Leon N. Cooper, a Nobel-winning physicist who helped unlock the secret of superconductivity and who did pioneering work in understanding how memory and the brain work, died on Oct. 23 at his home in Providence, RI. He was 94.

Some of the greatest physicists of thed 20th century, including Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and Richard Feynman, tried to explain how superconductivity works. Dr. Cooper helped crack the code with two colleagues at the University of Illinois — John Bardeen and J. Robert Schrieffer. Years later, Dr. Cooper recalled that if he had known how many eminent scientists had tried and failed to solve the concept of superconductivity, he probably would not have tried.

Dr. Cooper spent most of his career at Brown University, where he became interested in neuroscience and went to work on one of the central puzzles in the field: how people learn. Among the discoveries was how people learn to see.

According to Dr. Cooper’s daughters, when he was young, he told his father that he wanted to become a physicist because “there is no other way that I can know about everything.”

Bette A. Prashker, a pioneering woman in the book business who published the feminist classics Sexual Politics by Kate Millet and Backlash by Susan Faludi, died on July 30 in Alford, MA. She was 99.

The list of authors Ms. Prashker discovered, championed or positioned for best-sellerdom as a top editor and executive at Doubleday and also Crown included Isaac Asimov, Erik Larson, Dave Barry and Dominick Dunne.

Don Buchwald, a talent agent who elevated shock-jock radio personality Howard Stern to satellite radio, died on July 22 at his home in North Egremont, MA. He was 88.

In late 1985, after WNBC fired Mr. Stern, Mr. Buchwald negotiated his move to WXRK-FM, known as K-Rock. Over the next 20 years, Mr. Stern’s popularity swelled, and his show was syndicated to stations nationwide. But it was Mr. Buchwald’s negotiating in 2004 that led to a groundbreaking five-year $500-million contract with Sirius Satellite Radio, where he could say anything he wanted, compared with traditional radio, where his sexual and scatological references led to fines by the Federal Communications Commission against stations that carried his show. The Sirius deal included 34.4 million shares of the company’s stock, which were worth $219 million, when the show made its satellite debut in early 2006.

Walter Shapiro, a political columnist whose career included stints as a presidential speechwriter, stand-up comic, professor, author and, as a recent college graduate, congressional candidate, died on July 21 in Manhattan. He was 77.

He began his career in journalism at Congressional Quarterly and went on to write for Washington Monthly, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, USA Today, The New Republic and Esquire. He later wrote for Salon, Yahoo News, Politics Daily and Roll Call.

In 2010, Mr. Shapiro won a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. At his death, he had written dozens of columns on the race between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump. Their presumptive face-off was the 12th presidential campaign he had covered.

In addition to his columns, Mr. Shapiro wrote two books, one about his grifter great-uncle who may, or may not, have fooled the Nazis into buying what they thought was a cargo of nickel — and of whom Mr. Shapiro admitted he was unduly proud.

Francine Pascal, as former soap opera scriptwriter from Queens who conjured up an entire literary universe in her long-running and best-selling ”Sweet Valley High” series of young-adult novels, died on July 28 in Manhattan. She was 92.

Within a few years of its debut in 1982, “Sweet Valley High” had taken over the young-adult book market. In January 1986, 18 out of the top 20 books on the young-adult best-sellers list were “Sweet Valley High” titles. Altogether, the “Sweet Valley High” series has sold more than 200 million copies.

Although some critics panned her books’ utopian settings and fanciful plots, Ms. Pascal was unapologetic. “These books have uncovered a whole population of young girls who were never reading,” she told People magazine. “I don’t know that they’re all going to go on to War and Peace, but we have created readers out of nonreaders. If they go on to Harlequin romances, so what? They’re going to read.”

Manfred Kirchheimer, a filmmaker who was draw to stickball, jazz, subway graffiti, gargoyles of old buildings, and the memories of aging immigrants, and who earned a reputation as a master of nonfiction cinema, died on July 16 at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 93.

Mr. Kirchheimer often wrote, produced, directed, photographed and edited his movies. He got funding from nonprofit sources, and he earned a living as a freelance film editor and a film professor at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan from the mid-1970s until the mid-2010s.

From 2018 to 2022, Mr. Kirchheimer released four new movies that included footage he had shot more than half a century ago. The films unearthed scenes of old men reading newspapers and youngsters playing jacks with soda caps — urban life happening on sidewalks. In a review of one of the movies, Ben Kenigsberg, film critic for The New York Times, labeled Mr. Kirchheimer a “city symphonist.”

Ina Jaffe, a NPR correspondent for about 40 years, the first editor of “Weekend Edition Saturday” and a contributor to “All Things Considered,”  died August 8 in Los Angeles. She was 75.

She covered national elections since 2008. In 2010, she received a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association for her reporting on California’s disciplinary three-strikes law, which imposed harsher penalties for what were often minor or nonviolent criminal offenses. In 2011, her investigation into violence at psychiatric hospitals in California won an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award as well as a Gracie Award.

Ms. Jaffe’s through line of her reporting: “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em come back for more.”