Passing mentions: the notable lives lost in 2024

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Most weekdays we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Today, though, we'll be looking back at some notable lives, the inspired and inspiring figures who died this year. One day before his death, Alexei Navalny appeared in a court hearing by videolink from prison. He joked that authorities should put some more money in his account because he was running low. In the end, there was only one way for Russia's President Vladimir Putin to wipe that smile off Mr. Navalny's face. Our Russia editor, Arkady Ostrovsky was a personal friend of Mr. Navalny's. He reflected on what the assassination means for the future of Russia.

He did not see himself as a martyr. He was perfectly aware of the risks. He knew this was a possibility of both great likelihood of imprisonment and some quite strong chance of never walking out of that prison. And he had a very, very strong sense of wanting to live and wanting to win. So he didn't walk to his death. What was happening when he flew back in this kind of completely epic way, a hero returning, you know, Lancelot, whatever you want to call it, returning to slay the dragon was epic. And it was not just about power. It was not just about political power. It was about fear. In a way, he overcame that fear of death. I think his attitude to death was it's not as scary as you all think because he's actually seen it. I think having been in a coma for several weeks, he's actually had experience of death, which very, very few of us actually have. And therefore, I think he concluded in his head it's actually, it's not that scary. The reason Navalny's death is so crushing is that it crushes this idea that the good wins over the evil. And I think in the long term it does because otherwise humanity wouldn't survive. But in the short term, we just don't know how long the short and medium term is. They can. And there probably will be a lot of suffering in terms of Navalny's legacy, I think that's secure. I think around the world and Russia, when change will come. And it will come because Putin is not eternal, however much he might want that he is not eternal. And I think in the time that we can see into the end of his. His life, once he is gone, there will be change.

Several key members of Hamas were assassinated this year, including Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 attacks. The Economist's Israel correspondent, Anshul Pfeffer, spoke about the importance of Sinwar's death.

Sinwar is significant for two main reasons. First of all, because he was the overall mastermind, not just of the October 7th attack, but the whole strategy of years in which Hamas were broadcasting this kind of relatively pragmatic signals to Israel that they were prepared to go for some kind of a truce. But beyond the fact that this was his strategy, Sinwar really was the main figure in Hamas ever since he was released from Israeli prison in 2011. He very quickly became the leader in Gaza, and since Hamas is a movement which has both a military wing and a political wing, he managed to stride the two. He kept his roots in the military wing, where he had grown up and where he had been one of the founders. But he also became a major player in the Hamas political sphere after Israel killed Ismail Haniyeh, the former political leader. Sinwar was appointed as the overall leader of the political branch and also Sinoah, I think, saw himself as becoming ultimately a leader of the Palestinian people, And I think October 7th, in many ways was his play for that leadership.

Alex Salmond was the figurehead of Scottish nationalism, driving the Scottish National Party from the political periphery into government. He resigned as First Minister of Scotland after the failed independence referendum in 2014, eventually returning to the fringes of politics after harassment allegations and bitter party infighting. His achievement was to make the cause of Scottish nationalism a central part of the political landscape north of the border.

The independence of Scotland is much bigger than any individual, any political party. It's much bigger than anything. It's the biggest issue in Scottish politics.

In 2019, John Prescott told the Guardian newspaper, when I do die after 50 years in politics, all they will show on the news is 60 seconds of me thumping a fellow in Wales. The former deputy Prime Minister of Britain was referring to an infamous moment when he punched a protester who'd thrown an egg at him. Mr. Prescott connected with the electorate in other ways. Though he was the son of a railwayman and became an active trade unionist, as a Labour member of Parliament, he helped bridge the divide between the party's traditional support and the new labor movement that allowed Tony Blair to win three general elections. While in office, he earned the nickname Two Jags after it emerged he had used two Jaguar cars for ministerial duties. Later he entered the upper chamber, the House of Lords. But he always remained a colorful politician who was proud of his working class origins.

Here he won over bar staff, betting.

He could drink a pint in five seconds.

I'll be in trouble again, I think now.

Quincy Jones ruled popular music for half a century, producing tunes for Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin and countless others. Perhaps his greatest achievement, though, was helping break down the racial barriers. In popular music.

There are only 12 notes. We've had them for 700 years, and between rhythm and harmony, we have to figure out how to make those things belong to us. And that's difficult after 700 years.

Dame Maggie Smith was a master of comic timing. She established her career on stage but later turned to film, winning two Academy Awards, including for best actress. She found new audiences later in her career from her roles in Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter films. As an actor, she could transform herself into anyone, often with hilarious results.

There's nothing simpler than avoiding people you don't like, avoiding one's friends.

That's the real test.

Willie May was possibly the best baseball player in the history of the Sport. Over his 22 year major league career, he received two National League Most Valuable Player awards and 12 Gold Gloves. He stacked up nearly 3,300 hits, 660 home runs, 339 steals and a.301 batting average, if you know what that means.

Willie connects and hammers it 380ft over the right field fence for his 512th round tripper. And he also hammers a new National League career home run record into the books. Willie said, I knew it was gone when I hit it. Some 20.

Each week. In the Economist, our obituary's editor, Ann Rowe, tells the stories of extraordinary lives. Among them heads of state, cultural titans, people who have furthered human knowledge. But they also include individuals who have changed the world in less trumpeted perhaps, but still profound ways. Among them this year was William Anders, better known as bill. In 1968, he thought he was going to walk on the moon. In the end, his mission was just to swing by and snap pictures of it. Along the way, he Got an unexpected chance to take perhaps history's most famous photograph.

Roger.

Understand.

Bill Anders had high hopes of going to the moon.

Houston, this is Apollo 8.

Houston, here.

Apollo 8, go ahead.

He'd been training in the lunar landing vehicle, but the mission he was actually assigned to, Apollo 8, was never meant to go to the moon. Instead, they were going to test fly the lunar module round the Earth. And the lunar module turned out not to be ready on time. So NASA decided instead they'd turn Apollo 8 into a lunar orbit mission. This was an extraordinary risky move, because humans had never been outside Earth orbit before. Bill Anders thought their chances of succeeding were very low, not more than one in three, he expected they probably wouldn't get back. But all the same, NASA was determined to do it, because rumor had got round that the Russians were determined to do it. Pretty soon they'd got to get there first and show who was number one. So they went off to the moon, leaving the lunar module behind. Belanders was sorry about that, and he was also pretty disappointed when he came to the moon itself. To his mind, it wasn't anything like the shining orb of the poets. Instead, it was grey and barren, stark ugly, he often said. But they had to do their work of finding the proper landing sites for the mission that was doubtless going to follow when they would get a man on the moon. So all of them were equipped in some way or another to take photographs of it. He was photographing as normal when suddenly something shocking came into the corner of his eye. And it was color. He had not seen color for a long time. He'd been focused on a grey and dark grey place, and he wondered what on earth this little bit of colour could be, And suddenly saw that it was a shining blue marble that was rising above the moon, wreathed in cloud, a really beautiful sight. And it was the Earth rising. He felt very emotional to see this sight, and he shouted to his colleagues.

Oh, my God, look at that picture over there. There's the Earth coming up. Wow, isn't that pretty?

Oh, my God, look at that picture over there. Wow, is that pretty. The minute he said that, the other two, Lovell and Borman, absolutely dived for cameras. Borman's camera, though, would only take black and white film, and Lovell's the same. So Anders realized he had the best camera to take this, but he needed colour film. He hadn't loaded it. So he crazily grabbed around to get Lovell to send him some colour film. And then he needed to put on a telephoto lens, and at last he seemed to be ready to take the picture. But he didn't have a light meter in the spacecraft, so he had to guess at that. So he said his wonderful photographic technique was just a point his camera at the Earth, click the F stops and change the aperture with every click. And that way he caught three wonderful photographs, which eventually became known as Earthrise. He only took three, and he would have liked to take a lot more. But Bormann had told him right at the start, this isn't in the flight plan, it's not scheduled. They had to save their film to photograph landing sites, and they couldn't just expend it where they wanted to. So he actually ordered Anders and Lovell to go to their couches and try to sleep. But Anders found he couldn't sleep at all because he just wanted to look out of his window and look at the Earth. He reflected that down there on that beautiful, fragile surface, looked as fragile as a Christmas tree ornament. And actually it was Christmas Eve anyway, so he had those thoughts in his mind for thinking how delicate it was. But down there on that planet, there were wars raging, especially the war in Vietnam. America's campuses were alight, riots were convulsing Europe, forests were burning, people were at each other's throats. And it was hard to believe, because this delicate planet really needed caring for. It did not need people to be treating it that way. And besides, when he looked at it space wise and looked at the distance between Moscow and Washington, these fervid space rivals, they could be spanned with his finger and thumb together. This view of the Earth as a really precious object was overwhelming to the astronauts. And thanks to his photographs, that message was really strongly delivered to the world as well. Because the picture Earthrise was very soon featured on stamps in America. It ran in magazines and in newspapers. It became a poster that decorated countless college walls. And it kicked off the Green movement. There was one quote in particular that was always being said or read back at him, something that seemed so poetical that he wondered if he could possibly have said it. They went all the way to the moon to discover the Earth.

For decades, Ruth Westheimer, better known as Dr. Ruth, was America's giggling national sex therapist. She loosened the country's puritanical collar and spread advice and wisdom on sexual health.

Not many people boast about being short, but Ruth Westheimer did. She was only 4 foot 7 when she was studying at the Sorbonne. She had to wait for a good looking guy to come along so that he could pop her up on the windowsill so that she could see the teacher. And whenever she appeared on an American talk show on tv, you could see her little feet swinging several inches above the ground. There were plenty such talk shows because she became a real media star in America. It started when she began to notice that as she worked for Planned Parenthood and also did sex therapy sessions in her private clinic, she noticed how much people needed help with talking about sex. It seemed extremely difficult for Americans to articulate what they wanted. And so she thought it might be helpful if she made a radio program. She started one in 1980. New York local radio station volunteered to take was called Sexually Speaking. It went out on Sunday night just after midnight, and it lasted only 15 minutes. But it soon drew such an audience in that they lengthened it to an hour. And in the end, in 1984, she started doing the Dr. Ruth show on TV and that made her a national sensation. She appeared a very great deal on the late night talk shows and she did rather scandalize the hosts of the talk shows with very frank conversation. She once told David Letterman that she'd had a letter from a lonely elderly lady, a widow, who had never tried masturbation, and how she had recommended to her that she ought to try a cucumber if she wanted to feel something in her vagina. And at that point David Letterman simply got up and walked out, leaving Ruth in a state of high giggles sitting at the table. And she also persuaded Johnny Carson to admit that if masturbation really made you go blind, then he wouldn't have seen a thing since 1938. So she was a naughty and rather dangerous person to have on a show, Always speaking her mind and speaking in the most wonderful German, Jewish, American accent. He'd been brought up in Germany and never, never lost it at all and thought that in fact this was a selling point and made people, people all the more keen to talk to her because she sounded very grandmotherly, as if she was going to give you a bowl of chicken soup, when instead she was going to tell you all about proper foreplay. Sex was not her only subject. She never mentioned, or very rarely, only when pushed to it, that she actually had quite a tragic background. After her upbringing in Germany, or ten years into it, when she was only ten and a half, her father was arrested by the Nazis, and at this her mother and grandmother decided to send her away on the Kindertransport to Switzerland, where she was put into a children's home, which very rapidly became an orphanage, because the parents of Most of the children there were taken to the camps and gassed, and no more letters came for them. After a while. She left as early as she could, when she was 16 and went to Israel, feeling that after the war she wanted to embrace the cause of a new country and a new homeland for Jews. She was actually trained to be both a sniper, which meant she could assemble and dismantle a submachine gun, and also so she was taught to throw grenades. Every so often in interviews, she did raise this rather violent capacity with interviewers. She always wanted people to treat her seriously. She might be short and she might be very funny, but she always had a serious side and a dangerous side, too. The other side that she didn't show so much was the side that had been brought up Orthodox, Jewish, regularly gone to synagogue, but it showed in her very serious approach to the subject. She did want relationships to be long. She did want people who were not married to use contraception. He called herself old fashioned and a square. Matchmaking was fine with her. It was very Jewish and she liked it for that. And she had a whole sheaf of quotations from the Talmud up her sleeve. Theory one was a lesson given with humor is a lesson retained. As she went into her 80s, she was still a character and still died talking away on all kinds of shows about sex and about love and not worried at all that she was now rather too old for it. She was still the acknowledged expert in the country. She did notice, however, that her short height was becoming even shorter and she had lost a quarter of an inch in her old age. In her 80s, well, she thought she might lose height until she became more or less invisible. But you'd certainly go on hearing that wonderfully guttural German, American, Jewish voice.

There was no doubt about that.

I have sitting right next to me a very funny young man who has some wonderful observations on Bachelor life. Welcome, Jerry.

Thank you.

Last time I told you that you have beautiful eyes. Now, I hoped that by this time you would be be married, because I like people to be married.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John Joe Devlin. And our sound designer is Will Rowe, with help this week from Alex Port Felix. Our senior creative producer is William Warren and our senior producers are Rory Galloway, Sarah Larnyuk. Our producers are Benji Guy and Maggie Khadifa. And our assistant producer is Henrietta McFarland. We'll be back here tomorrow with the weekend Intelligence.