Peter Tarnoff, a seasoned diplomat whose work behind the scenes for presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton included establishing a secret channel to Fidel Castro and helping arrange the escape of six U.S. Embassy officials from Iran, an escapade later depicted in the 2012 movie “Argo,” died on Nov. 1 at his home in San Francisco. He was 86. While other outsized personalities like Richard Holbrooke and Anthony Lake became famous, Mr. Tarnoff preferred to [...]

Robert Brustein, an advocate for nonprofit theater, where he served at various times as critic, teacher, producer, director, playwright and actor, died on Oct. 29 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 96. Mr. Brustein was dean of the drama school at Yale and founded and ran the Yale Repertory Theater and the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, producing well over 100 plays. He taught at both institutions. He also reviewed stage productions for [...]

Anita A. Summers, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who addressed a variety of public policy topics, including zoning, education and tax incentives, died on Oct. 29 at her home in Gladwyne, PA. She was 98. Her son Lawrence H. Summers, the economist and former Secretary of the Treasury, confirmed the death. She insisted that public policymaking be strengthened with economic analysis, that the business and finance world could benefit [...]

Alan G. Hevesi, a New York politician who spent 35 years as an elected official until he suffered a fall from grace that led to his resignation as state comptroller and 20 months in prison for corruption, died on Nov. 9 in East Meadow, L.I. He was 83. On Oct. 23, 2006, a state ethics commission concluded that Mr. Hevesi had knowingly violated the law by improperly assigning a public employee to handle personal chores. [...]

Ida Applebroog, an artist who confronted the violence, coercion and mortality that can simmer beneath everyday relationships with a prolific stream of drawings, paintings, sculptures and videos, died on Oct. 21 at her home in Manhattan. She was 93. Writing in The New York Times in 2010, Randy Kennedy called her work “funny in a way that skews toward weird without losing the ha-ha.” Her work also demonstrates her comfort in grappling with the unspeakable, [...]

Gary Winnick, a former junk-bond salesman who in 1997 founded Global Crossing, a telecommunications company that laid fiber-optic cable underwater around the world to speed internet and phone traffic, but that imploded five years later under billions of dollars in debt, died on Nov. 4 at his estate in Los Angeles. He was 76. For a time, Mr. Winnick was the wealthiest person in Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal. He spread [...]

Linda R. Hirshman, a lawyer, philosophy professor, and author who enraged liberals and conservatives alike with an essay attacking women who chose to stay home and raise children, died on Oct. 31, in Burlington VT. She was 79. In 2005, she published an article in “The American Prospect,” a progressive policy journal, criticizing women who chose to drop out of the workforce to raise families as a bad choice. She argued that affluent women with [...]

George Tscherny, a leading figure in graphic design, whose work unified the clean lines of modern art with pop sensibility, died on Nov. 13 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99. The family fled Germany after Kristallnacht and ultimately settled in New Jersey, after George and his brother Alex lived for several years in a home for refugee children. Trained at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Mr. Tscherny apprenticed in Manhattan design studios for [...]

Helen Marcus, a photographer whose evocative black-and-white portraits of literary figures and film and television personalities graced book jackets and magazine covers for decades, died on Oct. 1 at her home in Manhattan. She was 97. Her fame as a photographer, and her leadership role as a defender of her profession on issues of copyright and credit were all the more notable because the field at the time was so overwhelmingly dominated by men. Helen [...]

Herbert Gold, a novelist, who wrote of the complexities of love and marriage, died on Nov. 19 at his home in San Francisco. He was 99. Mr. Gold’s writing brought a sense of humor to his tales of ordinary men and women trying to gain a foothold in the slippery terrain of romance or, like him, struggling to connect the world of their Jewish immigrant parents with the realities of American life. His most admired [...]