Manny Nosowsky, a New York Times crossword puzzle creator who delighted solvers with his witty, pun-filled puzzles for nearly two decades, died on May 20 in San Francisco. He was 91.

Dr. Nosowsky had been practicing urology for about 20 years when he faced a sudden bout of health issues. In 1983, at age 51, he gave up medicine and retired. To fill time, he joined his wife in solving crossword puzzles, and he decided to try constructing them.

His first puzzle for The New York Times ran in 1992. Eugene T. Maleska published eight of Dr. Nosowsky’s puzzles, and Will Shortz, the current editor, chose 246 of them, which The Times has called “bundles of pun” for their wit and humor. [e.g.’s: Breakfaster’s favorite drama: omeletprinceofdenmark; Classic saucy love song: Aiolihaveeyesforyou].

Billie Tisch, the last of the original four family members whose philanthropic legacy endures in the prominent educational, cultural and medical institutions that bear their surname, died June 7 at her home in Manhattan. She was 98.

Mrs. Tisch was the widow of Laurence A. Tisch. Mr. Tisch and his brother, Preston Robert Tisch, became self-made billionaires by transforming a kosher hotel in Lakewood, NJ, into the Loews Corporation, a conglomerate that began as a movie theater chain and now has investments in hotels, drilling, natural gas pipelines, insurance and packaging. Forbes magazine has estimated the family’s fortune at $10 billion.

Mrs. Tisch was the first woman to be elected president of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. She was also chair of the WNYC Foundation, vice chair of United Way of New York City, and a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation. Billie and Laurence Tisch made major donations to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and New York University Medical Center, among other organizations. In 1997, they created the Tisch Children’s Zoo in Central Park with a $4.5 million gift.

“I believe that’s what one does with one’s free time is an expression of one’s deepest convictions,” she told The Times in 1981.

Albert Wolsky, a prolific Hollywood costume designer who won Academy Awards for his sequined ensembles for “All That Jazz” and who transformed Olivia Newton-John’s character from saintly to seductive in “Grease,” died May 23 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95.

After fleeing Paris with his family during WWII and settling in New York, Mr. Wolsky accumulated more than 80 screen credits, winning him a reputation as “the dean of Hollywood costume designers.” In addition to winning two Oscars, he was nominated for five more.

Not all actors were as thrilled with Mr. Wolsky’s creations. And that was fine with him. “When an actor says, ‘I wouldn’t wear that,’” he once said, he liked to respond: “Neither would I. That’s why I call it a costume.”

Rafe Pomerance, an environmentalist who discovered in an obscure 1979 report that burning coal heats the atmosphere, which roused him, Paul Revere-like, to warn the public and politicians about climate change, died on May 21 in Washington, DC. He was 79.

Mr. Pomerance emerged as the central figure in a whole-issue article in The New York Times Magazine in 2018, “Losing Earth” by Nathaniel Rich. The article later expanded into a book and is now in production as a movie.

Earlier cautions about climate change, first noted in 1896 into the 1960s had been largely ignored. Dire warnings about increased carbon in the air predicting melting ice sheets, rising seas, calamitous weather and imperiled species did not catch the awareness of the public, politicians, media or environmental groups, which were focused on smog and toxic waste dumps.

“Shouldn’t I be totally depressed?” he asked in 2019. “Yet, I’m not.” One reason was how many people had come to understand the climate crisis. “When I started, nobody had heard of the problem. Nobody was active,” he said. “We started at zero. Well, look at us now. Everybody in the world knows about climate change. So is that progress? Let’s hope.”

James Burrows, master of the television situation comedy, who was a creator of “Cheers” and directed more than 1,000 episodes of that show and other TV classics like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Taxi,” “Frasier,” “Friends,” and “The Big Bang Theory,” died on June 19. He was 85.

Mr. Burrows earned a reputation as the “Steven Spielberg of sitcoms,” winning 11 Emmy Awards and receiving 47 nominations in a career that spanned five decades. “When I direct a television show, I try to reach that sweet spot where the best script meets the best performance and the best chemistry between performers,” Mr. Burrows wrote in his 2022 autobiography, Directed By James Burrows, written with Eddy Friedfeld. “Hitting that exact moment, where these factors land in combination, results in the sweetest and most enduring laugh.”

Carlo Ginzburg, an Italian scholar renowned for an approach to history that focused on the mass of humanity that existed outside the political and social elites of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, died on June 17 at his home in Bologna. He was 87.

In the 1960s, when Mr. Ginzburg embarked on his research, there was little interest in discovering what the peasants of centuries past thought and believed. History was focused on great leaders and events, like the Medici banking and political dynasty of nearby Florence or the powerful doges who ruled over Venice. Mr. Ginzburg’s interdisciplinary approach straddled anthropology, literary theory, art criticism, and psychoanalysis.

His family spent several years in a small, southern Italian village to which his parents had been exiled for their opposition to the Mussolini regime. His father was tortured and killed in 1944 during the Nazi occupation of Italy. Carlo spent the remainder of the war hidden in another rural village, under the protection of his maternal grandmother. “She was my only non-Jewish relative, and to protect me, she made me use her maiden name,” Mr. Ginzburg recalled. “I became Carlo Taszi.”

Greg Hyman, an electronics wizard and toy inventor who was a creator of Tickle Me Elmo, the giggling red plush Muppet when it appeared in 1996 and became a runaway success, died on May 1 at his home in Boca Raton, FL. He was 78.

Elmo was a bundle of red fluff and googly Muppet eyes. He giggled and said “That tickles.” What followed was retail mayhem. The first 400,000 sold out by Black Friday. As the company scrambled to make more, deploying Boeing 747s to deliver them, there were reports of frantic parents ambushing store employees and each other. A black market quickly emerged, with reports of Elmos, which had a retail price of $29.99 being scalped for as much as $7,000 each.