Neil Drossman, who brought wit to print advertisements and television commercials, died on Nov. 25 in the Bronx. He was 83.

From the late 1960s until this year, Mr. Drossman was a copywriter at several agencies. One of the most enduring lines Mr. Drossman wrote was for Meow Mix: “Tastes so good, cats ask for it by name. For Stick Ups, small deodorizing disks made by Air Wick that could be glued anywhere in the house, he wrote “This is a good place for a Stick Up.” When Readers Digest hired him in 2003 to refresh its image, Mr. Drossman pushed that venerable publication into slightly risqué territory. One of the ads in the campaign showed a woman in a bathrobe holding a copy of the magazine and looking into the camera. “If we got any closer to our readers,” the headline read, “we’d have to use protection.”

Guy Stern, who fled rising antisemitism in Nazi Germany at 15 for a new life in the United States but returned to Europe during WWII as a member of a military intelligence program that trained him to interrogate prisoners of war, died on Dec. 7 in West Bloomfield, MI. He was 101.

Mr. Stern was one of the so-called Ritchie Boys, a group named for a secret Army camp in Maryland that served as a training center — mostly for German Jews — to learn how to interrogate imprisoned German and Italian officers and translate documents to extract vital information. At least 60% of the actionable intelligence in the European theater was amassed by the Ritchie Boys, according to David Frey, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at West Point.

Dan Greenburg, the prolific humorist, best-selling author, essayist, playwright and screenwriter, whose satirical prose examined Jewish angst, died on Dec. 18 in the Bronx. He was 87.

Mr. Greenburg achieved national fame in 1964 with the publication of his How To Be A Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual, a tongue-firmly-in-cheek assessment of the unique and often baffling qualities of a stereotypical Jewish mother. Though his own mother didn’t think it was particularly funny, the book sold more than 270,000 copies in its first year alone, and opened the door for the 28-year-old Mr. Greenburg to embark on a long career as a writer.

He subsequently published more than a dozen books for adults and later began writing humorous children’s fiction, turning out volumes of the popular “The Zack Files” series, for which his son was the inspiration. In a 1998 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Greenburg said, “There’s nothing more fulfilling than hearing that you’ve turned a kid on to books.”

Robert M. Solow, who won a Nobel in economic science in 1987 for his theory that advances in technology, rather than increases in capital and labor, have been the primary drivers of economic growth in the United Stated, died on Dec. 21 at his home in Lexington, MA. He was 99.

Professor Solow taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he and a fellow Nobel laureate, Paul A. Samuelson, forged the M.I.T. style of economic analysis, which emerged as a leading approach in the second half of the 20th century and played an important role in economic policymaking.

Although choice posts in Washington beckoned  — he did serve briefly as a staff member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers during the Kennedy administration — Professor Solow’s heart was always in academia. Once, when invited to an embassy party, his secretary was asked his rank so he could be properly seated according to protocol. “Tell them,” he told her, “I’m a full professor of economics at M.I.T. — and they don’t have anything that high in the government.”

Irwin Cohen, an inventive developer who transformed a derelict factory, where the first Oreo cookie was produced in 1912, into Chelsea Market, an exuberant 21st-century food bazaar that helped revitalize its New York City neighborhood, died on Dec. 18 in Manhattan. He was 90.

In creating the market, Mr. Cohen reconfigured the former National Biscuit Company plant — a complex of 17 brick buildings dating to the 1890s, filling a block between Ninth and 10th Avenues and West 15th and 16th Streets — into an industrial destination for foodies. Repurposing the plant spurred the gentrification of West Chelsea.

Mr. Cohen and his daughter purchased the factory for $14 million. In 2018, Google bought the property for $2.4 billion.

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 wield his influence out of the public eye. “Peter was really the quintessential diplomat in the sense that he never asked for the spotlight,” said Wendy Sherman, who served alongside him in the Clinton administration. “He never needed to be the named person. He just got the job done.”

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 The New Republic for more than 50 years.

In many books and in countless newspaper and magazine articles, he argued for brave theater, intellectual theater, non-pandering theater, and he worried that the art form was being attenuated by the profit motive.

“The basic aim of the commercial theater is to make a profit,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990. “The basic aim of noncommercial theater, in its ideal form, is to create the condition whereby works of art can be known. And I don’t think these are compatible aims.”

As erudite and contentious as ever, Mr. Brustein continued to bemoan the state of theater in his later years. “…Our values have somehow gotten very skewed, and we’ve gone back — if we ever left it — to the notion that success is the highest value in this country. Not integrity, not quality, not intelligence, not spirit, not soul. Success, financial success. And this is a heartbreaker.”