Joan Didion
By 
The great essayist Joan Didion has died.
For those not familiar with her work, I strongly recommend Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, her collections of essays on the politics and culture of California in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as The Year of Magical Thinking, her harrowing account of the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne, and its emotional aftermath. (I haven’t been able to make myself read her book about the death of their daughter Quintana the following year).
Didion also deserves enormous credit for being the first prominent writer to raise serious questions about the guilt of the Central Park Five, who by the way Donald Trump still wants to execute.
RIP.