#InMemoriam

This week, we honor a Swiss collector, a discerning art critic, and a champion of performance art.

This week, we honor a German Neo-Expressionist, the creator of the “Sylvia” comic strip, and an arts patron behind SFMOMA.

This week, we honor India’s most celebrated photojournalist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, and a multi-media artist.

Even as the pace of work life quickened exponentially across the next two decades, email inboxes overflowing, media outlets proliferating and then contracting, websites and newsletters dominating and then collapsing, newspapers going online-only and then…

We are near an old strain of folk utopianism, one that depicts the afterlife as a place with towers of food rising to the heavens. One of the first songs Hurley came up with was a sort of mantra he and his brother would chant aloud as children: “There’s…

The poet Alice Notley died on May 17. But death was a place that she had visited before, a state with which she had long communed. Step into the uninvidious nonvoid inter alia especially be- Tween the live and dead for I have been there often and know it…

Sensitivity to contradiction—of “In My Room,” he noted: “Two people wrote a song about loneliness, and five people sang it”—and spiritual conviction were foundational elements of his work.

What does it mean to live in an era whose only good feelings come from coining names for the era (and its feelings)? On one hand, perhaps our surfeit of coinages, many inspired by various resurgent Marxian traditions, suggests an intellectual ecosystem in…

As with any object under scientific investigation, theorizing philosophy scientifically requires locating its borders, which can only be accomplished by recognizing what is beyond and outside it—that is, what is non-philosophy.

This week, we honor a surrealist and zoologist, a monochrome abstractionist, and a pillar of Oakland’s Chinatown.

## Mel Olken Former executive director of the IEEE Power & Energy Society Fellow, 92; died 9 January Olken became the first executive director of the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) in 1995.

(1945–2024) Helen Elizabeth Fisher, the biological anthropologist who defined the science of love, died from endometrial cancer at her home in New York City on August 17, 2024.