Linda R. Hirshman, a lawyer, philosophy professor, and author who enraged liberals and conservatives alike with an essay attacking women who chose to stay home and raise children, died on Oct. 31, in Burlington VT. She was 79.

In 2005, she published an article in “The American Prospect,” a progressive policy journal, criticizing women who chose to drop out of the workforce to raise families as a bad choice. She argued that affluent women with elite degrees were disappearing from the halls of power in law, business and politics and that the choice was harmful to them personally and to the country because their absence meant that more than half of the American population would be underrepresented in the places where policy was made.

The articles later grew into a book, and four more books followed. At the time of her death, she was working on a book with Margaret Sullivan, the media and political columnist, about the roots of right-wing media and how its growth has destabilized democracies in several countries including the United States. The working title was “Hate, Inc.”

George Tscherny, a leading figure in graphic design, whose work unified the clean lines of modern art with pop sensibility, died on Nov. 13 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

The family fled Germany after Kristallnacht and ultimately settled in New Jersey, after George and his brother Alex lived for several years in a home for refugee children.

Trained at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Mr. Tscherny apprenticed in Manhattan design studios for five years, then opened his own practice in 1955. He soon had a client list that included American Can, Colgate Palmolive, Pan Am and RCA, all hiring his office to design advertising, logos and annual reports. Unlike other graphic designers of the era, his work brought in humor and humanity. He taught at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, created its graphic design program, and designed its logo, still in use today.

Helen Marcus, a photographer whose evocative black-and-white portraits of literary figures and film and television personalities graced book jackets and magazine covers for decades, died on Oct. 1 at her home in Manhattan. She was 97.

Her fame as a photographer, and her leadership role as a defender of her profession on issues of copyright and credit were all the more notable because the field at the time was so overwhelmingly dominated by men.

Helen Marcus founded the New York chapter of the American Society of Magazine Photographers (later the American Society of Media Photographers) in 1982 and served as its national president from 1985 to 1990. From 1998 to 2007, she was president of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund, an organization named for the celebrated photojournalist that was established in 1979 to help independent photographers complete their projects.

Her work appeared in Time, Forbes, Gourmet and other magazines, and in The New York Times. Her photographs are included in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the International Center of Photography. Her 1977 photograph of Toni Morrison inspired an etching that appeared on a Swedish postage stamp. “It’s probably the most reproduced photograph I ever made,” she said in an interview with New Letters magazine in 2007.

Herbert Gold, a novelist, who wrote of the complexities of love and marriage, died on Nov. 19 at his home in San Francisco. He was 99.

Mr. Gold’s writing brought a sense of humor to his tales of ordinary men and women trying to gain a foothold in the slippery terrain of romance or, like him, struggling to connect the world of their Jewish immigrant parents with the realities of American life.

His most admired novels addressed a different theme: Jewish identity in the United States. He explored this subject in two works that blended memoir and fiction, and in a novel-memoir that tilted more strongly toward autobiography.

Marvin Newman, a renowned photographer who brought an artistic eye to capturing shadows on a Chicago main street; people in front of shuttered storefronts on Coney Island; and athletes in competition, including Bill Mazeroski of the Pittsburgh Pirates smashing the 1960 World Series-winning home run, died on Sept. 13 at his home in Jersey City, NJ. He was 95.

One of Mr. Newman’s most famous pictures is one he took for Sports Illustrated in the Texas Christian University locker room before the 1957 Cotton Bowl against Syracuse University. There is no action, barely a hint of movement, just players and staff members sitting on chairs or the floor, anticipating the start of the game.

In an appraisal of the photograph in Sports Illustrated in 1999, Gary Smith wrote that it represented what sports are most about — “the moments before, the times when a person takes a flashlight to his soul and inspects himself for will and courage and spirit.”

Mr. Newman said he knew the picture was special. “When photography works well, you can go inside the psyche of the people in the picture,” he said. “You can see beyond the moment.”

Dianne Feinstein, the long-serving Jewish senator from California who rose to national prominence when she appeared before cameras with her hands stained with the blood of a murdered colleague, died Sept. 28. She was 90 and in failing health. Feinstein served in the Senate for more than three decades as its longest-serving woman.

Feinstein became a national figure in 1978 when she was the president of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco and found the body of fellow supervisor Harvey Milk. Milk, who was Jewish and the first openly gay elected official in the city’s history, was assassinated by a former colleague, Dan White. White also killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone.

Feinstein announced the murders while her hands were still stained with Milk’s blood. She soon stepped in to replace Moscone, serving two terms as major. The trauma of the double murder propelled her to become an outspoken advocate for gun control, a cause she took with her into the Senate, when she won a special election in 1992 to replace Sen. Pete Wilson, a Republican.

Feinstein was the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee from 2009 to 2017, and later served as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, stepping down when her health began to fail. Early in 2023, she announced she would not run again for election in 2024.

Victor R. Fuchs, the so-called dean of American health care economists, died on Sept. 16 at his home on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. He was 99.

Dr. Fuchs was best known for a slim book published in 1975 with the attention-grabbing title, Who Shall Live? Health Economics and Social Choice. He was among the first to articulate why the United States was in the midst of rapidly rising health care costs, while costs in other countries stayed manageable. The book has become required reading among physicians, health economists, and anyone interested in the issue of American health care, and it has never been out of print.

Dr. Fuchs showed that the real problem facing the country was not health care coverage but health care costs; America, he wrote, was spending more and more without achieving better health outcomes.

He wrote more than 200 research papers and 16 more books. He retired in 1995 but continued to write. He finished his latest not long before his death. It is scheduled for publication next month.