Emily Gordon writes:

I was very sorry to hear from illustrator and cartoonist Derek Van Gieson that John Kane passed away a few days ago. John, a New Yorker cartoonist, was also a dedicated musician and devotee of that small instrument with a big heart, the ukulele. He sent me many ukulele links and had a YouTube channel dedicated to them; I'll find it to link to, but right now, the thought makes me too sad.

John may have been getting up there in age by the time I caught up with him, but he was more animated and on the ball than any twelve youngsters combined. He was always going out to exhibitions, learning about some new technology, or improving himself via activities like judo. One of his most recent passions was taking up the uke. He had five models last time I remember. He'd watch Youtube clips and learn from the masters. I know he drove Sam and Sid nuts with all of his uke talk as there was usually something happening in that realm that he was very enthusiastic about. After lunch we'd walk down to the subway and talk music shop or just shop about guitars. He always had a unique theory he was thinking about or a new way of experiencing something that he'd often share. More often than not, I'd come home from The New Yorker luncheons, thinking I was one of the luckiest bastards in the world to be in the court of these fascinating gentlemen. Eventually our friendship became quite solid and if I didn't make it one tuesday for lunch, either John or Sid would get ahold of me to ask me what the hell happened. I can't really express how much that meant to me.

Pollux writes:

"If Mr. Salinger is around town, perhaps he'd like to come in and talk to me about New Yorker stories." So William Keepers Maxwell, Jr., The New Yorker's fiction editor, wrote in 1947. Salinger would contribute several short stories to The New Yorker that year, beginning a career that was at once fascinating and strange, and in many ways, tragic.

There seems to be only one photo of J.D. Salinger: the black-and-white author photo that graced millions of copies of Catcher in the Rye. There are, of course, other photos of Salinger, but he will remain for us the young author with the 1950's style haircut and intelligent face whose stories have become required reading in the library of American literature.

Martin Schneider writes:

Some people, you figure they will just always be there. David Levine was drawing caricatures for The New York Review of Books well before my birth, and it was only reasonable to suppose he'd be at it years after my death, too. It's difficult to imagine a world without a steady succession of new Levine drawings in it; it's not merely perverse fancy to wonder whether Levine's death makes it impossible for The New York Review of Books to keep publishing articles. That is how strong that association was.

You may have guessed that I grew up in a household with The New York Review of Books in it. Has there ever been a connection between an illustrator and a periodical as

Jonathan Taylor writes:

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has died at 100.

Updating: John Updike praised The Origin of Table Manners in 1979, though he found missed any sense of "the arthropoid breath" in CLS's "science of mythology": "It is beautiful like a clock, and cool like a clock—a strangely elegant heirloom from the torture-prone, fear-ridden jungles and plains. Its orderly revolutions and transpositions have the inverted function of not marking but arresting time, and making a haven, for their passionate analyst, from the torsion and heat of the modern age."

Martin Schneider writes:

I was hours away from an airplane voyage when news came though of Senator Kennedy's death. Now, at my destination, I can take the time to accomplish the minimum a post like this should do: direct you to the useful post on The New Yorker's website listing the many fine articles that covered Kennedy over the years.

I know I'll be using it.