Alan Arkin, the star of “Get Smart” and “Little Miss Sunshine” and who appeared in more than 100 films in a career stretching over seven decades, died on June 29, in California. He was 89. In the early 1960s, Arkin became an improv star at Chicago’s Second City, which led to scores of screen credits, including “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming,” “Gross Pointe Blank,” and “Edward Scissorhands.” On television, he appeared in [...]

Marlena Spieler, an American food writer of more than 70 cookbooks, died July 6 at her home near London. She was 74. As a food writer, she was the “Roving Feast” columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle, and also worked for radio and television shows. She received the James Beard Award, and also the International Cookbook Award in Périgueux, France, in 2000. Her Jewish Heritage Cooking book was honored in 2003 by a Special Jury [...]

Richard Ravitch, a politically savvy, civic-minded developer who helped rescue New York City from bankruptcy and its decaying subways from fiscal collapse, died on June 25 in Manhattan. He was 89. “Mr. Ravitch never won elective office, but he left an outsize mark on government as one of the backstage wise men recruited to stave off the financial collapse of New York’s Urban Development Corporation in 1975 and, a few months later, of New York [...]

Marvin Kitman, who survived longer as a television reviewer than most of the programs he mirthfully critiqued, died on June 29 at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, NJ. He was 93. He joined The New Leader as a TV critic in 1967 and began writing a syndicated column for Newsday in 1969. Over 35 years, he churned out 5,786 columns, championing groundbreaking shows like “All in the Family,” “Seinfeld,” and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” [...]

Joseph Pedott, a native Chicagoan and the advertising mastermind behind the iconic ‘80s products the Clapper and the Chia Pet, died in San Francisco. He was 91. In 1980, while attending a housewares show in search of new clients, Mr. Pedott learned about a terra cotta planter, shaped like a ram, that grew chia sprouts resembling hair when watered. The inventor said it was popular but not profitable. Mr. Pedott bought the rights and tinkered [...]

Peg Yorkin, a U.S. feminist, philanthropist and strategist, who co-founded and served as chair of the board of the Feminist Majority Foundation, publisher of Ms, died June 25. She was 96. Two of her campaigns were notably successful: The Feminization of Power, which saw the increase of women in the U.S. Congress from 5% in the 1980s to 29% today, and U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of the abortion pill mifepristone and brought to [...]

Harry M. Markowitz, an economist who launched a revolution in finance, upending traditional thinking about buying stocks and earning the Nobel Prize in economic science in 1990 for his breakthrough, died on June 29 in San Diego. He was 95. Until Dr. Markowitz came along, the investment world assumed that the best stock-market strategy was simply to choose the shares of a group of companies that were thought to have the best prospects. But in [...]

Robert Sherman, who hosted three long-running radio shows over more than a half-century on the New York classical music station WQXR-FM, died June 27 at his home in Ossining, NY. He was 90. Mr. Sherman had been working behind the scenes at WQXR for more than a decade before he began hosting “Woody’s Children,” a weekly folk music program in 1969. A year later, he began “The Listening Room,” a daily program featuring established and [...]

Jack Goldstein, a preservationist who in the 1980s reacted to the razing of several venerable Broadway theaters under a Times Square redevelopment plan by helping to organize a successful campaign to give landmark status to more than two dozen other theaters, died on June 16 in Cold Spring, NY. He was 74. Part of the process was examining theaters’ interiors and exteriors to determine which should be designated landmarks, and then persuading the landmarks commission [...]

Mary Ann Hoberman, whose dozens of rhyme-filled books for children sought to encourage them to read, to read aloud, and to commit poems to memory, died on July 7 at home in Greenwich, CT. She was 92. In a 2008 interview with the Poetry Foundation, she said that moments from her childhood were reflected in her books. “I started writing when I had children of my own,” she said, “but I wasn’t really observing them [...]