” Dean’s point is that while Black culture is especially adaptable to meme form — popular song lyrics, dances, slang and celebrities often fuel its potency — asserting power and ownership over that popularity has always been complicated. Black jubilation and Black death each have the tendency to go viral. “If there is liberation,” Dean writes, “it will not take place on corporate platforms, where Mark Zuckerberg profits directly from the reproduction of our deaths.”

The history of circulating images to generate empathy against racial violence is long and exhausting. Anti-lynching efforts in the late 1800s and early 1900s, for example, worked to expose mob murders as white terrorism. Pamphlets like “A Red Record,” written in 1895 by Ida B. Wells, included graphic images of lynchings to show how the grisly brutality of Black men was treated as spectacle and entertainment. It excerpted reports from white-run newspapers that justified the murders, contrasting them with its own reportage on how the victims were framed and killed. Yet Leigh Raiford, a scholar of art and social movements who teaches African-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, told me that decades of anti-lynching activism did not manage to end state-protected violence against Black people.

I thought about this history in late September when Daniel Cameron, the attorney general of Kentucky, announced in a news conference that Breonna Taylor’s killing was not considered murder by the state, despite months of online campaigning for her humanity and for justice. The heartbreak was devastating, a terrifying reminder of Black precarity.

But I’ve come to see the thousands of images of Taylor as a memory of our collective will — even though it was betrayed by the state. Anti-lynching efforts were ultimately successful in reshaping the historical and cultural memory of the brutality and immorality of those deaths. “We shouldn’t see them — or this — as a failure, but as a project on the road to redemption,” Raiford told me. She reminded me that memory and memorialization are necessary for that work, as is the honest appraisal of the past to work toward justice in the present and the future.

As winter arrives, the memorials have mostly faded from view. Yet many of us are still keeping vigil for Taylor — and George Floyd, Tony McDade and Walter Wallace Jr. and the 200 other Black people killed by the police in 2020 — and the whole host of persistent failures to protect Black life that we cannot forget. That we should not forget.

[Read more about Breonna Taylor.]

Jenna Wortham is a staff writer for the magazine and an editor of the anthology “Black Futures.”

Cecilia Chiang at home in San Francisco in 2019. Max Farago/Trunk Archive

Cecilia Chiang
b. 1920

She escaped war in China and landed in an America that was hungry for a new kind of Asian cuisine.

To 14-year-old Cecilia Chiang, a bicycle meant freedom. Freedom from being enclosed in a rickshaw, pulled by a servant who was an extension of her mother’s watchful eye. Freedom to ride fast, legs pumping, hair flying in the wind. With the resourcefulness that would allow her to reinvent herself repeatedly over the next century, Chiang managed to learn how to ride in secret before asking her parents for a bicycle of her own. After all, they had very specific ideas about what was proper for the kind of well-bred girls born to 52-room palaces in Beijing that once housed Ming dynasty officials. Impressed, her softhearted father agreed, and her mother reluctantly allowed it. China was modernizing, but a wife still followed her husband’s lead.

Until that moment, Chiang’s days as the seventh of 12 children had centered largely on her prosperous, opera-loving family. Her early life unfolded with an ordered ease. Everything had its season. Swallows and peonies heralded spring, a time for filled spring pancakes, fresh spring onions and lavish spring feasts where the adults drank wine and extemporized verses of poetry. The hot days of summer brought crisp, fragrant melons cooled in well water and refreshing pickles made of tiny cucumbers and tinier ears of corn. With fall came sweet crabs, steamed and served with dark rice vinegar and ginger, eaten in the preferred Chinese method: with great abandon. Chiang was rarely allowed in the kitchen, but the finely honed palate that would later be revered was already undergoing training.

In 1937, invading Japanese troops took over Beijing and commandeered most of the city’s food supplies. Residents survived on rice husks unless they had a family member like Chiang, who at around 18 began to ride her red Schwinn into the countryside searching for black-market provisions. It was an untenable existence. By 1943, with resources dwindling, Chiang and a sister set out for Chongqing, over 1,000 miles to the south. Disguised as peasants, in plain cotton coats that hid their fur-lined undergarments, they boarded a train loaded with bags that included formal dresses and silk stockings. Within weeks, the train service stopped abruptly, their luggage was stolen by Japanese soldiers and the young women found themselves walking or hitching rides on ox carts, sleeping in barns and once, memorably, voluntarily tied to ropes and dragged across a wide mud pit — it was the only way to avoid a lengthy detour — until they stumbled, dirty and lice-ridden, into the first border town that marked Free China.

Soon after, in the rough, bustling city of Chongqing, Nationalist party banners proclaiming “The Final Victory Is Ours!” hung everywhere, mapo tofu burbled in street-vendor stalls and the beautiful sisters soon befriended Gen. Chiang Kai-shek’s two sons and nephew. It was a heady, optimistic time. On the advice of a fortuneteller, Chiang discouraged the affections of dishy son No.2 and the good-natured cousin and instead married her former-professor-turned-businessman. Soon after, her husband was offered a job in Shanghai, a city whose cosmopolitan promise had always enthralled Chiang. The newlyweds enjoyed a decadent few years in the supper clubs and jazz lounges, but fortunes turn quickly in war, and by 1949 they were lucky to book tickets on the last plane out of the city, three weeks before it fell to the Communists.

By 1961, Chiang was in San Francisco. She spent the previous decade in Tokyo, and although she ran a successful restaurant there with friends, living among her country’s former occupiers must have rankled. America was, in all ways, a new world. Most Chinese restaurants at the time were Cantonese, with simple chop-suey menus tailored to supposed Western tastes, but Chiang was determined to present her version of China, with distinct regional preparations from Sichuan, Shanghai and Beijing. And somehow, it worked. Initially, the Mandarin was a small restaurant on Polk Street where Chiang served the San Francisco columnist Herb Caen his first potsticker. Soon she moved the business to Ghirardelli Square, with a million-dollar budget and strict instructions to her designer that there be “no gold, no red, no dragons, no lanterns.” The 300-seat Mandarin felt more like an old temple, decorated with antiquities that Chiang carefully bought at auction. The restaurant was her attempt to recreate the world of her childhood, a world that was ripped out of time by conflict and war. In its specificity, it spoke to a new generation of California chefs like Alice Waters, who also cared deeply about food that was local and seasonal.

For most of her early years in America, Chiang was unable to contact her parents. China was closed to the world, its people mired in the emotional and economic destruction of the Cultural Revolution. But then, in 1975, two things happened. First, she opened the Beverly Hills outpost of the Mandarin, which quickly became a celebrity favorite. Paul Newman had a house account; John Lennon and Yoko Ono stopped by every time they were in town. Second, after years of thwarted attempts, Chiang got a visa to China with a little help from a frequent diner — Henry Kissinger.

The homeland she returned to was unrecognizable. So was her father. Forced out of the family house, he subsisted in a single dark room, 97 and toothless. Worse, Chiang found that her mother had died of starvation five years earlier. Over a bottle of cognac that she managed to bring in, Chiang and her father traded stories of the 30 years they spent apart, of the other unknown losses. Chiang told him that his third-eldest son joined the Nationalist Air Force and died in a plane crash two decades before. Her father described the fate of her third-eldest sister, who took her own life after her daughter denounced her to the Communist authorities, a common event in those turbulent days. And then, right before her visa expired — maybe satisfied by finally seeing his daughter again — he died, too.

The China that gave Chiang’s family their wealth and privilege was hardly a just or equitable one; if it was, the Communists could never have risen to power. But Chiang spent half her life trying to preserve what she saw as its best parts — a deep appreciation of beauty, a desire to live deliberately and in harmony with the seasons, a love of feasting and family. As much as she treasured her youth, if that world hadn’t been lost, her life would have been much more circumscribed, focused on home and children. Instead, she helped shape America’s understanding of Chinese cuisine, and until her death at 100, she was dining out nightly, staying up late with a whole new generation of young chefs.

At Chiang’s 50th-birthday party, her children surprised her with a brand-new red Schwinn. They knew how much she had loved that bicycle, what it meant to her. But Chiang didn’t really need the bicycle anymore — she had freedom, and with it she made a world that was wholly her own.

[Read the Times’s obituary of Cecilia Chiang.]

Jade Chang is the author of the novel “The Wangs vs. the World.”

Sy Sperling at home in Manhasset, N.Y., in the early 1980s. Shari Sperling

Sy Sperling
b. 1941

He made baldness a club that you didn’t need to be ashamed to join.

You are wearing a Mets cap. You are bald. It is 1979. Or 1986. Or 1989. It doesn’t matter, because you’re bald and you live in a culture where a man’s hair is his virility is his masculinity is his worth. You pass a movie theater that has a “Rambo” poster in the coming-soon frame, Sylvester Stallone’s mullet hanging down rectangularly as if his neck wanted a privacy shield. Your wife reads a novel with Fabio on the cover. They must have brought in a wind machine to make his hair blow around like that during the shoot.

For most of civilized modernity, baldness remained the third rail of masculinity: Innovations in hairlessness are rare. You can wear a toupee or not, but people will know when the first strong wind comes around. You can get hair plugs, but what good is the sparse hair that will yield when people can tell what you did to get it?

But you saw a commercial on TV during the game the other day. In it, a man explains a hair-weaving system that sounds like something that might work for you, what with it being strange to wear this hat all day, and what with your hair being at a Stage V or VI on the Hamilton-Norwood scale of male-pattern baldness. In the commercial, the man sits halfway, cool-like, on a desk, a bookshelf behind him. He introduces himself as Sy Sperling, the president of the Hair Club for Men. He’s not too handsome, and he’s not a professional pitchman. He gives a speech that has been rehearsed and that he is orating in a Bronx-Long Island slow-rolling diction that is hypnotic. He holds up a picture of a man who looks just like him, a man who is him but who has only his Mr. Spacely side-fringe left — a real Hamilton-Norwood Stage VII. He says he is the Hair Club president, but also he’s a client. He’s a client! That totally ordinary-looking Joe with a bouquet of hair is wearing a wig rug toupee custom-made hair replacement using the proprietary Hair Club process. This shocked you. The startling admission of it, a delectable subversion: How can a president also be a client? Here is a man who did not appear to share your shame about his baldness, who addressed it as casually as if he were talking about fixing your carburetor.

So you go. You arrive at the Madison Avenue headquarters, and you find not a storefront but an office building. You get into an elevator, and when you alight onto the correct floor, you’re in front of an HCM giant monogram — nothing to give away to the other people in the elevator why you’re there. The experience is a pleasure. You are taken to the styling floor and treated to the Hair Club’s Strand by Strand™ system, during which a plastic wrap is molded around your head and then marked with a Sharpie to show where the new hair needs to go. Strands of your existing hair are trimmed in order to match their color, texture and curl.

You come back in a few weeks. A custom piece of hair is then sewn (and, in later years, adhered with the patented Polyfuse® formula) into your remaining hair. You weren’t getting a rug. Sy had banned the word “toupee.” Toupee implied an accouterment. What Sy gave you was now part of you. Shake your head. Get into that shower. Let a woman run her hands through your glorious new mane. There’s nothing to call it except: all yours.

How had no one ever thought about approaching baldness with such kindness before? Maybe Sy came at it from a point of necessity. He was a born salesman, a charming guy who worked with his brother to sell home-improvement products, swimming pools and carpeting (I kid you not). He himself was 26 when upon his scalp appeared the reflection of a light bulb over his head. He was divorced already, with two kids. He was going bald already. He was staring down the barrel of a lonely life as the butt of a joke. He got his own hair replacement, and maybe it wasn’t the most pleasant experience. He and his brother saw an opportunity and rented an office on 34th Street, in a dingy walk-up, and hired a few stylists and created their own not-too-pleasant experience.

But Sy wanted to do better. So he took one of the stylists — whom he had married — and rented a fancy place on Madison Avenue. What if hair restoration didn’t need to be done in dingy walk-ups? What if you presented a man with a place that made this secret, shameful project feel more like a spa day? What if you made a person’s worth as important as his hair?

The answer was yes. The business grew thick. Franchises sprouted everywhere. His widow — Susan, his third wife — told me how moved he was when a man in a restaurant with a full head of hair winked at him, or when someone stopped him in the condo to say his life was changed by his Hair Club experience.

Sy Sperling got out of the game in 2000, just at the dawn of the power shave. But there are more of his stores now than ever before. And it’s not the Hair Club for Men anymore. It’s now just the HairClub, so that anyone can join. And there are more options: tattoo dots on your head that simulate stubble, called RestorInk™. And something called EXT® Extreme Hair Therapy. And something called Xtrands+®. And, sweet lord, something called BioGraft®. But fundamentally, Sperling’s contribution was baldness’s last truly great innovation. Not since he humbly, cheerfully declared his own client status and led the way to the promised land of dignified hairedness has anyone else been brave enough to speak up on the bald’s behalf. (There is no iconic spokesman for Rogaine.) And this contribution — the emboldening of the bald — was enough for Sperling. It made him proud. It gave him a good life. It gave you one too. It was second only to having a full head of hair.

[Read the Times’s obituary of Sy Sperling.]

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for the magazine. Her novel, “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” was longlisted for the National Book Award.

Wilson, a senior zookeeper, grooming Laika, a cheetah at what is now the Maryland Zoo, 1966. Richard Stacks/Baltimore Sun

Mary J. Wilson
b. 1937

The first Black senior zookeeper in Baltimore, she had a way with the fiercest and most vulnerable animals.

In the mid-1960s, an infant gorilla named Sylvia came to live at the Baltimore Zoo. Back then, the question of how to ethically source animals was less pressing for zoos and their public. Sylvia was separated from her mother at a very young age to make her debut. She was quickly at a loss in her new environment.

Mary J. Wilson, the first Black senior zookeeper in Baltimore, was tasked with acclimating her. “We had to care for her just like we’d care for a human baby,” Wilson told The Baltimore Sun in 1996. “The first thing when I came in the morning, I used to give her a bath. Then I’d feed her breakfast. I’d cook three-minute eggs for her. She just became like my little daughter.”

When Sylvia grew too big for the zoo’s facilities, she was moved to the Cleveland City Zoo. There, she encountered another motherless gorilla and quickly began to nurture her — astonishing, because Sylvia herself had never given birth. The zookeepers believed it was Wilson’s influence at work. “They said it was because of how I raised her that she was so good with that youngster,” Wilson recalled.

A woman who made a life out of her talent for mothering grew up without one herself; her own mother died of diphtheria when Wilson was 5. She was raised in West Baltimore, moving between different relatives’ houses. Her daughter, Sharron Wilson Jackson, recalled a time when her mother was separated from her sister. Wilson was 6 years old. “She put on lipstick and caught a bus all the way to the other side of town to look for her,” Jackson said. Think of that little girl, knowing what it meant to be supported and having the courage to set out looking for love and care on her own, painted up to look strong.

Wilson graduated from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and was working at the zoo by the time she was 21. She had no specialized training when she began. Her only initial qualifications, she said, were a “willingness to work hard and a love of animals.” She worked there for 38 years, retiring in 1999.

In the 1960s, most women zookeepers were assigned to birds or “nursery type” animals. Not Wilson. She worked with large mammals from the start — elephants, cheetahs, tigers, monkeys, gorillas. The gorillas and elephants were her favorites. She stood six feet tall. She could reportedly look her elephant charges in the eye. There is a picture of Wilson in her early years at the zoo, dressed in an elegant skirt suit that showed off her tiny waist, her hair lightly curled, smiling broadly to charm her companion, a skeptical-looking cheetah. She is mesmerizing. “She was a fly girl,” her daughter remembers.

Inspired by her mother, Sharron Wilson Jackson became the first Black woman to be zookeeper at the Omaha City Zoo. Was it something they discussed, being first, I asked her. “We didn’t talk about that,” she told me. “It was no big thing. She just taught me to do my best at whatever I did.” In this, Mary Wilson echoed so many Black people who had the distinction of working as firsts. You don’t acknowledge it in the moment because to do so would have been too painful, too jarring, too breathtaking to actually go about getting the job done. Jackson recalled that when her mother was recognized at a festival honoring Black women’s achievements, “She didn’t want to go — she said: ‘I’m not going out there. I know what I did.’”

“She was very, very in touch with animals,” Jackson told me. That kind of care extended to her daughter. Wilson used to bring baby snakes, baby monkeys, baby baboons home. When she was around 8, Jackson took a baby gorilla, swaddled in towels, with her on an errand, relishing the reactions. She told a story of waking up late one night to follow her mother to the zoo after hours, to give a sick elephant, Joe, medicine. “Mom was a single parent of one, me,” Jackson explained. “She gave me the same privileges as she did those animals, by which I mean, she gave me the freedom to be me, but very protective. She gave me that rope. I never felt restrained.”

Toni Morrison observed in a 1983 interview that for Black women, “motherhood is freedom.” Often denied self-determination, it is in the care and raising up of our children that we can feel a sense of control, security and benevolence. It is where we can allow ourselves to be gentle in a world that only likes us strong. It is always a question, how much freedom a Black parent can give a Black child in this country that hates to see Black people free; freedom in that light is dangerous. But a sense of freedom is fundamental to raising a healthy being. And you can find freedom in extending radical care to others — human and animal. Wilson knew this. “She treated those animals like equals,” a co-worker remembered.

In the last four years of her life, Wilson had dementia, from Alzheimer’s. Jackson tried to keep her at home for as long as she could, but she eventually had to admit her to a care home. Wilson kept trying to move. During the years she worked at the zoo, she had command of acres of land — the rolling hills, the tiger cages, the petting-zoo barn. “She was always trying to get out,” Jackson tells me. “You think of a woman that’s walked for 38 years in acres of land at the zoo . . . she doesn’t want to be packed up nowhere.”

When Wilson lay in her hospital bed, dying from Covid, her daughter tried to figure out how to connect with her. She asked her to blink her eyes, move her fingers, but her mother couldn’t. Finally, Jackson remembered that sick elephant named Joe, who used to bob his head to communicate with her mother. Jackson said, “Mom, can you shake it up like Joe?” And Mary Wilson did.

[Read the Times’s obituary of Mary J. Wilson.]

Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of “We Love You, Charlie Freeman” and a forthcoming novel, “Libertie.”

O’Neil at Marvel Comics in New York, 1981. J. Michael Catron

Denny O’Neil
b. 1939

The comic-book writer who took stock of a country’s turmoil and changed the world of superheroes to match.

Denny O’Neil knew where the heart of the story was. When it comes to comic books, this may sound easy — fight the bad guy, save the day — but it is not. After the 1960s TV show was done with the Caped Crusader, Batman’s popularity cratered, and some at DC Comics feared the comic book would be canceled. That was until O’Neil got his chance to write the character. He would go on to write and edit Batman for most of the next three decades. O’Neil, a St. Louis native, started at Marvel Comics and returned for a stint in the 1980s, during which time he deepened the worlds of, among others, Spider-Man, Daredevil and Transformers. (He came up with the name Optimus Prime.)

He was pragmatic about his talent, which he considered more grit than gift; he prioritized submitting and receiving his scripts on time and then moving on to the next assignment without much fuss. Those who worked with him, and even his children, knew him as a private man. His collaborations with the artist Neal Adams redefined the genre, and yet the two rarely met. He battled a few archetypal nemeses of the writer — self-doubt, a nagging sense of underappreciation, alcoholism — but in time he beat them back. There was more than a hint of Batman’s m.o. in his approach to his work: There was a job to do, and he did it. But what he did forever changed the world of comic books and superheroes.

O’Neil felt that fantasies of boundless power and righteous might needed to be grounded in social realism. The greatest obstacle to a hero is not a villain but the world itself: The villain is a symptom, but the problems are societal. The hero cannot save the world by throwing a punch. “We can use,” O’Neil once said, “a lot of words that seem innocuous — ‘We don’t do violence in comics, we do action’ — which is true, but we also do violence. And most of the problems are solved in one way or another by violence — ‘It’s clobberin’ time!’ — so I wanted to put into the continuity a voice for the other side.” He was a pacifist.

His stories nevertheless had their share of action and, yes, violence. In fact, it was O’Neil who, in Batman No. 251, re-envisioned Joker as a murderous agent of chaos. And it was O’Neil who, in 1988, came up with the idea of a phone survey to determine whether the unpopular second Robin, Jason Todd, would live or die in Batman No. 428. (The votes in favor of Robin’s death won by a mere 72 votes; O’Neil voted to save him.)

But the violence in O’Neil’s work was presented as part of the problem and rarely, if ever, the solution. An O’Neil superhero was one who felt a deep connection to the world: For Batman it was through tragedy, for Daredevil through religion, for Green Arrow through social justice. It was a poignant impulse from someone who never shook the feeling that he was an outsider.

Of course, those of us who feel like outsiders have a sense of where the boundaries are. That’s what makes us outsiders. And for writers, knowing where the boundaries are helps us cross them. O’Neil’s 12-issue run writing Green Lantern, in which the law-and-order titular hero partners with an outspoken liberal foil in Green Arrow, brought comic books into a new era. His first issue, Green Lantern No. 76, includes the legendary page in which an elderly Black man asks Green Lantern, who behind the domino mask is a white test pilot named Hal Jordan, why he has helped alien races under siege throughout the universe but has done nothing for Black people suffering under the boot of racial oppression on his own planet. “Answer me that, Mr. Green Lantern!” The superhero, slumped over in shame, can only reply, “I … can’t. …” Comic books rarely enjoyed the type of widespread success that these did. They even showed up in a 1971 New York Times Magazine article titled “Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant.”

In the final story of the run, Green Lantern No. 87, Jordan is told by his cosmic bosses, the Guardians, that a new substitute Green Lantern has been found for his position if Jordan cannot answer the call. When Jordan discovers that substitute to be a Black man named John Stewart, who neither blinks nor holds his tongue in the face of a belligerent cop, Jordan protests. “He has all due qualifications!” one of the Guardians says to him. “We are not interested in your petty bigotries!” When Stewart is given the power and the uniform of a Green Lantern, the first thing he does is discard the mask. “I’ve got nothing to hide,” he says.

Since that debut, Stewart has become a major character in the DC universe. And, given his starring role in the Justice League cartoons of the early 21st century, for the latest generation of comic-book fans it is Stewart, not Jordan, who is the Green Lantern. When asked once about this evolution, O’Neil said he was just doing his job.

[Read the Times’s obituary of Denny O’Neil.]

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of “Living Weapon.”

Tad Jones in Santa Cruz, Calif., 1999. Windy Rhoads

Tad Jones
b. 1946

He took refuge in nature, and it was nature that finally took him.

I.

He is 73, with a long, woolly beard, like someone’s version of Father Time. He lives in a hand-built shack with no electricity or running water, nearly eight miles up a forgotten dirt road in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, a mile from a creek named for a long-ago settler — Waddell — who was killed by a grizzly bear. They call him a hermit, a holy man, the Unabomber. He couldn’t care less. On the night of Sunday, Aug. 16, 2020, a heat wave with temperatures well above 100 degrees brings a rolling cloud from the ocean as the old man sleeps under a canopy of redwood trees. When the lightning comes, it sizzles and snakes, consummates with dry earth.

II.

We all start somewhere — and end somewhere too. But how did he come to be here, feeding the jays and squirrels each day, under the redwoods? His vow of silence, one he takes in his early 30s, makes him an enigma to others, for silence is one of our great American fears. But still, he hasn’t annulled himself. He has a history too, born a middle child, to a mother of blighted artistic ambitions and a father who was a traveling salesman, with two sisters, living in a comfortable Sears Roebuck house in Columbus, Ohio. He loved camping and fishing with his father. He loved animals, rabbits first. Patiently played with his younger sister, Jill. Was gravely ill at one point and probably concussed himself after hitting a tree with his sled. He went to college and rambunctiously flunked out. He went into the military, in 1967, and was sent to Germany instead of Vietnam, growing to hate authority figures and command chains. His inheritance was an anger that kept growing; almost a substance: even now it smolders and ignites.

III.

By the next day — Monday, Aug. 17 — the lightning has set the grasses and underbrush on fire in the mountains around Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Within miles of these growing fires lives the old man in the remote enclave of Last Chance, in a gully beneath the ridge. He has no plumbing and stores his supplies in plastic barrels. Once a month, he rents a car in town, in Santa Cruz, to procure his supplies, including 800 pounds of seed to feed the animals, and to visit Windy, a friend’s 43-year-old daughter whom he helped raise. Until recently, she had never heard his voice as he took the vow of silence back when Jimmy Carter was president, communicating by chalkboard and jottings on paper. She has only ever known him as that wise, constant presence in her life. “The Bay Area is made up of many microclimates, and the one I am living in is particularly nice,” he tells Windy in one of his letters. “I don’t have the heat of inland or the fog of the coast. So I’ll stay here as long as possible.” The spot fires, left unfettered, now grow and begin to converge. In some places there is 50, 100 years’ worth of fuel on the ground. Though there has been no call for evacuation yet, you can smell the smoke. The forecast projects more heat and wind.

IV.

Booze, weed, the Sixties. Tad Jones, for that’s his name when people use it, lives in a school bus, on Sanibel Island in Florida, with a girlfriend. After they split, he lives for a time with his other sister, in her barn. His skin turns a green pallor perhaps because of “alcohol mixed with pharmacology,” as Jill puts it today. But at some point, he lifts himself up and turns himself into a seeker. He finds yoga, which helps with his scoliosis, and a guru: Baba Hari Dass, an Indian yoga master he follows to California. Like his guru, he renounces all but essential material possessions — and seemingly sex too — and takes a vow of silence. Baba Hari Dass wrote: “One who doesn’t want to possess any thing possesses every thing.”

V.

At first it’s hard for the Jones family to understand this retreat, his wanton rejection of American society, but he keeps repeating his mantra: He doesn’t want to inflict his anger on the world. Or his growing paranoia. “How uncalm he was,” Jill recalls. “If he was outside his realm, he was overwhelmed.” He carries a knife for protection; he’s careful to wear neutral clothing so as not to be confused for a gang member. He lets his beard grow out, until eventually it reaches his knees. He braids it and often rolls it up, then unfurls it to the surprise of new acquaintances. He lives inside the trunk of a redwood tree, in time with it, in opposition to industrial time, replicating those happy camping trips with his father. In the 1980s he moves out to Last Chance, a back-to-the-land community fed by cold springs and an August barn dance. His work here is to become part of the fauna, to enter the understory, to encode himself in nature. He writes in a letter that the skunks brush up against his legs, not once thinking to spray.

VI.

We could use more contemplation, more self-reflection. America — us — we could use more silence. As radical as it seems to subtract yourself from society, to cancel your own voice, and add yourself to the forest floor, the old man, it turns out, is not really radical. He likes the band Rush and the movie “The Big Lebowski.” He reads National Geographic, articles about faraway places and these extreme changes to our environment. The wind direction shifts now from the northwest to the northeast, and the fire leaps into alignment with the topography, lighting duff and branches: More than 43,000 acres are about to burn in a matter of hours.

VII.

Windy, who adores him, saves all his letters, which are full of advice written in his big loopy handwriting: here’s how to interact with your grandparents, here are the pros and cons of having children. (“[T]he earth doesn’t need any more people, so if you do give birth you want to give the child a reasonable chance to succeed.”) He tells her about the Mexican radio station he listens to, with the woman’s voice singing so lovely. He cracks slightly profane jokes about Donald Trump. He says he has set redwood trunks in ascending order to a little pet entrance to the shack so the cat can keep safe from predators. When he’s overrun by arthritis — his knees and shoulders and hips, walking with two metal canes — he goes to town to see the doctor, to stay with Windy. “Word is the crabs are meaty and good,” he writes her. “I am including a hunny B” — a hundred-dollar bill — “to buy the dinner.” Guinness beer too. He writes, “Remember I am speaking/talking now so don’t be shocked.”

VIII.

After nearly 40 years of silence, the old man starts talking again, at first to communicate with the doctors. It’s 2017, and he still swears like a sailor. Jill, his sister, speaks to him over Windy’s cellphone, and the first words out of his mouth are “How do you make this goddamn thing work?” It’s as if they’ve never missed a beat: he still has that mellifluous, bemused voice, that Midwestern accent. And that hair-trigger temper. As the fire encroaches, on that Tuesday, he buys feed for the animals in town — then returns to Last Chance. The wind is blowing, harder now, created by the fire itself, it seems. A community is its own ecosystem — like a forest — connected through pulses, half aerial, half subterranean. Every person, every cell, communicates in a chain. Still, almost no one here knows the old man’s last name. The fire conjoins and rages, from oak to oak, redwood to redwood. In the mesmerizing face of it, your own anger isn’t much. Even by 8 p.m. no evacuation order has been issued by the state. The residents of Last Chance, over 100 in all, think they’re safe. Only when the smoke blows clear does the fire marshal see wild flames from the ridge, the fine, dry leaf matter catching hot. By the time the conflagration jumps Waddell Creek, she take matters into her own hands, no longer waiting for state officials to raise the alarm, and the evacuation plan goes into effect.

IX.

By about 9:30 p.m., all but three people are accounted for at the gate that leads out of Last Chance. The old man — the hermit, the holy man, Unabomber — tries to drive the road out in his rented minivan, but fire suddenly blocks his way. He turns, and drives back, but now more fire blocks the back way. It’s as if napalm has been dropped on the forest, everything lit and storming. Fire personnel are nowhere to be seen. One resident spends the night in a field, fighting off rivers of sparks; another takes to a pond in his backyard, breathing out of a hose to escape the inferno. By 10:30 p.m. Last Chance has mostly burned to the ground. In the days after, only one person remains unaccounted for.

X.

Later comes the recovery mission. People with chain saws, an incursion to reclaim what’s left of home. Many of the redwoods are still burning inside and will die later. The old man is found — his bones, his ashes — near his two metal canes and the minivan not far from his shack, next to a scorched ravine, the fire so hot the van’s windows have been vaporized. Jill says there’s a way of seeing her brother’s demise as “terrifying” but “glorious.” “A slow, rusty death — that wouldn’t have been good for him,” she says. “It would have been awful.” After 70,000 people evacuate and nearly 1,500 structures are lost, Tad Jones ends up the only casualty of what comes to be called the CZU Lightning Complex in the most rampant fire year California has ever seen. “He burned on the ground of the place he lived,” Windy says, “the land he loved, the forest he walked through thousands and thousands of times, and he became part of it.”

[Read an article about Tad Jones’s death.]

Michael Paterniti is a contributing writer for the magazine and is working on a book about the discovery of the North Pole.

Correction: Dec. 28, 2020
An earlier version of this article misstated Tad Jones's birth year. It is 1946, not 1949.

Stanley Crouch and the jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis at a recording studio in Midtown Manhattan in 1991. Frank Stewart

Stanley Crouch
b. 1945

He was a critic, intellectual, holder of court, lover, snob and contrarian of the Black condition.

If you were a New Yorker out on the town in the late 1970s and 1980s, the sort of person who frequented house parties, bars and clubs on a Tuesday night, odds are fair that you would’ve run into a large, well-dressed, bespectacled man (odds are actually better that he would have run into you) and that at some point during the encounter, this charismatic, dark-skinned cat might have slipped you one of his business cards. Nothing fancy. Vanilla even. A name, Stanley Crouch, a number and this: an embossed pair of boxing gloves.

Crouch was known well as many things — critic, intellectual, keeper of flames, holder of court, friend, opponent, epicure, castigator, acolyte, mentor, lover, crank, snob, contrarian of the Black condition. Boxing, though, animated a good deal of him. The gloves were a shorthand for temperament. Misleading, too, because none of his fights — on the page, at a restaurant, in the offices of The Village Voice where he was the first Black staff member — involved anything as formal or gentlemanly as a glove. In 1988, he socked The Voice’s rap critic, Harry Allen, during a conversation about hip-hop, which Crouch flamboyantly loathed. The fight cost Crouch his job. In 2004, he made the news when he slapped the literary critic and self-described hatchet man Dale Peck at a cozy French restaurant for bludgeoning Crouch’s lone novel four years earlier.

Such were his passions. They ruled him. If Crouch handed you that card, you were accepting an invitation to his intensity, which veered from imposingly pugnacious to relentlessly genial; gangsta, chum. Even his affability could be a lot. “Many of us were subjected to long, rambling drum interludes over the phone that could be quite wearying,” recalled his longtime friend Loren Schoenberg, the saxophonist and jazz scholar. “I loved it,” he told me, laughing. Another friend, the trumpeter Bobby Bradford, recalled his phone ringing, too. “I remember distinctly once where he was doing something that he figured out about the hi-hat,” Bradford said. “That particular thing was good, very clever. But that wouldn’t sustain a drum solo or an evening playing the drums, you know?”

That’s right: One of the country’s pre-eminent jazz critics was also an endearingly tedious player, of drums no less. Crouch knew the music he tried to make was neither as muscular or dexterous as his writing on music. Iconoclasm was his hook — his uppercut. Which beloved text would he asperse? (“Beloved,” for one.) What shibboleth would he undo? Which colossus would he raze? Regular appearances on Charlie Rose’s talk show made Crouch an egghead sort of famous. Once, in 1992, with the pianist Marcus Roberts and Crouch’s good friend Wynton Marsalis seated around Rose’s table, Crouch surmised that “if you had some rappers on here, you wouldn’t get this level of discourse.” Clashing culture was music to him, modernity versus tradition, jazz — a particular, classical era of jazz — against everything else. Miles Davis after 1960 was useless. “Beyond the terrible performances and the terrible recordings,” Crouch wrote in The New Republic in 1990, “Davis has also become the most remarkable licker of monied boots in the music business.”

Criticism was his art. And he could get carried away by it. Whenever Schoenberg and Crouch went to see live music, they had to work out an arrangement, because Crouch liked to talk during the concert — about what was working and what stank. “We kind of sat separate and then talked after the set,” Schoenberg said. Crouch would then take a post-show walk right up to the band and critique the music to the players’ faces. “I don’t think you could name me one of his peers,” Schoenberg said, “who had the authority or the respect of the musicians, that when he went up on the bandstand and gave them his review, right there, and it could be harsh, that they actually, 90 percent of the time, accepted it, even if they might have rolled an eye or two.”

Crouch was hard on female novelists and young rappers, the avant-garde and his heroes. He deplored the woe of certain racial politics. His writing against Black grievance, at least as he understood it, was meant to denounce the separatism, sense of inferiority and pleas for special treatment that he suspected were curdling the way we talked about politics and art, the way we talked to one another. For a boxer, kid gloves are an insult. For a jazz man, a traditionalist no less, any race that could invent that music should never doubt itself. No race that invented that music should ever be anything other than original, freethinking.

That critical shove of Davis down the elevator shaft (“Play the Right Thing” was the title of that essay) lasts for many thousands of words, and the thud still resounds. Crouch abandoned the drums to make that sort of noise, to perform the leaving of his mark. That performance hurt people: the pianist Cecil Taylor, whom Crouch outed as gay in 1982; his formidable mentor and friend Albert Murray, who distanced himself from Crouch after he disparaged Murray’s rigor in a mid-1990s essay.

“Once when I visited him in New York,” Bradford said, “he was getting hate mail by the bundles, while he was working for The Village Voice. And he said to me, ‘Well, that’s how I keep working, man, because this hate mail represents that people are reading what I’m writing.’” Crouch was a sportsman that way. Everything about him was: Don’t try this at home. For here was a man who lived for more than thriving as a critic. He wanted to be criticism itself.

[Read the Times’s obituary of Stanley Crouch.]

Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The New York Times and a staff writer for the magazine.

Boseman in California, 2017. Sam Jones/Trunk Archive

Chadwick Boseman
b. 1976

Behind his performances of great men was an irreducible stillness and personal dignity.

In “Get On Up,” from 2014, Chadwick Boseman played James Brown in all of his swaggering, hip-thrusting, preacher-on-the-verge-of-a-breakdown glory. But that’s not the version of Soul Brother No. 1 we see as the movie opens. He’s not preening onstage but sitting in a pickup truck in a nondescript strip-mall parking lot. He’s got the signature perm going, but things are off. He’s disheveled, a little plumper than we might remember him. His face is weathered, his entire visage sagging.

Yet he beats the steering wheel in time to his own music, looks into the mirror and pats the perm down just so. He’s a man of supreme confidence in spite of his situation, in whose body defeat and defiance commingle. Boseman imbues the moment with an aura of curdled pride that suggests the heights from which Brown has tumbled and the distance he must still travel before he arrives at his life’s nadir.

“Get On Up” was one in a run of biopics that revealed Boseman as an actor of uncommon presence and dignity, someone who could convincingly portray legends from Brown to Jackie Robinson to Thurgood Marshall despite not looking very much like any of them. His particular talent was excavating his Great Man subjects’ interior lives, revealing an emotional attunement that turned otherwise middling movies into engaging character studies. He had a keen grasp of psychology that he could convey with the slightest of adjustments to his angular face. He didn’t portray individuals so much as he used his body to conjure the emotional weather that turns a character into a person.

Boseman did not begin his career intending to be a movie star. A native of Anderson, S.C., he studied playwriting and directing at Howard University before eventually heading to New York and settling into the decidedly unsettled life of a writer. He began acting as a way to understand how to best communicate with actors, taking television roles until his unlikely casting in the 2013 film “42,” which told the story of Jackie Robinson’s rookie season as a Brooklyn Dodger.

Brian Helgeland, who directed the film, has spoken of the innate, dignified stillness that made Boseman perfect for the role of Robinson. Boseman’s collaborators often speak of this stillness, but I’d like to think of it in terms other than dignity. It’s about craft first, about the man’s ability to wander the labyrinthine halls of human interiority without rushing himself or his audience toward an exit. Boseman prepared for roles by concocting entire lives for his characters — imagining the childhood traumas, personal fears and private hopes that undergirded the script. His job was to loose those histories, to lose himself in the narratives lurking beneath the stories he was telling. What we’re perceiving in Boseman’s stillness, then, is the quiet and observant mien of the writer he naturally was.

With the success of “Black Panther,” in 2018, in which he played the fictional African king T’Challa, Boseman transitioned into another phase of his career, occupying a similar niche in American cinema to Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington before him: a representation of upright and noble Black masculinity. With that transition came a sense that we possessed him, that his likeness was a public commodity — a lens through which we could perceive all Black people, no matter the particularities of their lives or Boseman’s. After years of playing giants of American history, it was a fictional character that transformed him into a kind of political figure.

His death at 43 after a struggle with colon cancer was shocking, especially so in a year when the institutions and figures we took for granted as fixed facts of our lives seemed to disintegrate. For days after his family announced his passing, people took to Twitter to express their surprise and pain at losing a lodestar of popular Black cinema. Perhaps even more shocking than his death was the revelation that the cancer was diagnosed in 2016 and that he had all the while been working through his illness — doing press for “Black Panther,” filming his final performances in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” and George C. Wolfe’s screen adaptation of the August Wilson play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” and even sitting in as a judge at the N.B.A.’s 2020 Slam Dunk Contest. His wife, Taylor Simone Ledward, and the rest of his family treated the illness as a strictly private matter. Not even his “Ma Rainey” co-star Viola Davis or Denzel Washington, one of the film’s producers, knew that he was sick at the time of filming.

I keep thinking about the intense privacy with which Boseman approached his illness in the context of his acting’s emotional frankness. An artist whose craft depended on his ability to call upon resources from a deep reservoir of feeling, on a certain sense of transparency, left us on a note of opacity that seems to me a final refusal of capture.

“Da 5 Bloods” and “Ma Rainey” are curious bookends to Boseman’s career. In his performance as Cmdr. Stormin’ Norman Holloway in “Da 5 Bloods,” he played a Vietnam veteran who was a formidable warrior and a stirring speaker. His is a gripping presence, a larger-than-life figure of Black Power-era pride. But he’s also elusive; he appears only in flashback sequences, and it’s unclear whether his exploits are merely a figment of his fellow veterans’ imaginations. In “Ma Rainey,” meanwhile, he plays the churlish trumpeter Levee, a character whose very name hints at the flood of trauma and insatiable desire barely restrained behind his feral grin. Even as these roles rely on the almost mythic aura of heroism we associate with Boseman, they also seem like rejections of the static notion of dignity that had become his calling card. As Spike Lee suggested to me over the phone, they are evidence that Boseman was maturing as an actor with the aid of directors like Ryan Coogler, Wolfe and Lee himself — burnishing his talents even in the midst of his illness.

Watching these films after his death, as companion performances of startling power and violence, the films feel like a sly commentary on his career, a closing argument that maybe only a playwright could engineer: No matter how much he seemed to bare onscreen, no matter how much he seemed to belong to us, Boseman’s depths remained his, and his alone.

[Read the Times’s obituary of Chadwick Boseman.]

Ismail Muhammad is a writer and critic in Oakland, Calif.

“Plaza, New York, 1977.” Photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

James Harvey
b. 1929

No one was more passionate about the pleasures of a packed movie theater, one more experience we lost this year.

Among the many things we’ve lost this year has been our ability to go — or at least to go safely — to the movies. This particular loss may seem relatively small, but our relationship to the movies is not, and never has been. An intrinsic part of that relationship has always been the presence of others — sitting in a packed house, feeling that simultaneity of response that can make sudden intimates of total strangers.

No one understood this better than the critic and cultural historian James Harvey. In three brilliant books — “Romantic Comedy in Hollywood,” “Movie Love in the ’50s” and “Watching Them Be” — he combined a spiritually charged celebration of movies with a down-to-earth appreciation of “the common American knowingness” to be found in a packed venue.

Thus, his celebration of Greta Garbo begins with his first being exposed to her in a “crowded theater in Chicago’s Loop, a mostly young audience as new to her probably as I was at the time, and a feeling in the place like revelation.”

That “feeling in the place” became a hallmark of his writing, perhaps because of the fact that he arrived in New York in the ’50s, at the onset of the then-new obsession with looking at movies, an obsession that would soon make stars of critics like Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael. Great revival houses dotted the city like beacons: the Regency, the Thalia (where Harvey worked, briefly, writing program notes), the Elgin, the Theatre 80 St. Marks. A young “would-be highbrow” in a city full of them, he became part of a generation finding liberation at the movies, “a way of saying that whatever heights we aspired to otherwise we were still part of the mass reality around us — that we didn’t kid ourselves and we didn’t buy any [expletive], least of all from the movies themselves. There you could be both skeptic and believer, awe-struck and wised-up at the same time.”

He had no patience for film theory, or for anything the least bit academic. His gift was to see into movies, into what they meant in their own time, and to do so in writing that was rapturously precise. It took a keen eye to nail Glenn Ford’s “curdled boyishness” or the “ruined handsomeness” of Robert Forster (in “Jackie Brown”). He was perhaps the only critic to notice how, if you look very closely at Doris Day when she’s not being called upon to sell cheerfulness, “her eyes look desolate.” There were phrases and sentences that, once you read them, would come to define a movie you only thought you’d seen. In the sight of Jimmy Stewart at the end of “Vertigo,” looking down on his dead “Madeleine,” he found “a final image that seems as inevitable as it is memorable. Because this is the vertigo — the madness of longing, this almost infinitude of painful desire, of longing beyond longing — that Hitchcock has been drawing us into all along.”

Given how much he seemed to know about “the madness of longing,” it was always a mystery to his friends that Harvey lived such a monastic life, holed up in a Carroll Gardens apartment spending endless, tortured years on each of his books, surrounded by rescue animals who did not always share his devotion to them. For his friends, there were limits you knew to observe; too much probing into the personal was discouraged. “It was our movie life that mattered to us as friends,” he wrote about his friendship with the critic Gilberto Perez. “That, for us, was the personal one.” But perhaps such a life only makes “sense” if you recognize that there are those whose guiding obsession sustains life in a way most of us probably can’t understand. It was Harvey’s quirky, consuming love for the movies that came to define him, even, maybe especially, for those who would have loved to know more.

In an unpublished memoir, he wrote about his childhood experience of chasing Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” from theater to theater, like a besotted boy, aware that the movie was asking for “an unusual sort of attention” from its mainstream audience, but never wanting to remove himself from those in attendance. What capped the experience was being part of the crowd, going “along with it to different and exciting new places.” Decades later, when he was well into his 80s, he could have given up the long walks he would take from Carroll Gardens to Manhattan movie houses in search of one more revelation. He could have settled, like the rest of us, for Netflix. But for him, to do that would be to lose something essential.

He died just at the point when the doors to the palaces were being closed, and his fellow congregants told to stay home.

[Read the Times’s obituary on James Harvey.]

Anthony Giardina is a novelist and playwright. His most recent play is “Dan Cody’s Yacht.”

Additional design and development by Shannon Lin and Jacky Myint.