Deaths (Obituaries)

He published a landmark work at 32. Known for lecturing extemporaneously for hours without notes, he dazzled colleagues with the breadth of his ruminations.

Washoe was 10 months old when her foster parents began teaching her to talk, and five months later they were already trumpeting her success. Not only had she learned words; she could also string them together, creating expressions like “water birds” when she saw a pair of swans and “open flower” to gain admittance to…

Nickolas Davatzes, who was instrumental in creating the cable television networks A&E and the History Channel, which now reach into 335 million households around the world, died on Aug. 21 at his home in Wilton, Conn. He was 79.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son George said.Mr. Davatzes (pronounced dah-VAT-sis) was president and…

Richard Robinson, who took over his father’s magazine company, Scholastic, and transformed it into a behemoth in the children’s book industry with the “Harry Potter” and “Hunger Games” series and titles like “The Magic School Bus” and “Goosebumps,” died on Saturday in Chilmark, Mass., on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 84.His son Maurice said the cause…

Literary references to grounding unruly children reverberate from at least the early 19th century, when the father in the 1835 novel “Home,” by Catharine Sedgwick, sternly orders his son Wallace to “go to your own room” after scalding a cat.Such banishments were later epitomized by the Swedish artist Carl Larsson’s 1894 watercolor “The Naughty Corner,”…

As an undergraduate, he had been relatively comfortable with the foreign policies of Republicans like Senator Robert A. Taft and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He became more critical after he entered the University of Wisconsin, where he studied under Professor Fred Harvey Harrington and where he and two other future professors, Lloyd C. Gardner and…