He had one of those 1960s stories so quintessential it sounds like a bad period movie: born in Coney Island, spent the early part of the '60s as a photojournalist covering civil rights and dog shows, fell in with Andy Warhol in '64, was the Factory photographer-in-residence for three years, became a Black Panther, and ended the decade by fleeing the states to spend 15 years in Katmandu selling hashish.

His Factory photos were instantly iconic, because that's how the Factory worked. Warhol and Dylan, Marcel Duchamp, the Velvet Underground performing live, and, of course, Edie.

He returned to the United States in 1982, became addicted to coke, and managed a British post-punk band. He kicked drugs and photographed club kids at Limelight.

Finkelstein died of pneumonia and emphysema. According to his website: "His work can be seen in upcoming exhibitions, including 'Who Shot Rock' at the Brooklyn Museum this Fall, and a retrospective at Idea Generation, London in December 2009."

She was born to middle-class alcoholics. She dropped out of school at 18, moved to San Francisco, and become a stripper. In the late-'60s, she met Manson, who renamed her Sadie Mae Glutz.

After the murders of Gary Hinman, Sharon Tate, Steven Parent, Jay Sebring, Wojchiech Frtykowski, and Abigail Folger, most of the Manson family was picked up for auto theft charges. While in prison, Atkins supposedly bragged of killing Tate to cellmates, who promptly turned her in.

At the trial, a remorseless Atkins confessed to stabbing Tate over and over again. Prosecutors say Atkins is the one who wrote "PIG" on the front door of Sharon Tate 's home, in Tate's blood. (Tex Watson took credit for all the murders in his post-born again memoir.)

She died of brain cancer. She is perhaps survived by a son, Zezozose Zadfrack Glutz, whose whereabouts remain unknown.

Kristol, born in Brooklyn to Orthodox Jews, was a Trotskyite at City College and an infantryman in World War II. When he came home, he edited Commentary, founded The Public Interest, and in the 1970s became the world's first Neoconservative.

Neoconservatives were, basically, former leftist intellectuals who decided they hated liberals, radicals, and Goldwater conservatives, and loved American moral superiority and, uh, tax cuts. It was much "sunnier" and nicer than regular conservatism. And they liked FDR. And Israel.

The big idea of Neoconservatism was, per 2003-era Irving, "cutting tax rates in order to stimulate steady economic growth." A revolutionary concept! Great for getting elected. And pretty good for getting reelected, until it stops working.

In fact, nearly every major tenet of his political philosophy, as he laid it out in 2003, informed the worst abuses of Bush administration. The entire section on foreign policy and American military might would be laughable if it weren't for the disastrous way in which his theories were tested on the ground.

He is survived by his son Bill Kristol—a remarkably embarrassing partisan party hack, which is at least not something Irving ever was—his wife Bea, and their daughter Elizabeth Nelson.

But judging from the clips available on YouTube, he appears to been something out of a pop culture design fantasy.

Bongiorno shot to fame in the 50's hosting the beloved Lascia o Raddoppia?, Italy's version of the $64,000. After that he went on to host a number of shows on Silvio Berlusconi's media empire, including, judging from the clips available on YouTube, an Italian version of Wheel of Fortune, something like an Italian Price Is Right set in a corn field, and another show that looks like an Italian Who Wants to Be a Millionaire set on a space station.

Overall, his ouevre appears to be what you'd get if Russ Meyer had art directed Bob Barker's career — which is more or less all the American public has been asking for all these years. Thank you Italy for at last making this dream come true; a shame we only realized it when it was too late.

He was diagnosed last year, and his decline was sudden and largely unexpected, though Liz Smith reported on his condition just yesterday.

It was a long and fascinating life. Dunne was a World War II vet. He was a TV director and film producer. He was one of the druggiest of the '70s Hollywood druggies until he cleaned up at age 50. He was a television star. When his daughter Dominique was murdered in 1982, he became a journalist.

His professional home of many years lists his credits:

Dunne—who joined Vanity Fair in 1984 as a contributing editor, and was named special correspondent in 1993—famously covered the trials of O. J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, Michael Skakel, William Kennedy Smith, and Phil Spector, as well as the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. He wrote memorable profiles on numerous personalities, among them Imelda Marcos, Robert Mapplethorpe, Elizabeth Taylor, Claus von Bülow, Adnan Khashoggi, and Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. His monthly column provided a glimpse inside high society, and captivated readers.

"He became our first star writer," Tina Brown says in After the Party, a documentary on Dunne. She hired him to write a story on the trial of his daughter's killer for Vanity Fair, and she calls him "the defining voice of the magazine."

Dunne covered the trials of "the rich, the powerful, and the famous," he said in the same documentary. And "the reason I can write assholes so well is that I used to be an asshole."

He's survived by sons Griffin and Alex and granddaughter Hannah. There is an obituary and a nice remembrance from Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair.

Kennedy's parents, corrupt political fixer Joseph Kennedy and strict Rose Fitzgerald, had grand ambitions for their sons Joseph Jr., John, and Robert. But Ted, the baby, was allowed, or maybe expected, to be a charming lightweight. The family mocked him for being fatter and slower than his superstar brothers, and he accepted their ridicule good-naturedly.

In the 40s, the family disasters began stacking up: his sister Rosemary was lobotomized and institutionalized. Siblings Joe Jr. and Kathleen died. All this by the time Teddy was 16.

When brother Jack, a sitting Senator, ran for president in 1960, the family sent Teddy out on the thankless and impossible task of winning the Western States. When he failed (not costing Jack the election, thankfully), he expressed a desire to stay out west, with his wife Joan. With his brothers in DC running the nation, Ted wanted to lay low and perhaps work toward a political career on his own terms.

"The disadvantage of my position," he told an interviewer, "is being constantly compared with two brothers of such superior ability."

But Joe told him to move to Massachusetts and take Jack's Senate seat, and so Ted did. He won a bruising primary battle with the very grudging support of his brothers and cruised to victory, whereupon Jack was suddenly gunned down. In the summer of 1964, Ted was in a plane crash that killed one man and nearly paralyzed him for life. (His recuperation provided him an opportunity to educate himself, at least.) And in 1968, his brother Bobby, then running for president (because he saw Eugene McCarthy draw blood from LBJ and decided to go in for the kill himself), was assassinated in California. And so, Teddy, the dumb one, was now, at 36, the last Kennedy brother. He declined to seek the nomination for the presidency, not knowing that he'd kill his chances forever the following year.

Ted was a drunk, and he fucked around. That was true his entire life. He was an intellectually lazy, louche rich kid, whose family bought him his education, his job, and even found him an acceptable wife. He got kicked out of Harvard for cheating in 1950, and when the Boston Globe threatened to reveal this fact as Ted campaigned to be a senator, the president, Ted's brother, invited the reporter over to make sure that the actual news get pushed to paragraph 5 and the headline remained vague.

So when, in 1969, he got wasted and drove a car off a bridge, killing a woman he'd left a party with, without brothers or a father to take care of it, it is not surprising that he did not know what to do. Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne, a former employee of Bobby's, were driving back to Edgartown, or to the beach, or who knows where. Kennedy drove off a narrow bridge with no guardrail into the water, but escaped the sinking car. Kopechne drowned.

Ted was almost certainly drunk, possibly concussed, and probably in shock. He walked back to the party and told the hosts what happened, whereupon they drove him back to the ferry landing. Kennedy says he swam back to Edgartown, went back to his hotel room, and went to bed. The next morning, he called friends for advice (this is when his father, who'd suffered a debilitating stroke years earlier, would've come in handy). When the car, and the body, were recovered, Ted went to the police. He pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury and received a suspended sentence of two months. And that was basically the end of his chance at the presidency.

The '70s? He did nothing in the '70s, until they ended, and he decided to challenge Jimmy Carter, whom he'd never liked. He didn't even really want to be president, it just seemed like now or never. He lost, and gave the best speech of his entire career at the 1980 Democratic National Convention, and then he buckled down to become one hell of a legislator and workhorse for the remainder of his years in the senate.

Oh, also he divorced his wife, hit the bottle hard, and began fucking around again even more recklessly than before. But he was the very definition of a functional alcoholic, able to achieve bipartisan compromises on important health care legislation by day and then fuck a lobbyist on the floor of a restaurant by night. He destroyed Robert Bork's chance at being on the Supreme Court, and paparazzi snapped him fucking a girl on his boat. He and Chris Dodd went out boozing and skirtchasing together. They'd later be joined by Ted's fuckup son Patrick and fuckup nephew William Kennedy Smith. After hitting the bar with son and nephew in Palm Beach in 1991, William allegedly raped one of the women he and Patrick had picked up. Ted testified. William was acquitted.

Ted remarried, to Victoria Reggie, in 1992. In 1994, He faced down the only serious threat to his senate seat ever, when Mitt Romney went after him. He won by 17 points, the narrowest margin of his career. After marrying Vikki and holding on to his seat, he largely avoided publicly embarrassing himself, and his scandalous past gradually faded from the popular consciousness.

In 2008, he bucked the Democratic party establishment and endorsed Barack Obama for president. In May, he suffered a seizure, and was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor. A thinner, weaker Ted Kennedy gave an impassioned speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, and then he largely disappeared from the public view.

His most important legacy is the legislation he was instrumental in passing. In the end, Ted Kennedy ended up a much more influential figure in American history than his more ambitious, more driven, probably smarter brothers. From Wikipedia, an incomplete list of major Senate accomplishments:

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the National Cancer Act of 1971, the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974, the COBRA Act of 1985, the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Ryan White AIDS Care Act in 1990, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the Mental Health Parity Act in 1996 and 2008, the State Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997, the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, and the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act in 2009.

Sadly, he didn't live to see his longtime dream of national health insurance actually come to fruition. The man's many, well-documented flaws aside, he was on the right side of history, most of the time, and he did more to actually make America a better place than 90% of the careerists and charlatans who pass through the United States Senate.

And as the undemocratic institution of the Senate (and this celebration of the life of a man who won his seat due to family connections and held on to it for almost fifty years proves the anti-democratic nature of that body) continues to destroy whatever hope this nation has of governing itself responsibly, we'll miss a man who more often than most tried to show that politics can be about tangibly helping real people.

[Top photo: AP. Most of the facts and quotes in this obituary come from The Boston Globe's series "Ted Kennedy."]

At the top: a portion of Kennedy's eulogy of his brother Bobby. Below: audio of Kennedy's entire 1980 convention speech.

After fighting in Korea, Novak covered politics for the AP and The Wall Street Journal. In 1963, with his wife working in President Johnson's White House as a secretary, Novak teamed up with with Rowland Evans to start the "Evans-Novak Political Report, a daily syndicated column that Novak continued writing, after Evans' retirement, up through this last February.

Novak was a great reporter. That's undeniable. He also used his column to advance a conservative political agenda, which is, obviously, an old tradition that has made something of a comeback. But his advocacy journalism skirted ethical lines on multiple occasions, especially in his constant use of anonymous sources. In 1972, he quoted an unnamed Democratic Senator as saying presidential candidate George McGovern's platform was "amnesty, abortion, and legalization of pot." The catchier "amnesty, abortion, and acid" line caught on, though critics accused Novak of inventing the quote. Decades later, Novak claimed the quote was from Thomas Eagleton, McGovern's eventual running mate. Eagleton had just died, and thus couldn't confirm it.

And, more recently, Novak became famous for his revealing that Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame was a covert CIA operative, as part of a Bush White House attempt to smear a critic who'd correctly noted that they were inventing intelligence to justify a war against Iraq. Reporting that is generally understood to be a crime, but Novak was never prosecuted.

Novak's role, which he understood and embraced, was to act as a proxy for political attacks by conservative politicians. You leaked your smear to Novak, and he reported that "neutral" Republican sources said something nasty about McGovern or Joe Wilson or even Fred Thompson. He was also generally considered a mean old man and his brain tumor was diagnosed after he was hospitalized after he hit a pedestrian in his black corvette and kept driving, claiming to be unaware that he'd hit anything.

He was 78, and a kinder remembrance may be found at his hometown paper.

Hughes wrote, directed, or produced some of the most beloved and influential films of the 1980s, from National Lampoon's Vacation through Planes, Trains, & Automobiles. He revolutionized family friendly live-action comedies in the 1990s. And despite his reputation as a retired recluse, he was credited under a pseudonym for work on both Maid in Manhattan and Drillbit Taylor in the 2000s.

But (the huge influence of Home Alone on a slightly younger generation aside) he'll obviously be best remembered, forever, for his still-beloved high school comedies. They were, and are, remarkable for a few reasons: strong female leads or supporting characters, a focus on a slightly idealized and exaggerated reality instead of peeking-in-the-girls-locker-room outrageousness, and, as we mentioned, class.

His movies dealt seriously, if not always realistically or positively, with class as experienced by, not coincidentally, public school teenagers growing up in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago. His rich suburban kids are neglected by parents more concerned with material goods than their children's well-being and his poor suburban kids are often just flat-out neglected or abused.

Hughes was raised in the Chicago suburbs, where he developed his loathing for (and, frankly, fixation on) the entitled trust fund kids."I knew kids that in the third grade would say, 'When I'm 18, I'm getting $22 million dollars.'" This never translated into political liberalism for Hughes (he shared that weird '80s pretend-counterculture conservatism with a lot of his talented comedian colleagues), but the consciousness of having not-so-much and being forced into dealing with those fascinating creatures who have too much underpins all his crucial '80s work.

So. Yes. Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, the gender-flipped (and superior) Some Kind of Wonderful, the still-hilarious Ferris Beuller's Day Off and The Breakfast Club—that's a pretty good legacy, and they're so ingrained in the popular culture that it's hardly worth it to exalt each one in detail.

The entirety of Pretty in Pink is available on YouTube, for now. The opening Ferris Bueller monologue remains a comic masterpiece.

Hughes began his career as a copywriter, sold jokes to Rodney Dangerfield, and eventually joined the National Lampoon staff. Despite his incredibly influence and obvious status as an auteur, he directed only eight films, from 1984 through 1991.

Schulberg was born in New York in 1914, but his father was powerful producer B.P. Schulberg, so Budd grew up in Hollywood, surrounded by silent film starlets. After college, he became a screenwriter and a communist (his parents were among the very few in the Hollywood executive class to hold left-wing sympathies). In 1939, he was assigned F. Scott Fitzgerald as a collaborator on a light campus b-movie romp. Instead of writing, Fitzgerald and Schulberg got drunk in New Hampshire.

In 1941, he wrote What Makes Sammy Run, his brilliant depiction of "the spirit of Horatio Alger gone mad." Lower East Side kid Sammy Glick goes from copy boy to powerful screenwriter/producer on the strength of his relentless ambition and conniving. It's the story of America's habit of rewarding the most sociopathic tendencies the country breeds into those unfortunate enough to be born without shit. It's Atlas Shrugged in reverse—Glick steals everything he "produces," and takes the money, and recognition for himself. It's never been filmed. That it came from the son of a Paramount executive was also something of a shock:

The novel did not endear Schulberg to [Louis B.] Mayer, who told B.P. that Budd should be deported. "He's a U.S. citizen," B.P. supposedly answered. "Where the hell are you gonna deport him? Catalina Island?"

(Of course, like so many other chronicles of the dark side of the American dream, it's become something of a how-to guide for real-life Glick types.)

When the US entered World War II, Schulberg ended up in the OSS, the intelligence-gathering precursor to the CIA. With John Ford's film unit, he documented the atrocities of the concentration camps, then personally arrested Leni Riefenstahl at her Austrian chalet.

After the war, Schulberg published The Disenchanted, his autobiographical novel about the Fitzgerald screenplay. Then, in 1951, he named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Richard Collins named Schulberg as a former party member first. Schulberg telegrammed the committee acknowledging his former membership and offering his full cooperation. In his self-serving testimony before the Committee, Schulberg said he left the party because it refused to break with the Soviet dictatorship, but, more damningly, he said the party had tried to influence his work.

I decided I would have to get away from this if I was ever to be a writer. I decided to leave the group, cut myself off, pay no more dues, listen to no more advice, indulge in no more literary discussions, and to go away from the Party, from Hollywood, and try to write a book, which is what I did.

It reads like Schulberg's decision to testify was borne as much out of his utter disillusionment with the Hollywood establishment as any sense of either patriotic duty or even self-preservation. But Schulberg named fifteen former Party members, including Ring Lardner, Jr. and Waldo Salt. He continued justifying his testimony for the rest of his life. The blacklisted writers "could have written books and plays," he said in 1982. The communists he named weren't truly concerned with the nation's social problems. They hadn't stood with him when he "was fighting the party." Schulberg eventually came around to the rather self-evident (in retrospect) idea that a congressional committee drafting a list of people no longer allowed to work in films was more of a threat to free speech than the party had ever been.

It was shortly after that that Shulberg collaborated with fellow name-namer Elia Kazan on his most enduring work: On The Waterfront, that brilliant paean to snitching. The story of how a chump ex-boxer and a crusading priest deal with corruption and mob control of the longshoreman is one of the greatest films ever made, and it cements Schulberg's place as an great American artists.

But it was his next collaboration with Kazan that we, personally, have always loved just a bit more, if only for its criminal underexposure: A Face In the Crowd is one of the best explorations of Popular American Demagoguery ever produced. Andy Griffith, playing the anti-Andy Taylor, is Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, another relentlessly ambitious type, though this one hides his reactionary abusive streak behind a down-home country aw shucks persona. Rhodes goes from Will Rogers to Father Coughlin, becoming a hugely popular radio star until his contempt for his audience is revealed on-air.

Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers - everybody that's got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They don't know it yet, but they're all gonna be 'Fighters for Fuller'. They're mine! I own 'em! They think like I do. Only they're even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for 'em. Marcia, you just wait and see. I'm gonna be the power behind the president - and you'll be the power behind me!

Rent it. It's great.

Schulberg was reportedly writing another boxing screenplay as recently as 2006. Tantalizingly, it was the Joe Louis story, and he was writing it for Spike Lee. We have no idea what the status of the project is, but we would absolutely love to see it.

Budd Schulberg, Screenwriter, Dies at 95 [NYT]
Budd Schulberg, Boss of the Brando Waterfront [TIME]

Dody was, in the late '50s and '60s, a ghostwriter, primarily to aging but still fiery female stars. He authored Bette Davis' The Lonely Life as well as books "by" silent film star Dagmar Godowsky, Helen Hayes, and John Barrymore's ex-wife Elaine Barrymore.

The intimate act of writing a strong personality's life story did not endear his subjects to him: "'The most suitable way to view stars is from a long way off,' he wrote in his own memoir, published in 1980." And: "'Let the next star,' he glowered, 'write her own damned autobiography.'"

After a brief trip to Hollywood, made with the intention of becoming a film star, Dody became a writer instead. In need of money, he wrote Godowsky's memoir. He never seems to have enjoyed the experience much, but he made his subjects sound good:

As a ghostwriter, Mr. Dody was expected to suppress his personality and channel the voice of the credited author. Yet often his own writing style crept in. In "First Person Plural," Ms. Godowsky's 1958 memoir of her life on the silver screen, the opening sentences, supposedly straight from Ms. Godowsky's pen, read: "It is my tragedy that the years have deprived me of my bad reputation. At one time my notoriety assured me of a marvelous evening. Now, Euclid would be fascinated to know, my circle has been squared."

He got along famously with Bette Davis, until she took a hatchet to "his" book (she was, he claimed, embarrassed that she hadn't written it herself). After penning Helen Hayes' memoir, he got out of the business. He spent a good part of his later years walking from his Greenwich Village apartment to the Met, and back.

At least this summer of Celebrity Death is taking out the McNamaras along with the Maldens.

JFK brought McNamara to Washington from Ford, because in the '60s (as today, probably) it made sense that a man who was quite good at managing a car company would best be able to manage the Pentagon, a corporation that produces war. And McNamera's dispassionate, analytical approach helpfully separated the messy details of death from the business of war, allowing everyone in Washington to accept burned villages, dead children, and wholesale destruction as a series of encouraging charts and graphs, showing progress in terms of thousands of dead enemies.

McNamara knew the war was unwinnable by the middle of 1965. And millions of tons of bombs and missiles indiscriminately rained down on North and South Vietnam and it became an open-ended commitment to a war of attrition between that realization and his resignation in 1967. After his resignation he refused to say a word about what he knew, and the war continued, for no good reason, until 1975.

His eventual, late-in-life apology was both too broad and too narrow. He was sorry that the entire ideology of the ruling class was wrong. He was sorry that no one listened to his limited objections. He was sorry Curtis LeMay was such an evil scumbag.

He was a narrow-minded number-crunching company man, exactly the sort of amoral little functionary we should never, ever allow to make decisions of life and death. A better man, perhaps, than a cold-blooded Machiavellian like Kissinger, but just as destructive.

At least until someone at Sony figures it out, you can watch the entirety of The Fog of War at YouTube.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

[Photo: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images]

Her striking frame, raspy voice, and taste for one-liners made her a natural subject for female impersonators. Told of her drag following, Arthur said, "I'm flattered." Her roles as Yente in Fiddler on the Roof, the outspoken Maude Finley of All in the Family and Maude, and most famously, the caustic Dorothy Zbornak of Golden Girls, gained her an avid gay audience. No funeral is planned. In wigs and wisecracks, she will live forever.

Of the four Golden Girls, Arthur is survived by Betty White and Rue McClanahan. None of the three attended costar Estelle Getty's funeral last year. White told Entertainment Tonight:

I knew it would hurt, I just didn't know it would hurt this much.. I'm so happy that she received her Lifetime Achievement Award while she was still with us, so she could appreciate that. She was such a big part of my life.

Update: The cult of Saint Beatrice has begun. Gays are posting this blasphemous Virgin Dorothy mashup in her holy memory:

(Photo by AP/Wally Fong)

Levine, whom you probably don't remember but will instantly recognize when you watch the clips below, plied the airwaves of NBC News back when dignity was recognized as a virtue in on-air personalities and people actually carried microphones around. He was exactly what a business reporter should be: Staid, careful, and serious. He had no discernable on-camera ego, and his death is timely in the sense that it reminds us just how insane the gang of testosterone-addled, shrieking, dancing clowns who have hijacked the coverage of our economy on television really are.

There aren't many clips of Levine at work out there, but here are two (you have to wade through a not-insubstantial period of randomness in both clips before you see Levine, but it's worth it so you can compare him to Jim Cramer and cry).

Rose, who's had Butler on his show and counts him as a friend, included him in a year-end memorial piece on New Year's Eve. Producers even created a graphic tombstone: "George Butler R.I.P. 1943-2008."

But Butler, the filmmaker, is still alive. Another George Butler, a jazz musician who played with Wynton Marsalis, is the one who died this year.

Such is the state of media, even at highbrow, self-serious PBS fare like The Charlie Rose Show: We have time to make infographics, but not for factchecking. Rose called the live Butler three times on New Year's Day to apologize.

Here's Butler on Rose's show in 2004 discussing Going Upriver, his documentary on John Kerry's Vietnam War experience:

The opening of the farewell editorial sets the scene:

What a run. A newspaper founded by a company that was scheduled to be created on September 11, 2001, announces its last issue on September 29, 2008, the day of the largest one-day point drop in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It's easy to forget the boom years in between that were bracketed by the terrorist attacks and the financial crisis.

Who can forget the glorious boom years of fear, war, torture, scandal and ignorance that have led us to this miserable wheezing end of our second gilded age? Thanks, Sun!

Their official history of the paper similarly ignores the things we loved about the scrappy daily in favor of reminding us of things like their idiotic call for the privatization of the New York subways in the very first editorial (followed by one announcing that some Washington Mall hippie demonstration was part of "The War Against the Jews"). The paper's founder and brainchild continues to impress:

When the paper was launched, a reporter of the Washington Post had asked its editor, Seth Lipsky, how the Sun would be able to compete against the New York Times, which had "eighty reporters" on its metropolitan desk. The Times might have 80 reporters, he replied, but they missed the story that taxes are too high, that the reason there is an apartment shortage is rent control, and that vouchers are a movement to rescue minority children from failing schools.

Yes, the Times missed that all-important local story on how taxes are too high, much as they missed the breaking national "hippies smell" scandal. We are trying to root for you here, Seth!

But it's hard. It's oh-so-hard. It is sad to see a daily broadsheet with smart writing fail, but honestly it didn't have to. The paper "burned through an estimated $80 million in its six and a half years of operation," according to the Post (which is gloating about the failure, yes, but still). If they'd began, back in 2001, as the tiny modest paper Lipsky originally intended, and built a strong internet presence, they'd be the Politico of the Intellectual Zionist New York Right Wing right now. Do you know what we could do with $80 million???

But no. They launched their paper just as their world-view reached its peak influence (post-9/11!), not when it was still a burgeoning, growing movement. So then they were stuck with it as it failed and lost favor. They launched a newspaper—a daily broadsheet!—as the newspaper industry collapsed and the internet took off again. It's hard not to see this as yet another example of "the smartest guys in the room" coming out looking like suckers.

Situations change of course, and added to the mix has been the great debate over foreign policy and the war. We are struck with each crisis — including the one that has beset our markets, when the temptation is running strong for so many to take the statist bait, though not once did we consider asking Washington to bail out the Sun — of the importance of guiding principles.

If that bit about not asking for a bailout is a joke, it's a lousy, un-self-aware one. Their glorious market, like their generation-defining war, was built on lies and misplaced faith, sold to us by hucksters like them (but more successful ones), and the cleanup for both mistakes will take years. Good riddance. See you on the internet.

Mac's lovable surliness and mock outrage at everyday minutia made him a master of stand-up comedy, which he parlayed into the dementedly funny Fox sit-com "The Bernie Mac Show." But even people who never saw his act or his TV show will have seen him in a movie, since his sense of humor made him a natural fit for just about every type of comedy. He helped make classics out of Friday and Bad Santa, made Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle bearable with the sound on, and was one of the highlights of the Ocean's 11 franchise. Though seldom cast as the leading man, he starred in the underrated but excellent Mr. 3000 in 2004. [CNN]