Van Wolff with her children in 1958. (Photo: NYMag)

Michael Wolff’s mother, Van, died Tuesday morning after a two and half year illness, the Observer has learned.

Mr. Wolff wrote about his mother’s declining health and worsening dementia in a moving and controversial story for New York Magazine in May that questioned the modern approach to end-of-life care. The story appeared on the magazine's cover with the headline, “Mom, I love you, but I also wish you were dead. And I expect you do, too."

“And yet, I will tell you, what I feel most intensely when I sit by my mother’s bed is a crushing sense of guilt for keeping her alive. Who can accept such suffering—who can so conscientiously facilitate it?” Mr. Wolff wrote.

A funeral service will be held this Saturday in New Jersey.

(Updated 1:45 p.m. to note the correct date of Ms. Wolff's death)

If you haven't read the New York Times' exceptional obituary of Ms. Ephron do so. Meanwhile, we have been relishing our own small piece of Ephron's legacy: The You've Got Mail character Frank Navasky, played by Greg Kinnear.

Frank Navasky was the boyfriend of Meg Ryan's character in the film. He was also a reporter for the New York Observer.

As IMDB puts it:

Frank Navasky is a columnist for the New York Observer. His columns often feature protests against the effects of technology on society. As a result, prior to the arrest of Theodore Kaczynski, he was sometimes jokingly mentioned as possibly being the Unabomber. He is particularly skeptical about the advantages of computers, and is famous for his pæans to the electric typewriter. He was also a prominent participant in a movement, ultimately unsuccessful, to save The Shop Around the Corner, a children's bookstore.

Frank Navasky comes off, at times, as arrogant, slightly obsessive-compulsive, a narcissist, and an indignant anti-capitalist.

For example, this is the scene in which he meets Tom Hanks' character Joe Fox, for the first time:

In the original script, Frank worked for a paper called "The Independent," but it was clearly modeled after The Observer, which is what they ended up using in the film. A lot of good it did him. Spoiler alert: They eventually split, and Ryan ends up with Tom Hanks.

Ephron was a well-chronicled character in the Observer, especially from the late 80s onward. One of the earliest mentions of her in the paper came in a July 25, 1988 story by Michael M. Thomas ("The Midas Watch: The Punishing Hamptons Social Scene of '88"). She was also a regular fixture in The Transom, the front-of-book column of boldfaced names. 

I'd heard from a Observer editor a few years ago that the character of Frank was based on Frank DiGiacomo, the former Vanity Fair writer (and soon-to-be-former Gatecrasher editor) who oversaw The Transom for a number of years while at The Observer. After all, the character was named Frank, and is a slightly cantankerous wiseass (which is an apt description of many an Observer reporter and editor over the years).

As it turns out, though, that tip was probably a decade-old bit of pranksterism passed down to me. The character was actually a sweet tribute to Observer writer Ron Rosenbaum, the man who reportedly inspired Steve Jobs to start a little company called Apple Computers.

Mr. Rosenbaum, who currently writes The Spectator at Slate, shared Ephron's views on many a topic: An avowed love of Charles Portis as well as the erstwhile Upper East Side watering hole, Elaine's (the setting for Rosenbaum's novel Murder at Elaine's, which Ephron once attempted to adapt into a musical with Roy Blount Jr.). Mr. Rosenbaum and Ephron also worked together on [MORE] Magazine and a satirical conference named for A.J. Liebling that Time once called "Journalism's Woodstock."

So what did Rosenbaum think of the character? Ironically—at least as it regards Rosenbaum—the answer was, while a little buried, already out there on the Internet, not too long after the movie had been released.

In a 1999 column for Slate about adapting to new technology, he wrote:

So, I may not be a Luddite, but I play one on TV, or I'm played as one if you rent and watch You've Got Mail. If you can get past the chirpy sentimentalizing of terminally insipid e-mails by tragically insipid stars Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, you'll find in the film a relatively benign caricature of a New York Observer writer with arcane literary and philosophical preoccupations who crusades to save an independent bookstore from being crushed by a big chain store, who rejects computer culture and rhapsodizes over his typewriter--an Olympia Report Deluxe electric. Now, it just so happens that I am a New York Observer columnist (click here to download me) with arcane literary interests (see the interview with me posted in Feed last month, if you care) who launched a crusade to save an independent bookstore (called Books & Co.) and who wrote a column rhapsodizing over his typewriter--an Olympia Report Deluxe electric--while working on a doomed film project with future You've Got Mail director Nora Ephron.

The column confirms on a intimate level what Ephron was able to capture so well and so often in her work: Two people, with shared interests and creative outlets, one acting as a muse for the other. The Observer’s appearance in the film is an obscure footnote to Ephron's work and life, but one that makes working for this paper a bit sweeter.

The film's larger contribution is the way it made New York feel like a small town. It took an amazing talent and a special kind of insight to do that, and the place hasn't been the same since.

For that, and in so many other ways, large and small, she'll be missed.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Like so many other young suburbanites, the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill was the first CD I owned. I first discovered it during a contraband, back-of-bus listening session towards the end of a school year on a friend's portable CD player, acquired thereafter through a Columbia House "17 Discs for $0.01" offer ripped out of Rolling Stone and immediately mailed in. The fact that these three guys who cursed not unlike some of the older kids I knew also happened to be Jewish was not a small deal: When I was eleven, Jewishness was still an alien thing to so many of my friends growing up, even in a city as urbanized as Las Vegas.

The Beastie Boys represented a world of possibility far from the all-too-familiar stereotype of the young Jewish kid: feeble, nebbish, unathletic, and timid, whose idea of humor and wit resembled less the incisive, cutting, and shocking ways of the Beastie Boys and more the schlocky, Catskills Borscht-Belt style of Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Not that the Beastie Boys weren't influenced by that, too—they clearly were—but discovering Licensed to Ill was a relevatory moment in that more suddenly became possible.

There was one line from Licensed To Ill that always struck me as off, though, even as it existed in the same album as "Girls": The one in "Paul Revere" about having done "it" with a sheriff's daughter using a "whiffle ball bat." I always heard it as out of place, not in the good-natured vein of the rest of the album. It wasn't enough to turn me off to the group, though; I was, after all, eleven. But MCA soon stood out to me not a few weeks later, the first time I saw "Sure Shot" on MTV, sandwiched in the Buzz Bin that summer between Warren G and Nate Dogg's "Regulate," Aerosmith's "Crazy," and later on, the group's classic "Sabatoge" clip.

He was the guy who rhymed on "Sure Shot":

I want to say a little something that's long overdue
The disrespect to women has got to be through
To all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends
I want to offer my love and respect to the end

His study of eastern religions later became the impetus for the Beastie Boys' participation in the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, something that brought awareness of a religion and issues a world away to the front of MTV's programming schedule, a practicing Bhuddist who was no doubt a large part of the reason the "whiffle ball bat" lyrics of "Paul Revere"—not even his—were never performed as such again (it was changed to a few things, among which was something about "a Siamese Cat," hilariously).

Again, surely I would've eventually come across Buddhism, but without MCA, not in sixth grade. It was MCA who was responsible for my favorite Beastie verse (the last lines of "Root Down" in which he shouts out his parents) and one of my favorite MTV moments (when he stormed the VMA stage as Nathanial Hornblower, only matched by ODB's "Wu Tang is for the children" speech).

In the summer of 1998, towards the end of my fourth listen to Hello Nasty, when I finally made it past the first half of the album, I heard something happened on the fifteenth track: The same guys who'd not a few tracks ago delivered the megaphone-rap of "The Move" (explaining how they were "intercontinental when we eat French Toast") and the tin-can digitization of "Intergalactic" had slowed everything to a crawl, and turned it down to an acoustic, intimate whisper. It was the odd occurance of being taken from a race track and being slammed head first into quiet placidity, as MCA quietly cooed about being "as deluded as the next guy."

In 2009, Jess Harvell wrote for Pitchfork that "I Don't Know" was a moment of failure for the Beastie Boys, a piece of "eye-rolling heart-on-sleeve earnestness," characterized as a cliche, overly sincere trap guys with the clout enabling them to make a non-linear, multifaceted album creative enough to want to explore other sonic territories can fall into.

In 1997, it was a shock to everything I'd known or assumed about the Beastie Boys, especially at 14: That their insecurities, like everyone else's, were very real, but more importantly, that they could exist on the same album as "Remote Control" and "Body Movin."

It may—like all of this, here—be an eye-rollingly sincere moment, but it was also the one in which I recognized MCA as my favorite of the Beastie Boys. The fact that it was seen by a critic as "eye-rolling" sincerity is as telling as those who are quoting the "whiffle ball bat" line on Twitter in tribute to Yauch: He was a crucial element of the nuance, subtlety, and exploration of new sonic ground that kept the Beastie Boys relevant over the last two decades, beyond what was expected of them, risks taken without which these three, white, Jewish guys may have long been relegated to novelty act status by now, and nothing more than a quoted "Whiffle Ball bat" line on Twitter that they couldn't even bring themselves to recite not a few years after it made them as successful and influential as they are today.

Yauch was 47, and is survived by his wife, Dechen Wangdu, their daughter, Tenzin Losel Yauch, and his parents, Frances and Noel Yauch.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Over the last decade, Clark's popularity waned as another new plucky, seemingly immortal Caucasian man named Ryan Seacrest generally took his place at the throne of organizing innocuous television that everybody you know watches, shame factor not withstanding. His most famous appearance in the final decade of his life may have been at the top of it, in Michael Moore's Oscar-winning 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine, in what is arguably one of the funniest scenes in the film: Dick Clark escaping Michael Moore by yelling at his associates to jump in a van, and then speeding away in it.

The set-up: Moore is describing the story of a Tamarla Owens, whose six year-old son took a gun to school and shot a young classmate with it, killing her. Owens, from Flint, Michigan, worked at a mall in a wealthy suburb 60 miles away from where she lived, for up to 70 hours a week, at two separate jobs. One of those jobs was as a waitress at Dick Clark's American Bandstand Grill, a chain of restaurants that Clark had a stake in, in exchange for branding use of his likeness and endorsement. The company had applied for tax breaks for taking on welfare recipients as employees; Moore explains that Tamarla Owens couldn't make enough money to pay her rent, was evicted, and moved into a relative's home (where he son found the gun he ended up bringing to school).

Plenty of people had plenty to say about the merits of Owens' case; what's indisputable was Clark's desire to avoid the topic entirely, as evidenced by Moore's movie.

Moore flew out to California to speak with Clark for the film. He doesn't say whether or not he attempted to contact Clark to interview him prior to rushing him in person, but either way, he gets what he wanted: The moment Moore mentions Tamarla Owens' name, Dick Clark shouts for whoever is with him to get in the van, which speeds off as soon as humanly possible (clip with Dick Clark begins at 7:08).

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Hitchens. (Christian Witkin)

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday at the age of 62 after a long illness with cancer. The Observer was lucky enough to have his byline grace our pages, including this book review of Michael Isikoff's Uncovering Clinton, (note how he calls Mr. Isikoff's prose "Capitoline" -- “'rising stars' intersecting with 'insiders' all the way") and Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others.

"I never met him, and spoke with him on the phone only rarely, but from our slender contact I can tell you that he was an absolute professional: On time, spot on, and spotless. Every editor's dream," remembered former Observer books editor Adam Begley. "I would have used him constantly if I'd had the budget."

"His writing leaves an enduring and inspiring legacy to readers everywhere," said his book publisher, Cary Goldstein of Twelve, in a statement. "We are proud to have played our part in sharing it with the world.  He will be missed." Twelve is publishing a forthcoming memoir, Mortality.

Vanity Fair has a page with links to stories Hitchens has written in the past year. He wrote so much! But we would also like to link to two VF essays which revealed that even Christopher Hitchens could suffer through self-examination: the first isn't one essay, but rather a series, "On the Limits of Self-Improvement;" the other recalls  a meeting with the family of an Iraq War soldier who was inspired by Hitchens to join the military and who died in combat.

I hated that it wasn’t the same Shakespeare and Company that Sylvia Beach opened in 1919, and which published James Joyce’ Ulysses three years later – I felt cheated, somehow. I hated the evocations of Henry Miller and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who lived lives of more daring that I could summon. I hated, too, the older expats who spoke of heartbreak with slightly melancholy boredom, who quoted Paul Celan as if he were an old friend, who smoked Lucky Strikes – and they all smoked Lucky Strikes, I have no idea why – without coughing.

At Huffington Post Books, Janice Harper is slightly more positive about her memories of staying there. At CounterPunch, Harvey Wasserman remembers his week too.

Tyler Rush, Arkansas native.

Tyler Rush, The New York Observer’s production manager and a 13-year veteran of the paper, died on Saturday at the home he shared with his partner, Melanie Hogue, in Cairo, N.Y. The cause was a heart attack. He was 49 years old.

Mr. Rush was many things—an artist, an erudite and intimidatingly well-read bibliophile, and the epitome of calm and rationality in an often chaotic newsroom inhabited by high-strung journalists—but if you ask the average person who knew Mr. Rush to describe him, the first response is almost always “Tyler was from Arkansas.” But saying that Mr. Rush was from Arkansas was just shorthand for saying that he stood out in the production department of an upscale Manhattan weekly. It’s technically true, of course; he moved to New York from what he described as his “shack” in Little Rock and had a brassy Southern drawl to show for it. He was tall, with a hippie-ish beard and long hair that hadn’t been cut since he moved to New York in 1998 (he once said that if he ever had to look for another job, he might consider a trim). He had a relaxed demeanor that put everyone around him at ease in an environment that is by nature distinctly at odds with anyone’s being at ease.

And yet, he belonged at The Observer as much, if not more, than anyone who has ever worked here. The sensibilities of the paper were very much Mr. Rush’s: he was intelligent, skeptical and witty, with a wicked sense of mischief. He appreciated great illustration and was passionate about creating something that was smart and well-designed. People wanted to do their best work for him.

Mr. Rush with Mr. Kaplan.

Mr. Rush joined The Observer in 1999 after moving to New York to be with Ms. Hogue, whom he’d met in an AOL book forum. He had grown up a military brat and lived in a variety of places—Japan, the panhandle of Florida and Texas among them—before his family settled into Little Rock, where he eventually went to college. In the years before he moved, he had been working at an Arkansas newspaper, and Ms. Hogue, who described him as a “paper fiend­—he loved any new newspaper he could find,” sent him copies of The Observer every week. He got to know New York through the pages of the salmon-color weekly and declared to Ms. Hogue that when he moved to New York he was going to go to the paper’s offices and get a job there. Shortly after he arrived, he walked the two blocks from the Upper East Side studio he had moved into with Ms. Hogue to The Observer’s townhouse on East 64th Street, and walked out with a job as a production designer.

“I’ve got to believe it was partly because he’s an artist and he loved the illustrators,” said Peter Kaplan, the former and longtime editor in chief of The Observer. He also loved his staff and was fiercely loyal, quietly absorbing enormous amounts of responsibility. “Everybody adored him,” said Mr. Kaplan, “and he exuded that.”

“He was the most intelligent person I’ve ever known,” said Julie Showers, who was not the first person to express that sentiment. She worked with Mr. Rush for 10 years. “He’s also the only artist I’ve ever met who thought art was ridiculous.” As a libertarian, he maintained that no government money should ever go to the arts. He was a romantic about some things—his hapless Minnesota Vikings, the music of Levon Helm, the paper itself—but never sentimental.

Mr. Rush particularly enjoyed outsider art and loved making it. “He didn’t make a big deal about it,” said former editor Tom McGeveran, “but he was always very ambitious about his pieces.” Undaunted by the size of his studio apartment, he made sprawling paintings on large doors. He made 3-D collages that had a sort of jubilant ugliness reminiscent of Robert Crumb’s work. His art was “collage and cartoon, and uniquely his,” said former Observer design director Nancy Butkus. “He didn’t follow any school,” she added.

And truly, he did not.

Mr. Rush is survived by his partner, Ms. Hogue; his sister, Tonya Gibbs  and her husband Oscar Gibbs and their children Ellsworth and Ellen, all of Lebanon, N.H.; and his father, Edward R. Rush of Little Rock, Ark.

He is, and will be, enormously missed.

A makeshift shrine had been erected overnight, with mourners leaving all variety of votive offerings. At least 30 apples (the edible kind) were arranged on the steps in front of the store, many with a bite missing, mimicking the tech company's logo. Candles, flowers, notes, and even iPhones had been placed with care in remembrance of  Jobs. A steady flow of people stopped to observe the scene, taking pictures of the memorial with their iPhones.

The Observer asked one supplicant, Chris, who had added a page of stickers to the ever-increasing pile of objects, how Jobs had impacted his life. "I think it's very sad and we kind of lost one of the greatest innovators I think of our generation," he explained. "And personally, being in technology, he was an inspiration to me. He made me not settle with bad work, he really helped me."

Many of the offerings were from out-of-towners. We spoke to one man, hailing from China, who left a personal note (in Chinese) at the site. "I am very sad. Steve Jobs was the father of Apple," he said. He, like many other skeptics, expressed doubt that the brand would be the same without its creator at the helm. "I’m just wondering... whether Apple will invent more products for us," he said. Because the world needs more Apple products. Really, it does.

"This ribbon is from Russia. You see, this is for memory of Soviet and Russian soldiers," a woman hailing from the country of the bear explained through a thick accent. " The Observer asked her why she decided to add to the shrine. "Because yesterday we heard about his death, and just one day ago we bought this iPod for son," she said, brandishing the gadget.

People stood solemnly discussing the deceased tech giant in every imaginable language. One woman asked to borrow our pen as she tore out a picture of Jobs from The New York Times scribbling "MERCI, MERCI," before adding it to the shrine. As expected, a slew of media outlets and professional photographers were on site, capturing the moment.

We noticed several people sitting in chairs, looking haggard. We thought perhaps they were mourners who had spent the night. As we approached them we noticed a sign. "We are waiting for the iPhone 4S," it said. It appears that extreme Apple fans will indeed exist in the post-Jobs era.

“All of Brooklyn’s thoughts and prayers are with Hope’s parents, Judge Gustin Reichbach and Ellen Meyers, her friends, and of course, my condolences to Councilman Levin and his staff. Here at Borough Hall we had the good fortune of working with Hope, who was a committed and passionate public servant. She truly will be missed.”

One reader emailed me and said, "I don't think I've ever been so freaked about the death of someone I knew so casually" describing Reichbach as "smart, vivacious, full of life."

Update: Rep. Nydia Velazquez:

“Today Brooklyn lost not only a rising star but a dedicated civic servant. A natural for public service, Hope Reichbach was a young woman with many dreams and so much promise. My thoughts are with her parents Ellen and Gus and with all those whose lives she touched.”