Pilgrim in excelsis

LAST OF HIS KIND Trow Sad news in today's New York Times obit section: Writer George W.S. Trow has died.

Granted, there's sad news every day in the Times obits, but Trow's passing is particularly sad for fans of his sui generis contributions to the New Yorker, like the groundbreaking anti-television jeremiad "Within the Context of No Context" (from 1980) and its sorta/kinda sequel from 1997, "Collapsing Dominant." Trow joined the New Yorker practically right out of Harvard in 1966 and was a founding editor of the National Lampoon. (Another member of the Lampoon dream team, Robert K. Hoffman, died in August.) He quit the New Yorker in 1994 after then-editor Tina Brown announced she was bringing in comedienne Rosanne Barr to "guest edit" a special issue.