Dr. Morris Waxler, who as a federal health official was instrumental in approving laser eye surgery as a quick fix to replace eyeglasses or contact lenses, and then reversed himself a decade later after concluding that the operation could actually impair a patient’s vision, died on Jan. 2 in a hospital in Madison, Wis. He was 88. Patients who had undergone Lasik surgery soon began complaining about how their sight had been distorted by halos, [...]

Award-winning songwriter Billy Steinberg, who wrote several top hit songs, including Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” died Feb. 18. He was 75. Mr. Steinberg wrote some of the biggest pop hits of the 1980s and 1990’s, and was behind songs performed by Whitney Houston Celine Dion, Cyndi Lauper, and Madonna. “Billy Steinberg’s life was a testament to the enduring power of a well-written song — and to the idea that honesty, when set to music, can [...]

Frederick Wiseman, a director whose rigorously objective explorations of social and cultural institutions constitute one of the more revered bodies of work in American documentary filmmaking, died on Feb. 16 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 96. Mr. Wiseman, who received an honorary Academy Award in 2016, was among the most influential directors of nonfiction cinema. Mr. Wiseman’s last films were among his best received. The novelist Jay Neugeboren, writing in The New [...]

Michael Silverblatt, a ravenous reader and cerebral interviewer whose long-running public radio program, “Bookworm,” provoked authors to see their work in fresh ways and to articulate what drove them to write in the first place, died on Feb. 14 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73. Mr. Silverblatt, whose nationally syndicated show aired from 1989 to 2022, once described himself as “a person of ferocious compassion instead of ferocious intellect.” He stunned his [...]