Kinky Friedman, a singer, songwriter, humorist and sometime politician who with his band, the Texas Jewboys, developed an ardent following among alt-country music fans with songs like “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” and whose biting cultural commentary earned him comparisons with Will Rogers and Mark Twain, died on July 27 at his ranch near Austin, Texas. He was 79.

He toured widely in the 1970s with his band and solo. When the band broke up, he turned to writing detective novels. He also wrote a column for Texas Monthly magazine in the 2000s.

He founded a ranch for rescue animals, and ran Echo Hill Camp, inherited from his parents, offering it free of charge to children of parents killed while serving in the U.S. military. In 2004, he announced a run for Texas governor, also ran unsuccessfully for state agriculture commissioner in 2010 and 2014. He returned to music and writing at his ranch until his death.

Elaine Schwartz, who in 1982 was a founder of the Center School, a public middle school in Manhattan, as a way to introduce bold classroom innovations, then remained its principal for four decades — long enough to see many of those innovations become common practice in schools nationwide — died on June 24 at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was 92.

Many of her once-radical ideas are today the norm in education — students receiving narrative report cards rather than number grades, and being included in parent-teacher conferences rather than having to sit outside expectantly. One of her biggest innovations is its emphasis on theater arts: Every student is required to participate in two schoolwide shows a year. to help preteenagers learn to become comfortable with their bodies. “The confidence they gain is amazing,” she said.

Soma Golden Behr, a longtime senior editor at The New York Times, died on June 30 in Manhattan. She was 84.

In her work, she expressed a lifetime interest in issues involving inequality, poverty, race and class, which resulted in a number of series for the newspaper, each enlisting squads of reporters, photographers and editors for intensive, sometimes yearlong assignments, several earning Pulitzer Prizes for reporting.

She was the first woman to lead the newspaper’s national desk, and the third on its masthead. In 1977, she was named to the Times editorial board. At the time, she was only women exclusively writing editorials, often on women’s issues, gay rights, and inequality.

Jon Landau, an Oscar-winning producer who collaborated with the director James Cameron in making three of the highest-grossing films of all time, “Titanic” and the two “Avatar” movies, died on July 5 in Los Angeles. He was 63.

Mr. Landau and Mr. Cameron’s decades-long collaboration made box office history. The first film they made together, “Titanic,” became the first movie to gross more than $1 billion globally after its 1997 release. Its record for total earnings, $1.84 billion, was broken by their next film, the science-fiction epic “Avatar” (2009).

“Titanic” was nominated for 14 Oscars and won 11, including best picture.

Richard M. Goldstein, a trailblazer in planetary exploration who used ground-based radars to map planets with techniques that scientists now use to measure geographical changes on Earth, including melting glaciers, died on June 22 at his home in La Canada Flintridge, CA. He was 97.

In the early 1960s, while a graduate student in electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, he proposed as his thesis project to try to detect echoes from Venus, using the Goldstone Solar System Radar, which had been newly developed. If successful, scientists would learn the distance from Earth to Venus. On March 10, 1961, technicians pointed the new radar at Venus. Six and a half minutes later, signals from the planet returned. He bounced signals off Mercury, Mars and Saturn’s rings, all making it possible to do accurate spacecraft navigation within the solar system.

Later, he adapted his radar algorithms for use with aircraft and satellites, which have mapped melting glaciers, the movement of tectonic plates, and other changes to the Earth’s surface.

Ruth Westheimer, the diminutive guru of the American sexual revolution whose straightforward, matter-of-fact way of discussing the facts of life led to a career as a radio talk-show host, television personality, author and advice expert, died July 12 at her home in New York City. She escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930s and was one of the entertainment industry’s last survivors of the Holocaust.

The turning point for her career came in 1980. After giving a lecture to a group of New York broadcasters about the need for sex education programming, WNYN-FM offered her a 15-minute radio show called “Sexually Speaking.” Word spread quickly about the quirky, candid and informative radio host calling herself Dr. Ruth, who offered no-holds-barred advice on sex. By 1983, the program was an hour long and was drawing a quarter-million listeners weekly. The following year, it was syndicated across America. In 1983, “Sexually Speaking” made the leap to television.

As a 10-year-old, she was sent to Switzerland on a kindertransport. Later, she relocated to Palestine, also served in the Israeli army as a sniper. She arrived in New York in 1956. She never saw any of her family again. She learned that her parents were sent to the Lodz Ghetto and killed at Auschwitz.

Maxine F. Singer, a biochemist and federal health official who in the 1970s was instrumental in developing guidelines that protected the then-nascent field of biotechnology while calming fears that this new science would give way to the spread of deadly lab-produced microbes, died on July 9 at her home in Washington, DC. She was 93.

In a letter to the journal Science,  Dr. Singer pointed out the risks to laboratory workers and called on the National Academies of Science to develop federal guidelines to protect them.