Peter W. Kaplan, 1954-2013

Former New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan died on Friday. “The meat of his tenure occurred during the unfettered, exuberant, often crass nineties boom, and the Observer glorified the city’s inhabitants and their rituals even as it skewered them, turning them into Drew Friedman gargoyles, putting words in their mouths with his characteristic barking, yawping headlines that were more like sentences or whole paragraphs (‘headlines that talked!’ as he said), finishing the story before the prose had even begun,” observes John Homans. This piece from last year is also worth reading. Kaplan was 59.