According to an article in The New York Times, Melissa Rivers, daughter of the late Joan Rivers, is donating her mother’s extensive collection of jokes to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, NY, where the jokes will be accessible to all. Melissa Rivers told The Times that the Smithsonian Institution had been interested in the collection, but said it would not be on permanent display. She said her mind instantly went to the final shot [...]

Amitai Etzioni, the Israeli-American sociologist who drew wide attention as well as derision by fathering the Communitarian movement, a vision of society in which people care less about their own rights then about one another and the common good, died on May 30 at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 94. Barely a decade after landing in America, having fled Nazi Germany with his parents, he was writing books, articles and provocative commentaries on [...]

Robert Gottlieb, an illustrious editor at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker, who shaped a library of novels, nonfiction books and magazine articles by acclaimed writers from the middle to the late 20th century, died on June 14 in Manhattan. He was 92. Mr. Gottlieb edited novels by, among many others, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing and Chaim Potok; science fiction by Michael Crichton and [...]

Robert J. Zimmer, a mathematician who as president of the University of Chicago championed diversity in the recruitment of students and by protecting free expression on campus, died on May 23 at his home in Chicago. He was 75. Mr. Zimmer, who presided over the university from 2006 to 2021, was instrumental in shepherding what became known as the Chicago Principles, a set of guidelines recommended by the Committee on Free Expression. “Concerns about civility [...]