Josep Almudéver, 101, Dies; Last Known Veteran of International Brigades
Harvey Schlossberg, a former New York City traffic cop with a doctorate in psychology who choreographed what became a model law enforcement strategy for safely ending standoffs with hostage takers, died on May 21 in Brooklyn. He was 85.
His death, at a hospital, was caused by cardiopulmonary arrest, said his wife, Dr. Antoinette Collarini Schlossberg.
The need for a standard protocol for hostage situations became more pressing in 1971 after the botched rescue of guards during the Attica prison riots in upstate New York. The next year, captives were taken in a Brooklyn bank robbery (the inspiration behind the 1975 Al Pacino film “Dog Day Afternoon”) and Israeli athletes were seized and massacred by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics.
In a pioneering training film he made for the New York Police Department in 1973, Harvey Schlossberg said that in a hostage situation, police officers “all believed, ‘If you gave me the right gun with the right bullet, I can put everybody out.’”
Dr. Schlossberg was originally assigned as a traffic officer in the accident investigation unit. But one day Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy was perusing a printout of personnel and serendipitously discovered a hidden asset: an officer with a doctorate in psychology. Dr. Schlossberg was soon transferred to the Medical Bureau to perform emotional testing that would determine the well-being of prospective and current police officers. He was promoted to director of psychological services in 1974.
He went on to coach thousands of officers in hostage negotiating. One was a Boston police sergeant, William Bratton, who would rise through the ranks to lead the police departments in Boston, Los Angeles and New York City.
Dr. Schlossberg’s hostage-negotiating strategies accounted for all sorts of eventualities. He would advise, for example, against summoning a spouse or a priest to the scene of a crisis — a Hollywood tactic, he said, that often backfired because the hostage-taker’s rage might be rooted in family tension to begin with.
“It’s important to remember what an outsider Harvey was in the N.Y.P.D. In a top-down, paramilitary, predominantly Irish police culture of command and control, in walked an iconoclastic Jewish intellectual pacifist, a beat cop with a Ph.D. in psychology.”
“The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” Mr. Carle’s best-known book, has sold more than 55 million copies around the world since it was first published in 1969, its mere 224 words translated into more than 70 languages. It is one of more than 70 books that Mr. Carle published over his career, selling more than 170 million copies, according to his publisher, Penguin Random House.
For centuries, naturalists have mapped the world’s flora and fauna. They have assembled atlases of migratory birds and cold-water fishes, sketched out the geography of carnivorous animals and alpine plants.
Now, an enormous international team of researchers has added a new volume to the collection: an atlas of microorganisms that can be found in the world’s subways. It contains data collected by more than 900 scientists and volunteers in 60 cities on six continents, from Stockholm to Shanghai, Sacramento to Sydney.
“We had a coordinated phalanx of people with swabs and masks, collecting genetic material from cities around the world,” said Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine who led the research.
Although each city had its own unique microbial profile, there was a “core urban microbiome” that all of the cities shared, they found. The scientists, members of the international MetaSUB consortium, also discovered more than 10,000 previously unidentified species of viruses and bacteria. They published the findings in the journal Cell on Wednesday.
Prof. Jerome Kagan, a Harvard psychologist whose research into temperament found that shy infants often grow up to be anxious and fearful adults because of their biological nature as well as the way they were nurtured, died on May 10 in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 92.
Prof. Daniel Gilbert, another Harvard psychologist and author, described Professor Kagan in an email as “one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century.”
“His research was not only original and groundbreaking,” he added, “but also prescient, foreshadowing the coming merger of psychology and biology in its attempt to link behavior to the brain.”
But he also concluded that properly run educational remedial programs were valuable because, except for the tiny number with acute brain damage, a vast majority of children, regardless of race or class, had the ability to master the intellectual skills that schools require as long as the students were instilled with confidence that they could succeed.
Professor Kagan acknowledged that as an ideological liberal he had originally believed that all individuals were capable of achieving similar goals if afforded the same opportunities. “I was so resistant to awarding biology much influence,” he wrote.
How many librarians get an NYT obituary?
A Reference librarian at the Library of Congress
Her learnedness became so comprehensive that she opened up new worlds to Mr. Asimov, the pre-eminent popular science writer of his day, and Mr. Sagan, the astronomer who introduced millions of television viewers to the wonders of the universe.
Constance Carter, a longtime colleague, visited Ms. Freitag last year just before the Covid-19 pandemic shut down nursing homes, then lost touch. She finally looked her up on Google this spring and came across the obituary.
In a way, Ms. Freitag was her own analog version of Google, providing answers to a wide array of queries from writers and researchers in astonishing depth and detail decades before computers and the internet transformed the research process.
On an astronomy-focused cruise in 1980, she had dinner with Mr. Asimov and others. He was famous for writing limericks, and on the spot he dashed off a racy one for her:
Said a certain young damsel named Ruth:
“I sit here enjoying my youth!
Between Isaac and Peter
What need for a heater?
I’m burning with love! That’s the truth!”
Mr. Koester was a pivotal figure in Chicago and beyond, releasing early efforts by Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Jimmy Dawkins, Magic Sam and numerous other jazz and blues musicians. He captured the sound of Chicago’s vibrant blues scene of the 1960s on records like “Hoodoo Man Blues,” a much admired album by the singer and harmonica player Junior Wells, featuring the guitarist Buddy Guy, that was recorded in 1965.
He founded the influential Chicago blues and jazz label Delmark Records and was also the proprietor of an equally influential record store where players and fans mingled as they sought out new and vintage sounds.
“Shakey Walter Horton and Ransom Knowling would hang out there, and Sunnyland Slim and Homesick James were always dropping by,” the harmonica player and bandleader Charlie Musselwhite, who was a clerk at the store in the mid-1960s, told The Times in 2009, rattling off the names of some fellow blues musicians. “You never knew what fascinating characters would wander in, so I always felt like I was in the eye of the storm there.”
He created the adhesive that lets the small, square notes stick to surfaces. They became one of the most ubiquitous office products ever conceived.
Soli Sorabjee was 18 when he walked into a record store in Bombay, as Mumbai was then called, and asked for a recording of the Hungarian Dances by Brahms. At home, he took a listen.
“I found it nothing like Brahms at all,” he told a television interviewer. “So many different sounds.” But he liked the tune on the presumably unlabeled or mislabeled record and played it again, and then a third time. “It happened to be ‘Tiger Rag’ by the Benny Goodman Trio,” he said. “The bug had bitten.”
Mr. Sorabjee became a passionate and lifelong jazz fan — as well as one of India’s leading jurists, a two-time attorney general, a constitutional expert and a champion of free speech.
Ms. Dukakis was 56 and an East Coast stage veteran of three decades when she starred in John Patrick Shanley’s “Moonstruck” (1987), a romantic comedy about a young Italian-American widow, Loretta Castorini (played by Cher), whose life is turned upside down when she falls in love with her fiancé’s brother (Nicolas Cage). Ms. Dukakis stole scene after scene as Rose, Loretta’s sardonic mother, who saw the world clearly and advised accordingly.
Moonstruck is a perennial favorite of mine.