Her style was always her own, from the geometry of the clothing she designed to the elegance of her life.
Her style was always her own, from the geometry of the clothing she designed to the elegance of her life.
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Magazine|Isabel Toledo, a Designer Who Expressed Emotion Through Clothing
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Isabel Toledo, a Designer Who Expressed Emotion Through Clothing
ByJORDAN KISNERDEC. 23, 2019
Her style was always her own, from the geometry of the clothing she designed to the elegance of her life.

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


Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year.
Isabel Toledo
(b. 1960)
Her style was always her own, from the geometry of the clothing she designed to the elegance of her life.
By Jordan Kisner
When Isabel Toledo was 9, her mother persuaded her to go to a babysitter’s house by telling her the visits were sewing lessons. Toledo was stubbornly independent and didn’t think she needed a babysitter, but when she encountered the sewing machine, she was enchanted. She disliked “children’s clothes”; she wanted her clothes to express how she felt (elegant, intelligent) and who she knew herself to be (singular, creative). It was 1969, and her family had recently immigrated to New Jersey from Camajuani, Cuba, where — as she wrote in her 2012 memoir, “Roots of Style” — she loved to watch “the afternoon hour, when the work shift ended and a sea of women invaded the street, all with their own particular styles of tossing their sweaters around their shoulders.” Soon she was spending all her after-school hours constructing her own clothing.
She had no dress form, so she relied on her own body and a knack for imagining fabric in motion. Her wardrobe filled with experiments: white vinyl jodhpur skirts, bubble dresses made of tulle and fishing wire, dresses shaped like kites. Expressing an emotional life through clothing would become her lifelong vocation. Eventually she would be known — especially by fellow designers, including Thierry Mugler and Karl Lagerfeld — as one of the greatest living couturiers.
Jordan Kisneris the author of an upcoming essay collection, “Thin Places.”
Toni Morrison
(b. 1931)
Her friends recall a woman who was as fun as she was brilliant.
By Fran Lebowitz
I met Toni in 1978. I, of course, was a child: I was 27, and she was 47. There was a reading series at the public library across from the Museum of Modern Art. They asked me if I would read, and I said yes. They said: “We always have two people. Do you know who Toni Morrison is?” She wasn’t that well known then, but I had read all of her books. I said, “I love her work.” They said, “Would you like to read with her?” I said, “That’s ridiculous.” I mean, we’re so different as writers. But I did it, and it felt like a close friendship formed in one hour.
When I met her, and for at least a few years after, she was still working at Random House. I used to hang around her office because Random House was also my publisher. My editor called me once and said: “You have to stop hanging around Toni Morrison’s office. The two of you are in there all the time with the door closed, laughing” — laughing, I think this is what was upsetting to people — “and smoking cigarettes,” which everyone did then, “because Toni Morrison is not getting her work done.” A completely ridiculous thing to say! If there was anyone not getting their work done, it was me. A few years ago, I did a benefit for the Princeton public library, and a professor at the university there told me, “I used to have the office next to Toni Morrison at Princeton, and the two of you in there smoking cigarettes and laughing all the time really disturbed me.” With some people, it’s just the idea of someone enjoying themselves.
Fran Lebowitzis the author of “Metropolitan Life” and “Social Studies.”
Judith Krantz
(b. 1928)
Her books sold some 80 million copies, freeing up millions of young women to imagine themselves as ardent sexual protagonists in their own lives.
By Susan Dominus
When she was 14, Judith Krantz persuaded her dentist to take off her braces, temporarily, then went home and put on a gray suit, black suede medium-height heels and her mother’s fur jacket. It was 1942, so her look wasn’t unusual, although her mother’s tacit approval of the reason for such adult attire was. Judy was traveling, on her own, from New York’s Penn Station to Annapolis, for a blind date with a 20-year-old midshipman at the Naval Academy, the affluent son of a family friend’s friend. Remarkably unsupervised, the child of wealthy and emotionally remote parents, she never told them that over the summer, when the young man came to New York, he sexually abused her again and again. When she tried to stop seeing him, he told her that he would die without her, he would despair, flunk out and be sent off to war to drown at sea. She was young, so young that this logic, as if from a twisted fairy tale, could be persuasive. She was young enough to believe that she had that power; she was so young that she was powerless to walk away, to tell anyone about her miserable secret.
That depressed, cringing girl was 16 when she wrested her life back, at which point she embarked on a life of rigorous self-invention. After graduating from Wellesley, she moved to Paris in 1948 (“French gave me a second personality,” she later wrote). At 21, she moved in with an older man and livedla vie bohèmein an abandoned brothel; she returned to New York, where family connections and her own resourceful smarts afforded her a fast rise in the then-influential world of women’s magazines. Her connections were legion: An ex-boyfriend went on to found the famed restaurant Lutèce; a fashion contact from Paris invited her to drinks with Marlene Dietrich. An old high school classmate, Barbara Walters, introduced her to her future husband, Steve Krantz, who started in radio and ended up in Hollywood, producing “Fritz the Cat,” the first animated feature to receive an X rating.
Susan Dominusis a staff writer for the magazine.
David Berman
(b. 1967)
He channeled his suffering into a comfort for many, including my friend in pain.
By David Marchese
This past spring, my oldest friend was hurting. I didn’t know how badly. I only knew that in late-night emails, he would spill forth with relentless self-doubt and anxious solitude, of torpor and bad sleep. Comfort came rarely. I’m thankful that he found some, as did many others, in the music of David Berman, a troubled but unflinching songwriter and poet bittersweetly well suited to offer understanding to those at risk. “I feel like David was a fireman who was going into the burning building to report back and explain what it felt like to be in the middle of that fire,” said his wife and former bandmate, Cassie Berman. For my friend, those reports were immediately useful. “Berman’s channeling his suffering into creative output,” he wrote to me about the most recent songs he’d heard, though he could’ve been referring to any of Berman’s work. “And he’s managing to stay connected to people, and funny. I’m appreciating the brain scramble.”
Sadness and spiritual longing may have been the emotional pedal tones of Berman’s music, which had its genesis in the same late-’80s University of Virginia and then the Hoboken-area social milieu that helped birth the indie-rock touchstone Pavement — early on, Berman’s band Silver Jews was often erroneously regarded as an offshoot of that group — but they were far from the only ones. Silver Jews’ loping, increasingly country-leaning songs were mystical, whimsical and funny, even at their most bleakly existential. Actually, that’s when they were funniest. Delivered in Berman’s warm barroom drawl, the line “I am the trick my mother played on the world,” from “Send in the Clouds,” somehow splits the difference between Nietzsche and Rodney Dangerfield. And as befits a writer who published a well-regarded collection of poetry in 1999, “Actual Air,” Berman, a slender, scruffily bearded soul who loved his Judaism and Johnny Paycheck, could craft images of bleary-eyed grace. His song “Random Rules” was a favorite of my friend: “I asked a painter why the roads are colored black/He said, ‘Steve, it’s because people leave and no highway will bring them back.’” As Berman put it in his poem “Self-Portrait at 28,” “I am trying to get at something/And I want to talk very plainly to you/So that we are both comforted by the honesty.”
David Marcheseis a staff writer and the Talk columnist for the magazine.
Leah Chase
(b. 1923)
She fed presidents and paupers alike and made her New Orleans restaurant into a kind of church.
By Michael Paterniti
She arrives every morning to the kitchen by 7:30, says a prayer for strength beneath Jesus on the cross and begins the gumbo. To watch her part a chicken alone there in the pale light, strong, slick hands cutting, pulling, chopping, is the moment in the movie when you see the hero’s superpower. Into the pot go the gizzards and necks and wings. In go the sausage, oysters, crabs, the ham, shrimp and dried sassafras. Her body seems to float there, but her hands move in double time, in a dance with the cutting knife.
Her kitchen is a church of its own, really — at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant on Orleans Avenue in the Treme neighborhood in the grand confluence, the polyglot, that is New Orleans. Here they live, waiting for the floodwaters and lights-out while the pot forever simmers with gumbo on the stove tended by the chef, this indomitable woman of faith and freakish hard work named Leah Chase.
Michael Paternitiis a contributing writer and a GQ correspondent.
Rosie Ruiz
(b. 1953)
She stunned everyone when she won the Boston Marathon. But it didn’t take long to uncover the truth: She cheated.
By Sam Dolnick
On April 21, 1980, at the Boston Marathon, the fastest men finished first, and then, at 2 hours, 31 minutes and 56 seconds — an amazing time, a world-class time — the first woman crossed the line. She was wearing a bright yellow shirt, damp with sweat, and short white shorts with blue piping. The TV announcer didn’t know what to say.
“On the right, Rosie Ruiz from New York! A shocker! Nobody had noticed her at the checkpoints. Nobody had thought about her when the race had begun! A totalstrangerto the experts!” He drawled the word for effect.
Sam Dolnickis an assistant managing editor for The Times.
Luke Perry
(b. 1966)
He played a smoldering cool boy on TV. In real life, he wanted to make the world a better place.
By Taffy Brodesser-Akner
On the day Luke Perry died, I grasped for a way to mourn him. I went on Twitter, where we now gather to hold our vigils after celebrity deaths, sharing memories and impressions and slinking back into who we were when the person in question first meant something to us.
It’s hard to overestimate what a big deal “Beverly Hills, 90210” was after it debuted in 1990, or how famous each of its main stars became, particularly Luke: He played Dylan McKay as a smoldering cool boy, a James Dean reincarnate, preternaturally mature (which maybe he got from living alone in a hotel while his father gallivanted around the world committing crimes). For some time during the show’s peak popularity, it was hard to find a magazine stand without one of the stars on at least two covers, or a newsmagazine show or tabloid that didn’t feature some tidbit of their lives, either with or without the cast’s participation. In a certain neighborhood in Brooklyn, it was hard to find a wall without a picture of him, posed against a wall, in a white T-shirt, or a tank top, or a denim vest (or more precisely, a sleeveless denim jacket with nothing underneath), hair moussed or gelled upward an honest-to-God two inches, his eyes setting afire the virgin heart of a 15-year-old who lived quietly before the internet and was told that this boy was her age even though he really was an actual man.
Taffy Brodesser-Akneris a staff writer for the magazine and the author of the novel “Fleishman Is in Trouble.”
Unita Blackwell
(b. 1933)
She was arrested dozens of times, and Klan members threw Molotov cocktails into her yard — but that didn’t stop her fight for civil rights.
By Maggie Jones
On an afternoon thick with Mississippi heat, Unita Blackwell sat on the front porch of her shotgun house with her friend Coreen, drinking homemade beer, waiting for something to happen. That’s when she saw them: two men — they looked to be about 19 — heading toward town. Blackwell knew they weren’t from around there. They walked too fast. No one walked fast in Mayersville on 90-degree days. They said, “Hello,” instead of the usual, “How y’all feeling?”
“That’s them,” Blackwell said.
Maggie Jonesis a contributing writer and teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh.
Richard Todd
(b. 1940)
He worked as a book and magazine editor for nearly 50 years. Five of his writers remember his gifts.

Richard Todd worked as a book editor for nearly 50 years, helping establish the careers of countless writers, including Tracy Kidder, Ann Patchett, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and James Fallows. Kidder’s book “The Soul of a New Machine” won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 1982.
Todd eschewed the hubbub of the New York literary scene, preferring instead to lead a quiet life in Massachusetts. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, he edited books and worked at The Atlantic. In 1983, he was given his own book imprint at Houghton Mifflin. He later worked as a freelance book editor for other publishers, as well as directly with writers. Over the course of his career, he wrote two books, including one with Kidder called “Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction.” Here, five writers — Darcy Frey, Amy Goldstein, Tracy Kidder, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Suzannah Lessard — talk about working with him.
Darcy Freyhas been a longtime contributing writer for the magazine. He is the author of “The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams.”Amy Goldsteinis a staff writer at The Washington Post and author of “Janesville: An American Story.”Tracy Kidderis a freelance writer who has published articles and essays in various periodicals, including The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Atlantic. He is the author of various books of narrative nonfiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Soul of a New Machine.”Adrian Nicole LeBlancis distinguished lecturer in nonfiction in the M.F.A. creative-writing program at Hunter College and is finishing a book on stand-up comedy for Random House.Suzannah Lessardis a former staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of “The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape’‘ and “The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family.”
Karl Lagerfeld
(b. 1933)
He created up to 17 collections a year for 54 years, but his greatest invention may have been himself.
By Irina Aleksander
Karl Lagerfeld rewrote his story so often that even the year of his birth remained a migrating plot point. After long claiming that he was born in 1938, he changed it to 1936 in his best-selling diet book, “The Karl Lagerfeld Diet,” and then, years later, announced that it was in fact 1935. To throw people off further, he celebrated misleading birthdays. In 2008, Lagerfeld turned 70; four years later, he turned 79. A German newspaper eventually published his baptism record, dated 1933, which is now believed to be correct. But Lagerfeld so enjoyed this game that he never actually confirmed it.
Lagerfeld created so much. By which I mean actual volume: up to 17 collections a year for 54 years, for multiple brands, including Chanel, a sleepy legacy house he took over in 1983 and turned into a luxury behemoth. But Lagerfeld’s greatest invention may have been himself. He was ostentatious without being silly. He dieted madly, but allowed himself 10 to 20 Coca-Colas a day. He seemed genderless before such a thing existed, and yet not at all P.C. (“The problem with political correctness is that it rapidly becomes very boring,” he said.) Though he was a voracious reader, he liked to appear superficial. I didn’t know Lagerfeld, but I shared a plane ride with him in 2014, from Paris to Dubai, while writing about a male model in his entourage. “Chic plane, chic plane,” Lagerfeld said upon boarding, and then proceeded to sketch a caricature of Angela Merkel, seemingly for his own amusement. Over a few days, I watched him consume carefully sliced pears and mangoes, each meal overseen by his butler, Frédéric, whom I would catch in the hotel elevator with trays of Lagerfeld’s protein powders. “I’m a very improvised person,” Lagerfeld told me, even as every part of his existence appeared to be choreographed.
Irina Aleksanderis a contributing writer for the magazine.
Elijah Cummings
(b. 1951)
The Maryland congressman pledged his service to a country that from his earliest years tried to thwart his ambitions.
By Astead W. Herndon
In May, less than five months before Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland died, he gave the spring commencement speech at Morgan State University, a historically black college in his Baltimore hometown. There were, at that time, signs of how fragile his health had become. He approached the lectern with the help of a walker. But his voice retained its distinctive boom. “There is something inspiring and life-affirming about standing here among women and men who have completed one difficult journey,” he told the students. “They started something, and they finished it.”
The story of black achievement in America is never far from the story of black oppression. The trajectory of Cummings’s own life, from a rowhouse in Baltimore to the chairmanship of the Committee on Oversight and Reform in the United States Congress, was an American dream achieved in spite of the country’s obstacles. Cummings was the third of seven children born to Ruth and Robert Cummings, sharecroppers who in the 1940s fled South Carolina for Baltimore. There they found, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said about Chicago, a North that could teach the people of Mississippi “how to hate.”
Astead W. Herndonis a national political reporter for The Times.
Robert Frank
(b. 1924)
He changed photography and helped us to see New York and the rest of the country with fresh eyes.
By Nicholas Dawidoff
Louis Silverstein was looking at a series of photographs of business travelers published in the November 1955 issue of Fortune magazine and thought the pictures lent such uncanny expression to men talking, reading and revising that he decided the photographer had been “lucky.” Fortune’s photography editor, the seminal photographer Walker Evans, had assigned his protégé, Robert Frank, to accompany the deal makers and politicians aboard the Congressional, a New York-to-Washington train known as the “mobile executive suite.” Silverstein was The New York Times’s promotion art director, and despite his skepticism, he reached for his telephone and invited Frank to come see him.
Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of five books.
Kathryn Johnson
(b. 1926)
She knew that the secret to getting a great story was not telling the whole thing.
By Caitlin Dickerson
It’s not often that you expect to find a journalist lying in bed next to a source and his wife. That would have been even more true in 1973 if that reporter was a woman, at a time when it was still rare for them to work at major national news outlets. But it was late, they were tired and Kathryn Johnson was on deadline, so she cozied up next to Capt. Jeremiah Denton and his wife, Jane, under the lamplight of their North Carolina hotel room. They reviewed the details of her story one last time before Johnson dictated 2,000 words over the phone, back to her editors at The Associated Press’s Atlanta bureau, and the article ran in newspapers across the country the following day.
That particular assignment was grueling, both physically and emotionally. Captain Denton had just returned to the United States after being held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for nearly eight years. Johnson’s editors had tasked her with securing exclusive rights to report on him in a series of eight articles that would be published over the course of eight days. After she persuaded Denton to talk to her, she hardly slept because of the constant deadlines. She fought the weight of her eyelids while Denton got down onto his hands and knees and showed her the kind of torture he had endured. Then, as a condition of their agreement, she went over the stories with him word by word before she turned them in.
Caitlin Dickersonis an immigration reporter for The Times.
Carrie Ann Lucas
(b. 1971)
She refused to let anything keep her from protecting disabled children.
By Ruth Padawer
Carrie Ann Lucas was in divinity school when she learned that her severely disabled niece — not quite 10 — had been placed in foster care because Lucas’s half brother could no longer care for her. Lucas knew that disabled children were rarely adopted from foster care, especially children like her niece, who had significant physical and cognitive challenges.
Lucas, a single woman in her late 20s, told her sister, Courtney, that she was seeking custody. Courtney was incredulous. “I had two young kids. I said to her: ‘Are you crazy? You have freedom now! Why would you do this to yourself?’ She said, ‘There’s no way in hell any niece of mine is going to spend the rest of her life in foster care.’”
Ruth Padaweris a contributing writer for the magazine.
Angus McQueen
(b. 1944)
He remade the National Rifle Association’s brand, and he made a fortune doing it.
By Jason Zengerle
In 1981, the National Rifle Association went looking for an advertising agency. It was losing its battle with gun-control advocates and was in dire need of improving its image, not to mention replenishing its coffers. Some of the big New York ad firms, an N.R.A. official later recalled, “didn’t know which end of the gun the bullet came out of.” But Ackerman McQueen, a comparably tiny advertising agency in Oklahoma City, was more than 1,000 miles from Madison Avenue — both geographically and culturally. One of its founders, Marvin McQueen, was an N.R.A. member. Ackerman McQueen landed the account.
Angus McQueen, Marvin’s son, was then the firm’s creative director. As a teenager, he entertained thoughts of becoming a Lutheran minister, but by his mid-30s he was a chain-smoking, Scotch-drinking Mad Man. He had cut his teeth making ads for Royal Crown Cola and Lufthansa. At Ackerman McQueen, he won an award for a Nocona Boots advertisement — featuring a cowboy stomping a rattlesnake — that was credited with remaking the boots’ stodgy image.
Jason Zengerleis a writer at large for the magazine.
Etika
(b. 1990)
His mental health problems collided tragically with the attention economy.
By Jamie Lauren Keiles
On midnight of June 20, a new video went live on Etika’s channel. In it, the 29-year-old YouTube star filmed himself as he walked through Lower Manhattan, speaking to the camera with a steady clarity that seemed almost eerie in light of his recent online behavior. “I’m sorry I betrayed your trust,” he began. City life, in the background, went on as usual — sirens, birds, passing cars. He went on to apologize to his fans for refusing to seek help. He seemed to be somewhere near the East River. Hours later, the N.Y.P.D. tweeted, seeking information on the matter, and Etika’s fans did not know what to make of the whole thing. Etika had struggled publicly with mental health — but then again, he was always up to something. Part of the joy of watching his channel had always been figuring out which parts were real.
There’s a fundamental problem of YouTube fame: When you get famous for being yourself, it alters that self beyond recognition. Most YouTube channels begin the same way, with regular people filming themselves, by themselves. In those first days, there are stilted introductions and impassioned addresses to not-yet-existing fans. This is how most YouTube channels end, before they come to fully exist. Those that survive will trace a common arc: an inciting viral moment, an influx of fans. You upload new content, the AdWords pay out. Now you’re not a regular person with a camera; you’re a YouTuber making YouTube, and here the snake begins to eat its tail. Your life is real to you, but it won’t seem real to fans, and so you come to a fork in the road: Keep being yourself at the cost of seeming real, or set out to perform a new pantomime of realness. If you’re like most YouTube stars, you’ll choose the latter. Etika was himself until the end.
Jamie Lauren Keilesis a contributing writer for the magazine.
Doris Day
(b. 1922)
She was an actress with subversive potential — who became a symbol of a generation’s sexual hypocrisy.
By Anthony Giardina
The first movie my mother ever took me to was “Young at Heart,” a 1954 melodrama starring Doris Day and Frank Sinatra. Toward the end, Sinatra, in despair over the ways he has disappointed his long-suffering wife, played by Day, turns off his windshield wipers during an ice storm and crashes. I was 4 when I saw that movie; the scene gave me nightmares. But I never held it against my mother. I’d like to think that I intuited then what I know now: a son’s nightmares were a fair trade-off for the essential information that Doris Day was delivering to women like my mother in the 1950s.
Day made 22 movies in that decade, most of them frothy musical entertainments designed to show off her lush band singer’s voice. But in her three most important dramatic movies — “Young at Heart,” “Love Me or Leave Me” (1955) and Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956) — she managed to transcend that image, sending out a very different message to the housewives who then composed her fan base.
Anthony Giardinais a writer whose recent play is “Dan Cody’s Yacht.”
Jimmy Nelson (& Danny O’Day)
(b. 1928)
They taught each other how to speak — without moving their lips.
By Elizabeth McCracken
“It seems to me that if I could teach you how to be a ventriloquist,” says Jimmy Nelson on the record “Instant Ventriloquism,” addressing his wooden partner, Danny O’Day, “I could teach just about anybody.” This, as with so much in ventriloquism, is either literally true or entirely fake or both simultaneously. It’s 1964, and the two are already famous for their appearances on shows hosted by Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan, as well as more than 100 television ads for Nestle’s Quik (alongside a ventriloquial chocolate-loving dog named Farfel). But Nelson is, at heart, a teacher. This record is how he plans to teach Danny O’Day — and every single kid who listens in — how to ventriloquize.
Nelson puts Danny O’Day through the paces: Here’s how you hold your mouth (never mind that Nelson controls said mouth); here’s how you move your tongue (never mind Danny hasn’t got one); here’s how to produce the easy consonants and how to produce the difficult ones, those that ordinarily require lip movement. “I can’t impress upon you too much the importance of thinking B while saying D,” he tells Danny, as Danny tries to do just that.
Elizabeth McCrackenis the author of six books, including “Bowlaway.”
Harold Bloom
(b. 1930)
He submerged himself in literature — more grandly, and grandiosely, than anyone.
By Sam Anderson
Harold Bloom once described himself as a “monster of reading.” He claimed he could read — really read — a 400-page book in a single hour. His memory was superhuman; he carried in his head not just poems but whole libraries, word for word. At Yale, where he taught for many decades, he was known on campus for a kind of parlor trick: If you saw him crossing the quad, you could quote a line of John Milton, and he would take the baton, as he walked, and recite the lines that followed. He kept all of “Paradise Lost” — one of the longest poems in the English language, more than 10,000 lines — in his mind-vault, unabridged, alongside (supposedly) all of Shakespeare, all of William Blake, huge portions of Wallace Stevens and countless others. He was a one-man rejoinder to Plato’s complaint that writing would destroy human memory. In his final decade Bloom could still quote, off the cuff, Hart Crane’s “The Bridge” — the long, difficult poem that had electrified him as a child, some 80 years earlier. It can be hard to disentangle Bloom’s reality from his own self-mythology, but even his detractors — and he would accumulate a great many — had to acknowledge the raw power of that brain, a combination of bandwidth and storage capacity that was, by any measure, exceptional.
Literature, for Bloom, was not only the pinnacle of human culture; it was also a sort of Olympic sport, a feat of skill and strength to be mastered in private and then performed to a rapturous public. He was, indeed, a surprising popular success — an ivory-tower best seller. Bloom first broke out in 1973 with “The Anxiety of Influence,” a book that reimagined literary history as a sort of rolling Freudian psychodrama. Every writer, he wrote, is belated — hopelessly late to the party of literary greatness. The only solution is to go to war with your greatest predecessors. Shakespeare had to overpower Marlowe; Tennyson battled Keats; Pound wrestled Browning. To read literature properly is to trace these anxious skirmishes. As Bloom put it: “Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem. A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety. … Criticism is the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem.”
Sam Andersonis a staff writer for the magazine and the author of “Boom Town,” a book about Oklahoma City.
Peggy Lipton
(b. 1946)
She gave life to two indelible TV characters. And then there was her album.
By Rob Hoerburger
There she was, staring up at me with those placid, flower-child eyes and that straw-straight hair. I remembered her as a star of “The Mod Squad,” the show about the hippie cops, and as, for a long moment, one of the most beautiful women on TV. I’d rooted for her every year at the Emmys (four nominations, no wins). I also knew that she strangely disappeared at the end of the show’s five-year run.
Now she was in front of me again, in a dusty, used-record store in Central New York in 1980. I had a vague notion that this decade-old album existed but couldn’t recall ever hearing her sing. I examined the fraying jacket. Ace musicians played on it, and every song was written or co-written by a woman — Carole King, Laura Nyro, even a few by the singer herself. Most important, the price, something like 99 cents, was right for a college junior living on work-study. I took it home.
Rob Hoerburgeris the copy chief of the magazine and the author of the novel “Why Do Birds,” published earlier this year.
Eddie Hill IV
(b. 2009)
He stood out from the start. But the dreams for young Eddie were stopped short.
By Matthew Purdy
Eddie Hill IV was a third grader with an infectious smile, a head for numbers and a gift for conversation, which sometimes got the better of him. He would finish his work before other students, then entertain himself with a quiet patter of jokes and asides, causing a localized ruckus. That earned him a visit from Rashida Chatman, a self-described “strict and rigorous teacher” who served as the informal disciplinarian at Gilkey Pamoja Preparatory Academy in St. Louis.
Chatman, who was then teaching fourth-grade math and science, quickly got a fix on Eddie. She, too, had emerged from struggling St. Louis neighborhoods and excelled in public school, graduating from Fisk University in Nashville with a major in biology before passing up a shot at Meharry Medical College to return home to teach elementary school. Chatman immediately pegged Eddie as bored, not bad.
Matthew Purdyis a deputy managing editor of The New York Times.
Barbara York Main
(b. 1929)
A literary arachnologist, she identified dozens of new species and shed light on the landscape they crept through.
By Alan Burdick
Some spiders, the Charlottes of the world, weave elaborate webs, spawn young that sail away on gossamer threads and grab what little glory there is for arachnids to attract. Not the trapdoor spider: It digs a burrow, builds a door for it and waits inside. Trapdoor spiders retain characteristics of the most ancient arachnids, which evolved at a time when Earth’s climate was moist and unchanging — “a kind of far-off Golden Age for spiders,” Barbara York Main noted in her 1976 handbook, “Spiders.” They also grow quite old. In 1974, Main began studying a colony of trapdoor spiders in the wild. In 2016, a matriarch known to Main as No.16 died at age 43 — the oldest spider in the world by a decade.
Main was popularly known as “Lady of the Spiders,” after a documentary that David Attenborough made about her years ago. She saw her first trapdoor spider at the age of 6 or 7, near her home — a mud-brick house that her father built on the farm he cleared from the arid bush in Western Australia. “It was really exciting to be able to cautiously lift a trapdoor and maybe see a few legs scuttle down a hole,” she told an oral-history interviewer. Trapdoor spiders form dense colonies but, unlike many nest-weaving spiders, are not communal. Main called them “the most fiercely solitary of all spiders.”
Alan Burdickis a senior editor for The Times’s science desk.
Opportunity
(b. 2004)
A NASA rover set the beyond-Earth record for overland exploration, and revealed that the basis of life — water — once existed on the red planet.
By Gareth Cook
Her life began with a harrowing delivery. Cradled in the protective shell of a landing craft, she arced through the atmosphere at more than 10,000 miles per hour, incandescent, a shooting star over the Arabia Terra desert. At the last moment, the craft severed its parachute and dropped, shrouded in a layer of airbags, hitting the ground like an ungainly rubber ball, bouncing and spinning across the terrain until it finally rolled to a stop. The bags deflated, gently settling the craft into the ocher soil. The shell opened, and out she stretched, limbs unfolding like an origami creation, raising her head, eyes unblinking. She unfurled her solar panels to draw in the thin Martian sun.
She was called “MER-B,” a NASA rover searching for evidence that water, the basis of all known life, once flowed on Mars. She became Opportunity after a student essay contest: The winner was a girl who recalled nights in a Siberian orphanage when the wide sky, pricked with silver, made her feel less lonely.
Gareth Cookis a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a contributing writer.
Additional design and development by Danny DeBelius

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