Topline:
Every year, NPR remembers some of the writers, actors, musicians, filmmakers and performers who died over the past year, and whose lifetime of creative work helped shape our world.
Who's on the list: From well known musicians, a groundbreaking poet, acting legends to a humanitarian ballerina — this year's list is just sampling of those we lost in 2024.
Read on... for more about their lives and legacies.
Every year, we remember some of the writers, actors, musicians, filmmakers and performers who died over the past year, and whose lifetime of creative work helped shape our world. Here are just a few of them, listed chronologically below by the dates of their deaths. (You can find a tribute to many more musicians here.)
Beloved for the roles she created in such musicals as West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie, Chicago and Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Rivera carved out space for herself on stages that did not then easily accept Latina leading ladies. Her prowess as a dancer became apparent in childhood, during ballet classes in Washington D.C. Over a six-decade-ong career, Rivera won multiple Tony awards, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and was the first Latina to receive the Kennedy Center Honors. One of the great performers of her era, Rivera was never interested in making television or movies – until the end of her long life, she was a Broadway baby. Read Jeff Lunden's remembrance.
Born in China to Japanese parents, Ozawa shook up the classical music establishment when he was appointed to lead a top American orchestra in 1973. Young, hip and unorthodox, he represented a radical departure from an artistic tradition that rarely placed men of color (or any women) on prestigious podiums. He was a protege of Leonard Bernstein, with whom he shared an adventurousness and dynamism that captivated fans beyond the world of classical music. Ozawa also championed cross-cultural exchange; notably, he brought the BSO to China in 1979. Read Andrea Shea and Tom Huizenga's remembrance.
Ultimately, Apfel was best known for her look: owlish round glasses, heaps of clanking jewelry, and cropped grey hair. All of it, fashion. Apfel was an early example of what we'd now call an influencer. She insisted on being seen. Her career stretched from the 1950s until the late 2010s. It included stints as a White House designer, Home Shopping Network entrepreneur, writer, socialite and professor. At age 97, she signed with a top-tier modeling firm. She was the subject of a celebrated documentary and a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute. And Apfel was the oldest person with a Barbie doll made by Mattel in her image. Read Neda Ulaby's remembrance.
While probably best known for vibrant, pictorial quilts that summoned various aspects of Black American history and representation, Ringgold was a classically trained painter who bridged arts and crafts in deeply feminist multimedia work that, over a decades-long career, included cloth dolls, mosaic murals and picture books for children. A leading American artist who fought for increased diversity, her work is included in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem and many others. Read Andrew Limbong's remembrance.
He was dubbed "the patron saint of literary Brooklyn" by The New York Times, where Auster regularly appeared on the bestseller list for works such as The New York Trilogy that included his breakthrough novel, 1985's City of Glass. A prolific postwar writer who deftly swirled the surreal into such familiar genres as the detective novel and memoir, Auster also dabbled in filmmaking, writing scripts for a few art-house hits. Read Tom Vitale's remembrance.
If you were a Hollywood executive who wanted an off-kilter authority figure, you would call Donald Sutherland. The Canadian-born actor appeared in more than 200 films and TV shows. He played doctors, like the wiseacre lead in the 1970 movie M*A*S*H, and paranoid government figures, as in Oliver Stone's film JFK. He was excellent as a fascist, whether it be in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 or as President Snow in the wildly successful The Hunger Games franchise. But in films such as Ordinary People and Don't Look Now, Sutherland brought vulnerability to playing fathers. In real life, he was the father of five, including actor Kiefer Sutherland. Read Mansee Khurana's remembrance.
With his curly mop of hair, winsome attitude and candy-striped shorts, Simmons set out to encourage people to get fit, even those whose body types did not reflect the punishing standards of perfection at the time. He included all kinds of bodies in the bracingly upbeat VHS tapes that became foundational to his empire in the 1980s. Sweatin' to the Oldies sold more than 20 million copies alone. While Simmons received some criticism for fat-shaming, and later mystified fans by withdrawing from the public, he was a transformative figure in the nascent exercise industry, encouraging consumers to see exercise as playful, rather than painful. Read Kyle Norris' remembrance here.
A former accountant, Newhart's dour but deeply loveable persona was first established in a series of hit comedy records in the 1960s. Their success essentially invented a genre. Newhart moved seamlessly to television, hosting his own variety show, then starred in not one, but two eponymous sitcoms throughout the 1970s and '80s, Newhart and The Bob Newhart Show, in which he played a psychologist and a Vermont innkeeper respectively. Read Eric Deggans' remembrance here.
Donahue is credited with inventing the audience participation talk show. His topics were thoughtful – abortion, atheism, racism – and his tone was measured. He never talked down to his predominantly female audience. The Phil Donahue Show ran for nearly 30 years, and after 6,000 episodes, he stepped down from a television landscape that, aside from Oprah Winfrey, was populated by much more sensational and scandal-seeking imitators. Read Eric Deggans' remembrance here.
His stentorian tones enriched classic films ranging from Star Wars to The Lion King. "I am your father" and "You are my son" are two of his most immortal lines, but James Earl Jones grew up without his birth parents. He was abandoned as a child. The traumatized little boy with a stutter became one of the most in-demand actors in Hollywood and on Broadway. A boundary-shattering Black actor, whose early career included playing a doctor on daytime TV in the 1960s, his accolades included Tonys, Emmys, a lifetime achievement Oscar and a National Medal of the Arts. Read Allison Keyes' remembrance here.
DePrince was only 29 when she died of undisclosed causes earlier this year, but the celebrated ballerina's life was packed with inspiring accomplishments. The youngest principal dancer at the Dance Theatre of Harlem, DePrince also found fans through TV's Dancing With the Stars and Beyonce's Lemonade music videos. She recounted her journey from an orphanage in Sierra Leone to international acclaim in her 2014 memoir Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina. Read Clare Marie Schneider and Elizabeth Blair's remembrance.
You might know her as the tart-tongued Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey or as Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies, but Maggie Smith's illustrious stage career began decades earlier, as a teenage star of Shakespeare at the Oxford Playhouse in England. Her work on screen included indelible performances in such films as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, A Room With A View and Gosford Park. Read Bob Mondello's remembrance.
A once-in-a-generation talent, Kristofferson was a Rhodes scholar from Brownsville, Texas. who wrote his first country song at age 11. A celebrated college athlete, he enlisted in the U.S. Army after studying literature at the University of Oxford. Then he broke into the Nashville music scene, first working as a janitor before being discovered by Johnny Cash, writing songs for the likes of Janis Joplin and recording hits of his own. Musical stardom led to the movies. Kristofferson acted in dozens of them, from the legendary flop Heaven's Gate to the vampire classic Blade. Read Melissa Block's remembrance here.
Back in the days of liner notes, Adam Abeshouse's name would be instantly recognizable to classical music fans. He produced hundreds of records with such stars as violinist Joshua Bell and pianist Lara Downes. Shortly before Abeshouse's death from bile duct cancer at the age of 63, many of the musicians whose talents he'd burnished in the studio flew to his home in upstate New York to play one final concert for their beloved producer. Read Tom Vitale's remembrance.
Jones dominated pop music charts for decades. A charismatic musical savant whose career as a jazz trumpeter began in his teens, the composer, arranger, performer, producer and record-label executive helped orchestrate the careers of numerous stars, including Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra and Lesley Gore. None dazzled quite as brightly as Michael Jackson, with whom he created Thriller, the bestselling album of all time. Jones was nominated for 80 Grammy awards and won 28. Read Stephen Thompson's remembrance.
A centenarian and civil rights activist as well as a revered singer and instrumentalist, Jenkins recorded dozens of albums for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings,. She was the label's best-selling artist, outselling even Pete Seeger. Her music for children included original compositions such as "You'll Sing a Song and I'll Sing a Song." Other songs celebrated cultural traditions from around the world. Read Andrew Limbong's remembrance.
Jamison's celebrated collaboration with Alvin Ailey began in the 1960s as a star member of his troupe. Her lithe elegance transfixed audiences; her interpretation of his piece "Cry" made Jamison an immediate modern dance icon when it premiered in 1971. Eventually, Jamison moved into a different kind of role, as artistic director of the company, which she led for more than two decades. Read Andrew Limbong's remembrance.
Over a celebrated literary career that started in 1968 with her first published poetry collection, Giovanni wrote prolifically about Black pride and power, and about love and the sensual pleasures of everyday life. The longtime Virginia Tech professor authored more than 30 books, including many for children, racked up dozens of honorary degrees, and was the sort of celebrity poet who drew thousands of fans to her readings. Read Andrew Limbong's remembrance.
Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit npr.org.
Topline:
Lineage Logistics walked back its report that it had removed more than 100% of food waste from its burned Boyle Heights warehouse, acknowledging the figure misled residents about how much rotting food remains inside.
Revised calculation: Lineage last week reported through a community update that it had removed 104% of the rancid food waste from the warehouse, a figure that confused many residents because cleanup was not complete. In a community update on Sunday, Aug. 23, Lineage said that Freezer 2 has been demolished and all food waste removed, and that Freezer 1, the remaining room, is 92% clean of food waste. “Our prior reporting percentages tied weight removed from the building relative to our estimates of total food weight at the time of the fire,” reads a statement from Lineage. “That approach produced figures greater than 100% in our reporting this week, potentially creating the misimpression that food removal waste was complete when it is not.”
Full cleanup deadline: The company also pushed back its timeline for when it would finish food removal until Aug. 30, about a week behind the deadlines required by a South Coast Air Quality Management District order from earlier this month. That could open the company up to fines, though AQMD didn’t immediately respond to The LA Local about what consequences Lineage would face.
This story first appeared on The LA Local.
Lineage Logistics walked back its report that it had removed more than 100% of food waste from its burned Boyle Heights warehouse, acknowledging the figure misled residents about how much rotting food remains inside.
The company also pushed back its timeline for when it would finish food removal until Aug. 30, about a week behind the deadlines required by a South Coast Air Quality Management District order from earlier this month. That could open the company up to fines, though AQMD didn’t immediately respond to The LA Local about what consequences Lineage would face.
Lineage last week reported through a community update that it had removed 104% of the rancid food waste from the warehouse, a figure that confused many residents because cleanup was not complete. A company spokesperson admitted that the percentage was misleading for residents who have voiced their frustration about putrid air, the health hazards of living near the facility and confusion about how long the cleanup will take.
In a community update on Sunday, Aug. 23, Lineage said that Freezer 2 has been demolished and all food waste removed, and that Freezer 1, the remaining room, is 92% clean of food waste.
“Our prior reporting percentages tied weight removed from the building relative to our estimates of total food weight at the time of the fire,” reads a statement from Lineage. “That approach produced figures greater than 100% in our reporting this week, potentially creating the misimpression that food removal waste was complete when it is not.”
It added that moving forward, the company would measure 100% cleanup when “food waste removal is fully done.”
The revised calculations for cleanup completion come after questions from residents and reporting by The LA Local and Boyle Heights Beat about how Lineage has been reporting its progress and how that progress is being verified by public officials.
The cleanup progress has been largely based on the company’s estimates.
The LA Local obtained a copy of the daily reports Lineage is required to send to AQMD, showing that the company reports to the oversight agency the number of waste bins of food they remove each day and estimates the pounds of food they contain.
The company has already missed multiple deadlines.
Lineage failed to meet the Aug. 20 deadline for bulk food cleanup established by the order it agreed to with AQMD. There is a second approaching deadline, disinfecting the remaining freezer facility after all the food is removed, which is scheduled for Aug. 27.
AQMD did not immediately respond to The LA Local’s inquiries about what consequences Lineage faces for violating that order.
Lineage also missed a 45-day cleanup deadline on Aug. 14 that Mayor Karen Bass imposed in early July. Bass said the city could pursue a civil suit against the company.
Lineage said that it expects to spend about $100 million on cleanup, and stressed that it has been working diligently to remove the food and damaged materials from the remaining freezer room.
“We are not pausing, slowing, or reducing our work in any way. If anything, this final stretch demands more focused effort, not less urgency, and we are treating it that way,” the press release reads.
Topline:
Emergency preparedness groups and firefighters are praising the new fire-safe landscaping rules, while acknowledging they will also burden some homeowners.
The backstory: Californians and officials have been debating the so-called Zone Zero restrictions for years. The state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CalFire, voted to adopt the regulations last week.
The reaction: After California officials approved the strictest rules in the country for defensible space around homes in fire-prone areas, groups that help Southern California communities prepare for wildfires say they are a good compromise. But they’re also worried about the cost bear homeowners will bear to implement many of the changes.
What firefighters say: Local fire authorities, who will be responsible for enforcing the new rules, say they are much needed. Fire-safe landscaping helps prevent structures from burning and, if a fire catches, make it easier to fight.
Read on … for details of the Zone Zero regulations.
Southern California firefighters and emergency preparedness groups are praising new statewide rules for homes in fire-prone areas.
They’re also raising concerns about the burden they say will fall on homeowners.
The California Board of Forestry and Fire Prevention voted last week to adopt the rules after years of debate, delays and missed deadlines. They are the strictest rules in the country for home fire mitigation.
They will apply to almost 2 million homes across California in areas that CalFire designates as having some of the highest fire risk, defined as State Responsibility Areas and Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones.
That applies to large swaths of Los Angeles and Orange counties.
The rules regulate what can be within 5 feet of a home, an area known as Zone Zero. They prohibit any plants within at least the first foot from the home — or farther, depending on the size of a structure’s eaves. Then, within the first 5 feet, no combustible material is allowed, including dead leaves and branches, mulch, woodchips and firewood.
Other new rules ban wooden fences that are attached to houses and wooden sheds within Zone Zero. Local fire authorities will be responsible for enforcement and have some flexibility to tailor the rules to specific communities.
Once the rules are formally adopted next month, Californians with existing homes will have five years to comply. New construction projects will have to comply immediately.
A public comment period on the new rules is open until Sept. 2.
Fire safety groups acknowledge the necessity of rules and the burdens they will likely place on property owners.
“We're a supporter of actions that help move the needle forward toward resiliency. That's what this does,” said Brent Woodworth, chief executive of the Los Angeles Emergency Preparedness Foundation, a leading advocacy group for disaster preparedness.
The organization also independently assesses homes for wildfire risk and resiliency at homeowners’ request, primarily in communities in and around the Santa Monica Mountains.
Woodworth sees the new rules as a reasonable approach to better protect homes and communities from disastrous blazes, especially after the devastation wrought by the Palisades and Eaton fires.
He hopes it will help create a culture in Southern California that embraces fire mitigation.
But he knows the new rules likely won’t be welcomed by everyone.
“ It's going to take a lot to convince people to do this,” Woodworth said. “But this is a pretty decent start to try to get this culture shift going.”
CalFire started the rule-making process in 2020, and some homeowners have been pushing back ever since. Some feel it’s an overreach of their property rights or may just not want to see their gardens changed. Others are worried about the financial burden of removing vegetation, trees or wooden fences.
“There was such shock in the community from folks about how much work and what it's going to cost them to do. This is a huge burden on many people,” said James Grasso, president of the Topanga Coalition for Emergency Preparedness, a volunteer group serving Topanga, Malibu and surrounding areas.
Grasso said that’s particularly true in Topanga, where many homes are built in and around countless oak trees. He called for more incentives, grants or other financial assistance to help people cover mitigation work.
Overall, though, Grasso thinks the approved rules are a good compromise. The state originally proposed banning all vegetation within Zone Zero. He pointed to the gradual implementation timeline and the decision to allow some plants within 5 feet of homes.
He also hopes localized enforcement will allow for some flexibility that will accommodate Southern California communities' varied needs.
Local fire departments in charge of enforcing the new rules, and responsible for putting out fires once they start, emphasized the need for the changes.
Juan Huerta, a fire marshal with the Orange County Fire Authority, said less combustible material in Zone Zero helps keep blazes more contained and easier for firefighters to manage by making it harder for houses to catch fire.
A recent study from UC Berkeley found the more defensible space around a structure, the higher chance it has of surviving a fire.
”When you're talking about these embers that potentially ignite homes that much farther away, we don't necessarily always have the same resources in those areas,” Huerta said. ”The goal is to help eliminate another variable.”
He urged homeowners to consider implementing other mitigation tools, too, including fire-resistant cladding for homes or mesh that prevents embers from entering vents.
He is sympathetic to peoples’ concerns over the changes, especially the costs, and wants to help the public to understand why the measures are necessary.
“ We will be working with the residents, providing as much education and outreach as we can to help everyone really understand what the requirements are, but also why it's important,” he said.
Huerta’s team is already inspecting properties in at-risk areas of Orange County.
If a home is non-compliant, they will issue a violation notice and follow up until the problem is resolved.
Topline:
A century-old policy of extinguishing every fire by 10 a.m. shaped forests — and it may be making a comeback.
The backstory: Wildfires once ran on deadlines. After a series of catastrophic blazes in the early 20th century, the U.S. Forest Service sought to show it was able to control and protect forests under its care. In 1933, the agency mandated the “10 a.m. rule,” declaring that any wildland fire should be extinguished by 10 a.m. the day after it was reported.
Why now: Last June, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response,” which in its first sentence declared “The devastation of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires shocked the American people and highlighted the catastrophic consequences when State and local governments are unable to quickly respond to such disasters.” Draft versions of the policy included a return to the 10 a.m. rule, according to numerous sources in the wildfire community.
Read on... for more on this controversial firefighting strategy.
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
Wildfires once ran on deadlines.
After a series of catastrophic blazes in the early 20th century, the U.S. Forest Service sought to show it was able to control and protect forests under its care. In 1933, the agency mandated the “10 a.m. rule,” declaring that any wildland fire should be extinguished by 10 a.m. the day after it was reported.
Snuffing all fires quickly, the agency reasoned, would prevent disasters like the Big Burn of 1910. That incident scorched more than 3 million acres along the Montana-Idaho border during a 36-hour rampage, killing at least 85 people and destroying five towns.
Unlike earthquakes or tornadoes, wildfires have weaknesses. We can suppress flames with water or retardant chemicals. Wildland fire crews remove fuels with hand tools and bulldozers. Sometimes they use tactical burnouts — literally fighting fire with fire.
These tools can obscure crucial facts about wildfire and reinforce strategies that can backfire.
Tales of heroism following the Big Burn established the Forest Service as a necessary government service. As New York Times reporter Tim Egan put it, “To this day, I think that agency owes its existence to this fire.”
But Egan also described the consequences of that successful effort to control wildfire: “Actively trying to put out every fire left a lot of standing dead timber. So some of the big fires we had in the latter 20th century, including the Yellowstone fires of 1988 and some of the Idaho fires of the late 1990s, and fires still to come, are the result of having timber that probably should have burned every now and then during the seasonal fires.”
Rocky Mountain Research Station scientist David Calkin described the phenomenon as the “Wildfire Paradox” in a 2013 article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Using wildfire suppression to eliminate large and damaging wildfires ensures the inevitable occurrence of these fires,” Calkin wrote. “Wildfire suppression, effective 95% to 98% of the time, inevitably leads to ecologically significant wildfires with higher intensities and rapid growth that are unable to be suppressed.”
Fire researchers began to notice the paradox in the 1960s, and began implementing “let burn” strategies in remote forests to reduce those fuel loads. The Forest Service modified the “10 a.m. rule” in 1971 to allow some fires to burn, and officially abandoned the policy in 1978.
Over the following decades, wildfire managers adapted to a changing climate, shifting public opinion and funding challenges.
A mid-century moist period began drying out toward the tail of the 20th century. The 1988 fires in and around Yellowstone National Park burned 1.4 million acres in one of America’s best-known landscapes. Colorado’s South Canyon fire in 1994 killed 14 wildland firefighters and prompted major federal fire policy reviews.
One of the most consequential shifts was the growing focus on the wildland-urban interface, or WUI — the increasing overlap between private homes and fire-prone landscapes.
Several record-breaking fire seasons in the early 2000s made federal budget watchers aware that the Forest Service was spending more to fight fire than almost anything else in its mission, and frequently didn’t have enough funding to do so. In 2017, federal wildfire suppression costs topped $2 billion — six times as much as was spent in the 1990s.
The year 2018 produced one of the worst wildfire seasons in history and included the Camp Fire, which killed more than 80 people in and around Paradise, Calif.
More recently, political pressure for a more aggressive response to wildfire has renewed fire suppression.
Last June, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response,” which in its first sentence declared “The devastation of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires shocked the American people and highlighted the catastrophic consequences when State and local governments are unable to quickly respond to such disasters.”
Draft versions of the policy included a return to the 10 a.m. rule, according to numerous sources in the wildfire community.
“No one was dumb enough to use 10 a.m. policy language, but there was fear of a fire getting away,” said Bobbie Scopa, a 45-year firefighting veteran who worked at the local, state and federal levels and now is vice president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters.
“Anytime you light a fire or purposefully don’t put out a fire, you own it and you own every bad thing that can happen. You’re taking a risk when you do that,” Scopa said.
Draft versions of the Fix Our Forests Act also included a call for full suppression of all wildfires.
Matt Weiner, CEO of the advocacy group Megafire Action, said putting that into law would have had dangerous consequences.
“We were able to get that out of it,” Weiner said. “And long-term, we will push aggressively against the 10 a.m. rule being included in statute anywhere. We don’t want to just create a suppression super-agency. We want a system that recognizes the need for a lot more beneficial fire on the landscape.”
Nevertheless, at a July 22 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Forestry and Horticulture, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz told members of Congress his agency remained committed to prioritizing aggressive initial attack on wildfire this year.
“Keeping fire small protects firefighters, communities and also saves funding,” Schultz said. “I assure you every fire has a full-suppression strategy.”
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
Topline:
With the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing opening to the animal world in about 100 days, officials are announcing ways for humans to also mark the milestone.
Why now: There will be a community festival at King Gillette Ranch in Calabasas on Dec. 2, as well as a ribbon cutting ceremony at the crossing that will be broadcast live to the public.
Why it matters: According to officials, the wildlife crossing will be the largest of its kind in the world, reconnecting habitat for Southern California mountain lions, bobcats, deer, bats, birds and other animals — big and small.
Read on ... for event details.
Go deeper: Agoura Hills wildlife crossing bridge over 101 Freeway to open this winter
With the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing opening to the animal world in about 100 days, officials are announcing ways for humans to also mark the milestone.
There will be a community festival at King Gillette Ranch in Calabasas on Dec. 2, as well as a ribbon cutting ceremony at the crossing that will be broadcast live to the public.
According to officials, the wildlife crossing will be the largest of its kind in the world, reconnecting habitat for Southern California mountain lions, bobcats, deer, bats, birds and other animals — big and small.
Here’s what you need to know.
The festival at King Gillette Ranch will include exhibits, music and special guests, according to organizers. The ribbon cutting will be played live on a large screen with visitors invited to cut their own ribbon through a virtual display.
Ticket donations are required to get in and will go toward the National Wildlife Federation’s #SaveLACougars campaign.
There will be a private reception and fundraising event after the ribbon cutting for donors and sponsors. The event will support the National Wildlife Federation and the Wildlife Crossing Fund.
Details on how to tune in to the ribbon cutting ceremony online have not been shared yet.
Collin O'Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said the crossing is a profound testament to what’s possible when people refuse to accept the fragmentation of the natural world.
“When we cut this ribbon, we will not just celebrate a single bridge — we will be celebrating a global movement to restore wildlife connectivity,” he said in a statement.
You can keep an eye on the crossing's progress through three livestream cameras here.
