Ariella Budick writes in Newsday:

Brooke Astor, who died at 105 Monday of pneumonia at Holly Hill, her Westchester County estate, was perhaps New York City’s last grande dame, an all-but-extinct breed. Socialite, philanthropist, self-confessed flirt and expert charmer, she enriched the city she lived in with wit, style, and unstinting largesse.
…
She was the only child of Gen. John Henry Russell Jr., a Marine Corps officer whose work took him around the globe. Brooke passed her childhood in a range of foreign locales: China, the Dominican Republic, Panama and Hawaii. She briefly attended the Madeira School in McLean, Va., before dropping out to pursue her social life full-time.
“My mother was afraid I would learn too much and become a bluestocking,” she told her friend, the late New Yorker writer Brendan Gill. Cont’d.

In a 1999 Talk, John Cassidy described an awards-gala appearance in which Astor, “a sprightly flyweight going on ninety-seven,” appeared alongside Hillary Clinton:

In truth, though, Mrs. Clinton was no match for Mrs. Astor, a hardy dowager who has honed her technique at thousands of such occasions. Clambering onto the stage, she held the audience rapt as she told of her thirty-nine years as head of the Astor Foundation—a period during which the foundation distributed two hundred million dollars to causes that ranged from the public-library system and the Metropolitan Museum to low-income housing in Queens. “I’ve given it all to New York, and I’ve never given anything to anything I haven’t seen,” she declared, in her plummy English accent, the likes of which is rarely heard outside Buckingham Palace these days.

Gill wrote in his 1997 piece: “She always speaks at ease, without preparation, phrases springing to her lips with the unguardedness of someone who has long known exactly who she is.”

From the Times obituary:

Hans Koning, whose outpouring of more than 40 fiction and nonfiction books ranged from exotic travel to erotic trauma to a withering indictment of Christopher Columbus, died on Friday at his home in Easton, Conn. He was 85.
His daughter Christina Koning confirmed the death, but declined to give a cause.
Mr. Koning wrote novels, plays, screenplays, travel books, young adult books and many magazine articles, particularly for The New Yorker. He also did translations. His stated goal was to reflect on injustice and the essential state of being human “in a hidden way.” But his strongly leftist politics were seldom camouflaged. Cont’d.

It is my understanding that longtime New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett has died. If anyone knows more, please confirm. What a week for deaths. Which every week is, but they seem to be snowballing.
Here’s Balliett’s short review in the magazine of A Great Day in Harlem, and a November 18, 1961, Talk of the Town about Sonny Rollins; as with all old Talks, it has no byline, but the reliable Greg.org credits it to Balliett, so I’m going with it. (It is indeed by him.) It begins:

When life becomes nothing but a bowl of clichés, how many young and successful people of non-independent means have the resilience and backbone to withdraw completely from the world and reorganize, refuel, retool, and refurbish themselves? Well, we know of one such heroic monk—Sonny Rollins, a thirty-one-year-old tenor saxophonist. In the summer of 1959, Rollins, finding himself between burgeoning success and burgeoning displeasure with his playing, dropped abruptly and voluntarily into oblivion, where he remained until this very week, when he momentously reappeared at the Jazz Gallery, on St. Marks Place, with a quartet. At the time of his self-banishment, Rollins was, among other things, the most influential practitioner on his instrument to come along since Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins; the unofficial head of the hard-bop school (a refinement of bebop); and one of the first of the now plentiful abstract or semi-abstract jazz improvisers. As a result, his Return—rumored for months—took on a kind of millennial air, which we got caught up in several days before the event by having a chat with the Master himself.

Friday update: Balliett’s death has been confirmed. Also now online at newyorker.com: the critic’s December 26, 1970, Profile of Bobby Short. Here’s the Newsday obituary: “‘Whitney’s knowledge of the jazz world was encyclopedic, his passion for the music unbounded, and his prose as fluid and as joyful as the subject he wrote about,’ said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker…. ‘Whitney’s heart might have been with the music of the golden era of jazz, but he was also perfectly capable of writing with sympathy about the later innovators, such as Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman,’ said Remnick. ‘He was especially brilliant writing about singers and drummers—in fact, Whitney himself was a damn good amateur drummer himself.'” Other obituaries: in The New York Sun, in The Washington Post, in The New York Times, and on All About Jazz.

A tribute by John Nichols for The Nation. And from Good Texan (an excerpt, but worth reading the whole post):

The obituaries, both the CNN version and the one Lloyd linked to in the NYT, just barely hint at what she was like.
At least the Times is honest enough to repeat her words about her stint with them: “The New York Times is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.” however, they remain fussy enough to circumlocute that her dog’s name was an “expletive” — according to Dad, the dog’s name was Shit. Which just proves the point. There’s a saying that some people wouldn’t know shit if they were standing in a big pile of it; it might be more accurate to say that most folks would *pretend* they didn’t know shit for the sake of politeness. Molly never did that. She always said exactly what she thought.

Not that it’s a surprise or anything, but Bush’s comment about Ivins’s death was spectacularly lame. From the Times story: “On Wednesday night, President Bush issued a statement that said he ‘respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase…. Mr. Bush added: ‘Her quick wit and commitment to her beliefs will be missed.’ ” I hate everything about this smirkingly anti-intellectual, evasive set of non-statements. The passive voice says everything.

I’m sad to read this. Kathryn Harris writes for Bloomberg (which could use better copy editing):

Art Buchwald, the Pulitzer Prize- winning columnist and humorist who for more than a half-century lampooned the mighty in the nation’s capital and managed to find comic relief in his own fight against kidney failure, has died. He was 81.
Buchwald died at his son Joel’s home in the Wesley Heights section of northwest Washington, with his son and daughter Jennifer at his side, said friend Ben Bradlee, former Washington Post editor. The cause of death was kidney failure, according to the New York Times.
“He had an outlook on current events that made people smile and made people thoughtful and that’s really a hell of a contribution when you think of it,” Bradlee said in a telephone interview.
Buchwald ended his regular column in January 2006, before he underwent a leg amputation below one knee and entered a hospice. At the time, an assistant told USA Today that the surgery was prompted by a vascular condition.
Buchwald chose to discontinue dialysis and later left the hospice. In the following months, he defied expectations of imminent death and went on to give numerous interviews, write about death and publish a book, “Too Soon to Say Goodbye.”
“What’s beautiful about death is you can say anything you want to, as long as you don’t lord it over others that you know something they don’t,” he wrote in a March 14 article in the Washington Post. “The thing that is very important, and why I’m writing this, is that whether they like it or not, everyone is going to go. The big question we still have to ask is not where we’re going, but what were we doing here in the first place?” Cont’d.

Scott McLemee writes in his Inside Higher Ed column: “Nobody was smarter than George Trow about the bad faith that comes with being ‘plugged in’ to streams of randomized data. He once defined a TV program as ‘a little span of time made friendly by repetition.’ (Friendly, the way a con man is friendly.) That was long before most of us started spending ever more of our lives in front of another kind of screen.”
 
In The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg writes a moving tribute. “His impact on the magazine was as noticeable as it was, at first, anonymous. His unsigned Talk of the Town stories—chronicling popular music, the remnants of Edith Wharton-era “society,” Harlem flash, and the new culture of marketing and strobelike celebrity—broke the mold of fusty “visits” and facty catalogues. The pieces were jazzy, telegraphic, emphatic.” As noted earlier, selections from “In the Context of No-Context” and other Trow pieces, including a report (with Hertzberg) from an animated conversation about a Bob Dylan concert, are online. (And while you’re there, listen to the vintage WBAI Bob Fass and Dylan extravaganza. It will blow your mind.)
Mark Feeney wrote Trow’s obituary for The New York Observer: “Mandarin prose and mandarin pose often coincide, of course. What’s rare is their sharing the page with an abiding sense of civic virtue. That idea of patriotic engagement sets him apart from Henry James, with whom one might think Trow would neatly align. James often seemed slightly pained at being American. Trow would have fit right in as a James character, except that he would have terrified James.”
 
And Greg Bottoms wrote about Trow in the September 2005 Believer: “He’s a cranky conservative in a way, a modernist at heart, some kind of neo-New Critic trafficking in the language and outré fragmented and self-conscious structures of ‘literary postmodernism,’ especially its accent on how narrative and meaning are constructed, in an effort to take grand swings at the mores and effects of postmodern culture, as if it were a smiley-face piñata.”

Sad news. Here’s the New York Times obituary. The New Yorker website has also put up an excerpt from Trow’s classic 1980 essay “Within the Context of No-Context.”

William Styron died yesterday. This makes me sad. From the NYT:

The reaction to “The Confessions of Nat Turner” was at first enthusiastic. Reviewers were sympathetic to Mr. Styron’s right to inhabit his subject’s mind, to speak in a version of Nat Turner’s voice and to weave a fiction around the few facts known about the uprising. George Steiner, in The New Yorker, called the book “a fiction of complex relationship, of the relationship between a present-day white man of deep Southern roots and the Negro in today’s whirlwind.”
…
When the Styrons settled in their Connecticut farmhouse and began a family, his life became the ideal of any aspiring writer: productive yet relaxed, sociable yet protected. On the door frame outside his workroom, he tacked a piece of cardboard with a quotation from Flaubert written on it: “Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
The precept seemed to work for him, but it was an unconventional routine he stuck to: sleep until noon; read and think in bed for another hour or so; lunch with Rose around 1:30; run errands, deal with the mail, listen to music, daydream and generally ease into work until 4. Then up to the workroom to write for four hours, perfecting each paragraph until 200 or 300 words are completed; have cocktails and dinner with the family and friends at 8 or 9; and stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning, drinking and reading and smoking and listening to music.

He woke to sleep, and took his waking slow.