You know when you’re in a panel discussion in New York and the topic turns to gentrification, and the audience gets very quiet while everyone prays there won’t be some guy who stands up and says something excruciating? L. J. Davis was that guy.

Davis, a writer whose career was long enough that a lot of people forgot who he was for stretches along the way, died last week at 70. He wrote four novels in the '60s and '70s and, over a longer span, produced a substantial body of cranky and annoyingly accurate journalism. (A Harper’s article that essentially called the 1987 market crash won him a [...]

The Silver Lake Walker, also known as Dr. Marc Abrams, has died. While every city has a crazy compulsive walker (San Francisco's was infamous for wearing tiny, tiny and very unfortunate shorts!), the delightful Dr. Abrams obviously stood out in America's City of Endless Traffic and also wasn't actually crazy-he was just very invested in lots and lots of walking. (He also did 4000 push-ups a day.) He was found dead in a hot tub in Silver Lake, and his age is given, improbably, as 58. Presumably, there's some sort of lesson here about life.

Chronic sampler, exploiter and musical entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren is at last dead, at the age of 64. As a youth he was a confirmed attendee of art schools, until they'd had enough of him. Eventually he segued from work as a band costumer into work as a band manager, at first an almost negligible difference in duties. It was his office that installed Johnny Rotten in the Sex Pistols; but the way down was just as steep, and Sid Vicious died and the remaining members of the band turned against him, even using that least of punk methods, the lawsuit, against him.

Alexander McQueen, the long-notorious English fashion designer just now reaching both commercial success and fame, committed suicide this week, his office confirmed today.

A cornerstone of Memphis, pianist, producer and bandleader Willie Mitchell died yesterday at age 81. Aside from making his own music, Mitchell owned and operated the Hi Records label after 1970, home of Ann Peebles, Syl Johnson, and most notably, Al Green. It's not a stretch to say that Mitchell is responsible for some of the very greatest soul music ever recorded.

Dealmaker Bruce Wasserstein, one of the 200 richest people in America and the owner of New York, has died at the age of 61.

David Broder, known as "the dean of the Washington press corps" because he was really old, has died. The cause of death was the lack of bipartisanship that plagues our nation's politics.

George Steinbrenner at the end was not the man who once ruled American sport. His neck bubbled out into a series of rolling chins. His skin was sallow and plastic-looking. As he sailed out his years in Tampa, draped in Yankees pajamas for the entirety of the day, his mind had slipped away. "Great to see ya, Tommy," Steinbrenner said to his friend Tom McEwen when Franz Lidz visited George's Florida compound in 2007 to report a story for Portfolio. And then he said it again. Great to see ya, Tommy. Great to see ya. Great to see ya. He would repeat the phrase after every question.

There are few worse things than the ol' "Really Nice Guy Killed by Coming to New York City" stories. This is one of the worst ever, about a kid from Jersey. Let's mash the Daily News and the NY Post: "[24-year-old] Connor [Donohue], jokingly nicknamed 'Con Man' by friends and family, had just started a job at SingleStop USA, a nonprofit helping the poor…. Until last month, Donohue worked as dean of students for Prep for Prep, a nonprofit Manhattan group that identifies promising minority students and prepares them for private school. He fell from his building at 8:30 a.m. Sunday, hitting a tree and then the [...]

David Brown, the man who was Mr. Helen Gurley Brown since 1959-and a journalist, editor, stage producer, Army veteran and a producer of Jaws-died yesterday at his home here in Manhattan.

Painter Kenneth Noland has died. Apart from any personal reactions, may I make a commercial observation? Which is that the people hurting in the stock market crash last year, who pulled some good old Nolands out of their Long Island dens to make some quick five-figure cash, are all face-palming super hard right now.

"A founding member of rock group Electric Light Orchestra was killed when a giant bale of hay tumbled down a hill and crashed onto his van in the UK." The cellist, Mike Edwards, a two-year veteran of the band, underwent a name change when he came to believe in the teachings of Osho ("There is no God other than life itself," etc.). And now he's dead.

How will you remember Robert Byrd? As the man who was elected to the Senate before Barack Obama was born-back when Hawaii was barely a state that issued fake birth certificates, not long after the time when the KKK was a normal-seeming kind of social organization to which one might belong? As the man who built a thousand bridges, roads and tunnels for the people of West Virginia, a lifetime of steering money home that still didn't do much for the state? As the loudest, most vehement opponent to the invasion of Iraq? As a pioneer of open government? As one of the last politicians we'll ever see to [...]

Here's a question: why does no one want to live any more? The LAPD is going with "apparent overdose" on 38-year-old Corey Haim.

Howard Zinn is dead.

Here's how one should best be remembered, by Awl pal and designer pk: "Brad"-the longtime blogger, theater enthusiast, coiner of the unfortunate phrase "blogosphere," serial raconteur and total hound who died yesterday-"did everything gay men are told we should no longer do in this day and age. He drank far too much, he loved to smoke, and he had a taste for distractingly handsome, alarmingly young men. In fact, Su and I once referred to a boyfriend whose name we had forgotten as 'this many.' The name stuck, and Brad would tell us for months how 'this many' was doing. Brad's last trip to Chicago left us in [...]