Oral History Group and ‘POV’ Producer Receive $1 Million Grants

Two Brooklyn public media organizations are among 13 winners of a 2013 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, being announced Thursday by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

StoryCorps, which records and collects oral histories, and its occasional collaborator American Documentary, which produces the PBS series “POV,” will receive $1 million each. Dave Isay, StoryCorps’ founder and a 2000 MacArthur Genius Grant winner, said in a telephone interview that in addition to bolstering reserves, the money would go toward making StoryCorps’ digital archive of more than 45,000 (and growing) stories publicly available. StoryCorps owns the stories’ rights, but “we have to be very, very careful,” Mr. Isay said, citing concerns about privacy and identity theft.

Simon Kilmurry, American Documentary’s executive director, said by phone that the award would both aid the constructio of a public screening room and “give us a real solid financial base,” including some unrestricted funds to support projects and films.

Among the other winners, Housing Partnership Network, a Boston organization that facilitates collaboration among affordable housing and community development leaders, was awarded the largest grant, $1.5 million.

Oral History Group and ‘POV’ Producer Receive $1 Million Grants

Two Brooklyn public media organizations are among 13 winners of a 2013 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, being announced Thursday by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

StoryCorps, which records and collects oral histories, and its occasional collaborator American Documentary, which produces the PBS series “POV,” will receive $1 million each. Dave Isay, StoryCorps’ founder and a 2000 MacArthur Genius Grant winner, said in a telephone interview that in addition to bolstering reserves, the money would go toward making StoryCorps’ digital archive of more than 45,000 (and growing) stories publicly available. StoryCorps owns the stories’ rights, but “we have to be very, very careful,” Mr. Isay said, citing concerns about privacy and identity theft.

Simon Kilmurry, American Documentary’s executive director, said by phone that the award would both aid the constructio of a public screening room and “give us a real solid financial base,” including some unrestricted funds to support projects and films.

Among the other winners, Housing Partnership Network, a Boston organization that facilitates collaboration among affordable housing and community development leaders, was awarded the largest grant, $1.5 million.

2 Views of Buildings Around Grand Central: Special or Just Old

It is possible to look at the 80- and 90-year-old towers around Grand Central Terminal as buildings that give east Midtown the desirable luster of civic history. It is equally possible to look at them as the buildings that give east Midtown the deathly shroud of commercial obsolescence. (As the photos above are meant to show, it is also possible to see the buildings in either light.)

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times

The Bloomberg administration is advancing an ambitious rezoning proposal for east Midtown (PDF) that would increase allowable building density and encourage developers to assemble lrge sites for enormous new office towers. To earn greater density, developers would pay for improvements to the pedestrian network. In some cases, they could build even denser buildings if their designs made what the City Planning Department called “a significant contribution to the skyline.”

But not if there are landmarks in the middle of the development sites.

So the question of whether any more buildings in east Midtown merit official landmark status â€" besides those that are already designated â€"  is more than a preservation issue. It could affect the city’s economy.

Two position papers released Wednesday answered the question quite differently.

In “Icons, Placeholders and Leftovers: Midtown East Report” (PDF), the Real Estate Board of New York and its allies in the Midtown21C coalition concluded, “The critical landmarks have been designated.” They rejected every building identified by preservation groups as being worthy of landmark consideration.

“Landmarking runs the risk of slowing or stopping the fission process of continuous transformation that has created Midtown East,” said the report, which was prepared by the consultants George E. Thomas and Susn Nigra Snyder of Philadelphia and Joel S. Weinstein, an engineer in New York.

“Any disruption in the process runs the risk of stalling or stopping development â€" and curtailing one of the great sources of real estate and wage taxes that pay the city’s regional bills,” the report said.

Besides that, the report said, a landmark designation can threaten the very building it is intended to protect, since masonry towers built before World War II suffer from the “inherent vice” of materials that have reached the end of their life spans or were assembled with insufficient safeguards against moisture, weathering and wear.

“Inherent vice threatens the integrity of a building,” the report said, “and has the potential to destroy the economic basis of its use.”

Old Acquaintances Remember Van Cliburn

Neal Boenzi/The New York Times Van Cliburn during a ticket-tape parade in New York after returning from Moscow after winning the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 1958.

To the world, he was the famous concert pianist who gave an uncertain nation a shot of confidence in those tense months after Sputnik. “The Texan who conquered Russia,” Time magazine called him. But to the people who saw him carrying furniture on West 57th Street, he was just another 20-something, moving to a new apartment. And mostly doing it himself.

“I would bump into Van carrying a chair or a small tabe,” said the pianist Gary Graffman, who later took an apartment in the building Mr. Cliburn had vacated. “That’s how he moved.” Mr. Graffman’s wife, Naomi, added, “I suspect things like his piano, he didn’t move himself.”

Mr. Cliburn, who died on Wednesday, had triumphed at the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958. That was after he had won another important contest, the Leventritt Competition, in 1954 â€" and after countless wake-up calls from Mrs. Graffman, who worked for his manager at Columbia Artists Management in those days.

Every morning, starting about 10 a.m., Mrs. Graffman would call the switchboard in the Osborne, the apartment house at 205 West 57th Street where Mr. Cliburn lived in the mid-1950s and where the Graffmans have lived since 1962.

“He liked to sleep late,” Mr. Graffman said. “Mrs. Hughes, w! ho was down at the desk, would ring and keep ringing. It somehow didn’t register until 11 o’clock.”

Around 12:45, she said, “I’d be sitting at my typewriter and the door would open, and his head would pop in â€" his head, which seemed to be about 12 feet off the ground. He’d say, ‘Honey, I’m hungry.’ We’d go downstairs to Beefburger Hall, which is now a pizzeria, and we’d have a beef burger for 35 cents. I always paid, and if I was feeling rich, I’d have a cheeseburger for 45 cents.”

Mr. Cliburn soon made enough money from concerts and recordings to afford more than a burger. But by the 1970s, he was not making recordings very often. Thomas Z. Shepard, who took over as the vice president of Mr. Cliburn’s label, RCA Red Seal, said there was a reason.

“He had once taken a low-interest loan, I think it was 3 percent, and he used it to buy real estate and he did very well,” he said. “He was in no hurry to repay the loan and RCA didn’t care that much, either.They wanted to keep him happy. But whenever he came in to record, instead of getting any money for the recording, they would deduct his fee from what he owed them. And even though that was perfectly sensible and civilized, that deincentivized Van. He didn’t see why he should break his chops when he wasn’t going to make any money.”

Mrs. Graffman remembered Mr. Cliburn’s debut with the New York Philharmonic, soon after he won the Leventritt Competition â€" and the party after the concert, at the Park Avenue apartment of Rosalie Leventritt, the widow of Edgar Leventritt, a lawyer and amateur pianist who had started the competition.

“There were two planeloads of Texans who came for the concert,” Mrs. Graffman said. “In the old days, before they renovated Carnegie Hall, there was a long staircase backstage to go up to the green room, and hundreds of people pushing ahead like an ocean. We were with Mrs. Leventritt, and Van was standing at the top. He called down to her, ‘Honey, ! you see a! ll these people They’re all coming to your party.’ It was an absolute madhouse. She wasn’t expecting 500 extra people.”

Online Play Helps ‘Harlem Shake’ Reign at No. 1

Julie Glassberg for The New York Times Baauer performing in September.

“Harlem Shake” still has plenty of shake left in it.

Baauer’s song “Harlem Shake” has nothing to do with the actual dance of that name, but has inspired thousands of people to upload videos to YouTube of themselves flailing about to the track. And it holds at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, the magazine’s standard pop singles chart.

The song benefits from a recent change in Billboard’s chart methodology that incorporates YouTube views along with sales, airplay and other fors of audio streaming. The song â€" or qualified excerpts of it â€" had 98 million streams in the United States last week including thousands of videos on YouTube, a drop of just 5 percent from the 103 million it drew the week before, the first time that Billboard and its partner, Nielsen SoundScan, counted those views.

But YouTube wasn’t the only place where “Harlem Shake” was a hit. It went to the top of iTunes’s rankings as well, and SoundScan counted 297,000 downloads of the song last week, enough to make it the second-most downloaded song of the week.

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s “Thrift Shop” has exactly the opposite standings on Billboard’s song charts this week: It is the top digital track, with 300,000 downloads, but was held at No. 2 on the Hot 100 by the “Harlem Shake” phenomenon.

Also on the chart this week, Mumford & Sons’ “Babel” (Glassnote) remains the top-selling album. This is the album’s fifth week at No. 1, but! with 63,000 sales, it is a 66 percent drop from the week before â€" when it enjoyed a post-Grammy Award boost â€" and the lowest sales for a No. 1 album since August, when Zac Brown Band’s “Uncaged” had 48,000, according to Billboard.

Another “shake” had a notable showing on the chart this week, in an otherwise slow week of music sales. The band Alabama Shakes, jumped 14 spots to No. 6 with 33,000 sales of its album “Boys & Girls” (ATO), following recent performances at the Grammys and on “Saturday Night Live.”

Charges Tie Son and 2nd Man to Mother’s Dismembered Body

Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press The police on Tuesday guarded one of the locations in the Bronx where a dismembered body was found in plastic bags.

The son of a woman whose body was found dismembered and deposited in bags around a Bronx neighborhood was charged on Wednesday with two felonies related to the improper disposal of her body, as detectives continued questioning him and a friend about the killing itself.

The police charged the son, identified as Bashid McLean, 23, and the friend, William Harris, 26, with unlawful dissection of a human body and hindering prosecution, accusing them of having worked together to cut up the dead body of Mr. McLean’s 45-year-old mother, Tanya Byrd.

In addition, the police charged Mr. Harris with possession of stolen property and marijuana possession.

The circumstances of Ms. Byrd’s death remains under investigation. The police said Mr. McLean and Mr. Harris accused each other of having killed her.

The medical examiner has yet to determine a cause of death.

The police said that the two men made the task of determining the cause much more difficult because of the grisly method by which they disposed of her body, cutting it into pieces with a saw and distributing the remains in four bags around Melrose in the Bronx.

Detectives found evidence in Ms. Byrdâ! €™s apartment - a few blocks from the area where her body was found by a dog-walker early Tuesday morning - that she had been dismembered there, including a box for a saw, the police said.

Friends remembered Ms. Byrd as a friendly mother of a young son with Down syndrome and an older son, Mr. McLean, who was withdrawn.

At least one neighbor recalled regularly hearing a woman yelling in Ms. Byrd’s apartment.

New York, Past and Present: Cynthia Zarin Talks About ‘An Enlarged Heart’

In the personal essays that make up her new book, “An Enlarged Heart,” Cynthia Zarin writes about the changing face of New York City, the pleasures of a good coat, and her life as a poet and journalist, including her time at The New Yorker magazine. In a recent e-mail interview, Ms. Zarin discussed these subjects and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:

Q.

On the first page of the book, you call yourself “the most provincial person in the world.” But in these essays you recall traveling to Rome and Venice and working for The New Yorker. What makes you provincial

A.

Well, I live only a few blocks from where I was born, and my children were born in the same hospital, Mt. Sinai, asI was â€" that’s unusual, I think, these days. I’ve done some fairly ordinary traveling, and in the periods when I was writing for The New Yorker I traveled a bit on assignment, but compared to many people I’ve stayed fixed, and I tend to like to return to places I’ve been: blocks, restaurants, cities.

Q.

Later you write that your “ear for languages,” including English at times, is “almost nonexistent.” You’ve written several books of poetry. Are you a poet because of, or in spite of, this problematic ear

A.

I am terrible at languages. At school I was relieved of the language requirement because I was hopeless. Right now I am trying to learn Italian, with my youngest daughter. She is streets ahead of me. I think for me language often takes the form of words spoken or sung just out of earshot, and I found early on that it was important to me to try to hear what was being said, by me or by others, and try to get it right. B! ut precision often yields to mystery. I find language elusive.

Q.

The book’s title essay, about trying to diagnose a frightening bout of illness your daughter suffered when she was young, reads differently than the other pieces; less ruminative and more headlong, for obvious reasons. Was the process of writing it different than the others

A.

“An Enlarged Heart” was written only a few weeks after a terrible time in the life of my family. I wrote it almost all at once, on an old Selectric typewriter on a desk in my bedroom when we returned to New York. The piece was a way of finding language to describe something that, to me, was so shocking and had so changed how I thought about things. In order to know what I felt, I had to write it down. It’s not an elliptical piece.

Q.

Coats and shoes and curtains, among ther things, serve as strong prompts to your memory throughout the book. What is it about clothes and decor that capture your imagination as a writer

A.

I think that the things we love and that we choose often find us â€" or that in finding them, or keeping them, we reveal a little bit of our dream life. When I was about 13 or 14, my mother declared she would not go shopping with me anymore, because I was looking for something that was in my head, rather than on the racks of Bonwit Teller in 1974; a Platonic Closet, rather than a Platonic Cave! I was reading in Grace Coddington’s memoir the other day that Alexander McQueen sewed talismans into his clothes â€" an impulse I understand.

Q.

In a few essays, particularly in “! Restauran! ts,” there’s an elegiac sense of what disappears from New York over time. Having lived here a long time, is there a particular closed-up place you miss the most

A.

The other day I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I found myself thinking about the pool in the cafeteria. It was made of green marble, I think, and when I was a child we used to throw pennies into it â€" that’s a real loss; it was magic: a lagoon in the center of the museum! And the Éclair Bakery on West 86th Street; in my twenties, when I was feeling blue, I used to walk over there and eat â€" what else â€" eclairs. Isaac Bashevis Singer lived down the block and I often saw him there. And Zito’s on Bleecker Street â€" I was there on the day they closed and I asked if I could have the bread board and Zito said, “what do you want that for,” and I have it in my kitchen. And Café des Artistes, and the old movie theaters, the Thalia and The New Yorker, which was like walking down into a nautilusâ€

Sara Barrett Cynthia Zarin

Q.

The last and longest piece in the book is about your time working at The New Yorker, as an assistant to its legendary editor William Shawn and later as a writer. You refer to it as “the magazine” until three pages into the essay, and you also write about E. B. White without ever naming him. Is this a coyness meant to mirror that of the magazine

A.

That’s interesting. I think I was writing internally: that is, it was always spoken of simply as “the magazine,” so that is the locution that comes naturally to me. There are many people in the book who are not named â€" some of th! ese were ! editorial decisions, and decisions to protect privacy. With E. B. White, the decision was that any reader who cared who it was would know who it was, as you did, and if they didn’t know, it wouldn’t matter very much. And I’m not sure I’d describe the magazine as coy: I think there was a fierceness about privacy, and about the importance of inference, which is a kind of respect for the reader.

Q.

You write that after Shawn’s tenure ended and you left the offices, “it took a long time for me to know how to think again.” What do you mean by that

A.

William Shawn created an atmosphere, by legerdemain, on purpose, by default, what have you, in which writers, even ones who were virtually untried, as I was, were given a kind of quiet nod in which space and sometimes huge swaths of time were granted for writing and thinking. For me, and for others, that was formative. It ended abruptly, with a kind of violence, and it doesn’t exist anymor.. When I left the magazine I felt that without it I didn’t know how to put two sentences together. It was a kind of aphasia. I grew up and out of that â€" one does â€" but it took a while, and longer than I might like to admit.

Q.

There have been many book-length memoirs about working at the magazine. Were you ever tempted to write one yourself, or does this essay represent all you want to say about it

A.

This essay was a surprise: that is, I had in the back of my mind that I wanted to write something about Mary McCarthy’s Regency chest, which by a series of events had come into my possession â€" and I thought the essay would be generally about furniture, and specifically about Mary McCarthy, who is part of the furniture, one might say, of my reading and writing life. But when I began it quickly turned into something else â€" a meditation! , really,! about Mr. Shawn and The New Yorker, and the life of the magazine and what it meant to me and to people I came to love. Allen Shawn had written a memoir in which he discussed his familyâ€"without that, I do not think I would have felt comfortable doing so. In any case, I hadn’t planned to say anything about the magazine publicly, really. Whether it is the last word or not, I have learned not to predict what I am going to say about anything, but at the moment, this is it.

New York, Past and Present: Cynthia Zarin Talks About ‘An Enlarged Heart’

In the personal essays that make up her new book, “An Enlarged Heart,” Cynthia Zarin writes about the changing face of New York City, the pleasures of a good coat, and her life as a poet and journalist, including her time at The New Yorker magazine. In a recent e-mail interview, Ms. Zarin discussed these subjects and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:

Q.

On the first page of the book, you call yourself “the most provincial person in the world.” But in these essays you recall traveling to Rome and Venice and working for The New Yorker. What makes you provincial

A.

Well, I live only a few blocks from where I was born, and my children were born in the same hospital, Mt. Sinai, asI was â€" that’s unusual, I think, these days. I’ve done some fairly ordinary traveling, and in the periods when I was writing for The New Yorker I traveled a bit on assignment, but compared to many people I’ve stayed fixed, and I tend to like to return to places I’ve been: blocks, restaurants, cities.

Q.

Later you write that your “ear for languages,” including English at times, is “almost nonexistent.” You’ve written several books of poetry. Are you a poet because of, or in spite of, this problematic ear

A.

I am terrible at languages. At school I was relieved of the language requirement because I was hopeless. Right now I am trying to learn Italian, with my youngest daughter. She is streets ahead of me. I think for me language often takes the form of words spoken or sung just out of earshot, and I found early on that it was important to me to try to hear what was being said, by me or by others, and try to get it right. B! ut precision often yields to mystery. I find language elusive.

Q.

The book’s title essay, about trying to diagnose a frightening bout of illness your daughter suffered when she was young, reads differently than the other pieces; less ruminative and more headlong, for obvious reasons. Was the process of writing it different than the others

A.

“An Enlarged Heart” was written only a few weeks after a terrible time in the life of my family. I wrote it almost all at once, on an old Selectric typewriter on a desk in my bedroom when we returned to New York. The piece was a way of finding language to describe something that, to me, was so shocking and had so changed how I thought about things. In order to know what I felt, I had to write it down. It’s not an elliptical piece.

Q.

Coats and shoes and curtains, among ther things, serve as strong prompts to your memory throughout the book. What is it about clothes and decor that capture your imagination as a writer

A.

I think that the things we love and that we choose often find us â€" or that in finding them, or keeping them, we reveal a little bit of our dream life. When I was about 13 or 14, my mother declared she would not go shopping with me anymore, because I was looking for something that was in my head, rather than on the racks of Bonwit Teller in 1974; a Platonic Closet, rather than a Platonic Cave! I was reading in Grace Coddington’s memoir the other day that Alexander McQueen sewed talismans into his clothes â€" an impulse I understand.

Q.

In a few essays, particularly in “! Restauran! ts,” there’s an elegiac sense of what disappears from New York over time. Having lived here a long time, is there a particular closed-up place you miss the most

A.

The other day I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I found myself thinking about the pool in the cafeteria. It was made of green marble, I think, and when I was a child we used to throw pennies into it â€" that’s a real loss; it was magic: a lagoon in the center of the museum! And the Éclair Bakery on West 86th Street; in my twenties, when I was feeling blue, I used to walk over there and eat â€" what else â€" eclairs. Isaac Bashevis Singer lived down the block and I often saw him there. And Zito’s on Bleecker Street â€" I was there on the day they closed and I asked if I could have the bread board and Zito said, “what do you want that for,” and I have it in my kitchen. And Café des Artistes, and the old movie theaters, the Thalia and The New Yorker, which was like walking down into a nautilusâ€

Sara Barrett Cynthia Zarin

Q.

The last and longest piece in the book is about your time working at The New Yorker, as an assistant to its legendary editor William Shawn and later as a writer. You refer to it as “the magazine” until three pages into the essay, and you also write about E. B. White without ever naming him. Is this a coyness meant to mirror that of the magazine

A.

That’s interesting. I think I was writing internally: that is, it was always spoken of simply as “the magazine,” so that is the locution that comes naturally to me. There are many people in the book who are not named â€" some of th! ese were ! editorial decisions, and decisions to protect privacy. With E. B. White, the decision was that any reader who cared who it was would know who it was, as you did, and if they didn’t know, it wouldn’t matter very much. And I’m not sure I’d describe the magazine as coy: I think there was a fierceness about privacy, and about the importance of inference, which is a kind of respect for the reader.

Q.

You write that after Shawn’s tenure ended and you left the offices, “it took a long time for me to know how to think again.” What do you mean by that

A.

William Shawn created an atmosphere, by legerdemain, on purpose, by default, what have you, in which writers, even ones who were virtually untried, as I was, were given a kind of quiet nod in which space and sometimes huge swaths of time were granted for writing and thinking. For me, and for others, that was formative. It ended abruptly, with a kind of violence, and it doesn’t exist anymor.. When I left the magazine I felt that without it I didn’t know how to put two sentences together. It was a kind of aphasia. I grew up and out of that â€" one does â€" but it took a while, and longer than I might like to admit.

Q.

There have been many book-length memoirs about working at the magazine. Were you ever tempted to write one yourself, or does this essay represent all you want to say about it

A.

This essay was a surprise: that is, I had in the back of my mind that I wanted to write something about Mary McCarthy’s Regency chest, which by a series of events had come into my possession â€" and I thought the essay would be generally about furniture, and specifically about Mary McCarthy, who is part of the furniture, one might say, of my reading and writing life. But when I began it quickly turned into something else â€" a meditation! , really,! about Mr. Shawn and The New Yorker, and the life of the magazine and what it meant to me and to people I came to love. Allen Shawn had written a memoir in which he discussed his familyâ€"without that, I do not think I would have felt comfortable doing so. In any case, I hadn’t planned to say anything about the magazine publicly, really. Whether it is the last word or not, I have learned not to predict what I am going to say about anything, but at the moment, this is it.

AMC Confirms New Show Runner for ‘The Walking Dead’

AMC Scott M. Gimple, a writer and producer for “The Walking Dead,” has been named the new show runner of the series.

“The Walking Dead,” the hit AMC horror series, will live on for its fourth season under the stewardship of a new show runner, Scott M. Gimple, the cable channel has confirmed. Mr. Gimple, a writer and producer who joined “The Walking Dead” in its second season (and whose previous credits include the television series “FlashForward” and the film “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance”), was first reported to have been promoted to the position of show runner b the Hollywood trade publications in January. At that time, AMC had about as much to say about the news as a zombified corpse might. But on Wednesday, the cable channel finally confirmed his appointment in a news release that also announced production on Season 4 of “The Walking Dead” would begin in Atlanta on May 6.

Mr. Gimple is the third  show runner in the short but highly successful run of “The Walking Dead.” He succeeds Glen Mazzara, who ran the series in its second and third seasons, and who announced in December he was parting ways with AMC over unspecified creative differences. Mr. Mazzara had replaced Frank Darabont, the filmmaker behind “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” who originally developed â! €œThe Walking Dead” from the comics of the same title, and who left the series after its first season.

Smithsonian Says Looming Cuts ‘Won’t Affect the Public’ - for Now

Despite automatic federal spending cuts scheduled to take effect on Friday, the Smithsonian Institution has promised to keep its 19 museums and the National Zoo in Washington open for their regular hours, The Associated Press reported.

“Right now, it won’t affect the public,” Linda St. Thomas, a spokeswoman for the Smithsonian, said. Ms. St. Thomas said that the scheduled 5 percent cut - some $40 million â€" would be applied to maintenance, new construction, hiring, research, training and travel. The Smithsonian, which employs about 6,000 people, received $857 million from the federal government this fiscal year.

The director of the National Zoo, Dennis Kelly, said the zoo has been hoarding cash to make sure it has enough to care for its animals and continue its research, according to The A.P. “We think we have a plan that allws us to squeak through to the end of this fiscal year, ” Mr. Kelly said. “But we can’t sustain this. At the end of the fiscal year, if we’re still in this mode, the entire Smithsonian is going to have to rethink all of our priorities.”

Court Overturns Settlement of James Brown’s Estate

The long and tangled court fight over the estate of James Brown entered a new chapter on Wednesday when the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned a settlement dividing up his fortune, saying the former state attorney general had failed to follow Mr. Brown’s wishes in brokering the deal, The Associated Press reported.

Henry McMaster, the attorney general at the time, negotiated a settlement in 2009 that split up the singer’s estate, giving nearly half to a charitable trust, a quarter to his widow, Tomi Rae Hynie, and dividing the rest among his adult children.

But the supreme court ruled on Wednesday that the deal had a fatal flaw: it ignored Brown’s last wish that all his money go to charity. The court said Brown was of sound mind and body when he made his will before dying of hear failure in 2006 at the age of 73. The justices sent the case back down to lower court to be reconsidered and chastised Mr. McMaster for turning a blind eye to Mr. Brown’s instructions.

“The compromise orchestrated by the A.G. in this case destroys the estate plan Brown had established in favor of an arrangement overseen virtually exclusively by the A.G.,” Associate Justice John W. Kittredge wrote. “The result is to take a large portion of Brown’s estate that Brown had designated for charity and to turn over these amounts to the family members and purported family members who were, under the plain terms of Brown’s will, given either limited devises or excluded.”

Lead Singer Fired by Stone Temple Pilots

Rahav Segev for The New York Times Scott Weiland, center, with Stone Temple Pilots in 2008.

The Stone Temple Pilots have parted ways with their longtime lead singer Scott Weiland. The group put out a single-sentence news release on Wednesday: “Stone Temple Pilots have announced they have officially terminated Scott Weiland.”

The San Diego hard-rock and grunge band, which came to prominence in the early 1990s, reformed in 2008 after a five-year break and toured heavily last year.

Mr. Weiland, one of the founding members, plans to do a solo tour beginning next month, mining material from the group’s first two albums. He told Rolling Stone in an interview earlier this week that the band had been going through a rocky period.

“My personal feeling is that we need some new blood in the band,” he said. “We’ve been playing the same greatest hits set since we got back together. I’d like to make a new record. It will breathe new life into the group.”

He added his views had created some tension in the group: “There were some hurt egos. But that’s the way it is.”

Already Competing With the Boys, Girls Get Their Own Wrestling League

Julie Glassberg for The New York Times Rosemary Flores, 17, a wrestler for Curtis High School, pinned an opponent during a tournament in January in Harlem. With more young women interested in wrestling, the Public School Athletic League is starting a new city league for girls.

The Taft Educational Complex, in the South Bronx, started a boys’ wrestling team in November, and along with the dozens of boys who attended a season-opening meeting, there was one girl, Samantha Torres, 16.

The coach, Josh Lee, asked the restlers what motivated them to join, and soon all eyes turned to Ms. Torres.

“I said, ‘I want to show everyone that girls aren’t weaklings, and that just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I can’t wrestle,’” she recalled.

After a silent pause, the room erupted in applause. Once practices and matches began, however, some teammates were uncomfortable working out with Ms. Torres, and some opponents declined to compete for fear of losing to a girl, she said.

“When we first started practicing, some of the boys found it weird and really didn’t know what to do,” said Ms. Torres, adding that whatever qualms there were have abated now that she has begun beating some of the boys and has become “just another wrestler on the team.”

But the awkwardness she encountered is often a deterrent for girls seeking to join boys’ teams, even though there are no rules barring them. So the city’s Public School Athletic League has decided to gi! ve the girls a league of their own and is inaugurating a girls’ wrestling program with 16 teams in 12 weight classes that officials estimate will include about 300 girls.

The new league will draw from all five boroughs, including Bathgate High School in the Bronx, Hunter High School in Manhattan, Flushing High School in Queens, Canarsie High School in Brooklyn, and New Dorp High School on Staten Island.

It will be the first league of its kind in New York State, league officials said. The season will begin in March, culminating in a citywide tournament in May, said Eric Goldstein, chief executive of the Education Department’s Office of School Support Services.

Officials identified 15 schools with a core group of female wrestlers already competing on the boys’ squads, or where coaches and school officials believed there was enough interest from female students to give wrestling a try, Mr. Goldstein said. The 16th team, he said, will be a citywide “catch all” team for girls at schoos without programs.

“We had a growing demand for girls’ wrestling for the last few years,” Mr. Goldstein said. “We were really surprised at the response we got from the girls wanting to wrestle.”

Spring sports tend to be played outdoors, leaving more indoor athletic space available for wrestling, said Donald Douglas, the executive director of the P.S.A.L.

Female wrestling advocates said that starting teams in schools would attract girls who never considered that they could participate in organized wrestling.

“Nothing gets girls to join like seeing a girl throw another girl,” said Cheryl Wong, director of women’s wrestling at Beat the Streets, a nonprofit that promotes wrestling and that worked with the P.S.A.L. to start the new league.

Ms. Wong, an accomplished freestyle wrestler, has encouraged scores of girls to attend the clinics and practices that Beat the Streets runs as part of its mission to create and! strength! en school wrestling teams in the city.

There are 72 girls wrestling on boys’ teams in New York City public high schools, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. That number far outpaces the number of girl wrestlers in the rest of the state, but is far less than the numbers in states that already have separate girl wrestling programs, like Texas (2,416), California (2,008), Washington (1,071) and Hawaii (456).

Beat the Streets, which has helped reinvigorate school wrestling in New York City, will provide mats, uniforms, shoes and headgear to the new girls’ teams.

Rather than use collegiate rules that the boys’ league uses, the girls’ league will follow the freestyle rules used in Olympic wrestling. (The International Olympic Committee recently announced that it was dropping wrestling from the Summer Games). The style places more emphasis on westling on one’s feet instead of grappling on the mat.

One of the new teams will be Curtis High School on Staten Island, which already has a dozen girls on its boys’ team. At the Mayor’s Cup championships, a citywide competition held last month at the Harlem Armory that had a separate girls’ division, the Curtis girls won the girls’ team championship. One if its stars, Rosemary Flores, 17, who wrestles in the 126-pound class, won an individual championship.

For Ms. Flores, it was her third Mayor’s Cup title in a row. She is widely considered the best female wrestler in the city and one of the best in the nation at her weight classification.

Although Ms. Flores said she would rather wrestle boys than girls, she is looking forward to the girls’ program because “it’s great for female wrestling, and I can always use more matches.”

Kimberly Cardenas, 18, a senior from Petrides High School on Staten Island who won the girls’ 99-pound title at the Harlem tourna! ment, sai! d she was excited that Petrides would field a girls’ team.

Ms. Cardenas, who has more than 100 high school victories, against boys and girls, said that when she began as a freshman, “I was the only girl on the team and I got beat up pretty bad.”

“Some boys forfeited the match rather than wrestle me,” she said. “You could tell they were scared. They didn’t want to hurt me. Some boys were like, ‘Why does she have to be allowed on the team’ They were uncomfortable because they didn’t know how to practice with a girl.”

Ms. Torres, from Taft, also said that once she showed her mettle on the mat, male opponents began backing out of matches.

“One boy told his coach, ‘I can’t wrestle her because my friends are all here, and I can’t lose to a girl,’” said Ms. Torres, who took fourth in the girls’ division of the Mayor’s Cup tournament.

Her coach, Mr. Lee, said, “She’s, without a doubt, the toughest person on the team, and you can ask any boy on he team that.”

Already Competing With the Boys, Girls Get Their Own Wrestling League

Julie Glassberg for The New York Times Rosemary Flores, 17, a wrestler for Curtis High School, pinned an opponent during a tournament in January in Harlem. With more young women interested in wrestling, the Public School Athletic League is starting a new city league for girls.

The Taft Educational Complex, in the South Bronx, started a boys’ wrestling team in November, and along with the dozens of boys who attended a season-opening meeting, there was one girl, Samantha Torres, 16.

The coach, Josh Lee, asked the restlers what motivated them to join, and soon all eyes turned to Ms. Torres.

“I said, ‘I want to show everyone that girls aren’t weaklings, and that just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I can’t wrestle,’” she recalled.

After a silent pause, the room erupted in applause. Once practices and matches began, however, some teammates were uncomfortable working out with Ms. Torres, and some opponents declined to compete for fear of losing to a girl, she said.

“When we first started practicing, some of the boys found it weird and really didn’t know what to do,” said Ms. Torres, adding that whatever qualms there were have abated now that she has begun beating some of the boys and has become “just another wrestler on the team.”

But the awkwardness she encountered is often a deterrent for girls seeking to join boys’ teams, even though there are no rules barring them. So the city’s Public School Athletic League has decided to gi! ve the girls a league of their own and is inaugurating a girls’ wrestling program with 16 teams in 12 weight classes that officials estimate will include about 300 girls.

The new league will draw from all five boroughs, including Bathgate High School in the Bronx, Hunter High School in Manhattan, Flushing High School in Queens, Canarsie High School in Brooklyn, and New Dorp High School on Staten Island.

It will be the first league of its kind in New York State, league officials said. The season will begin in March, culminating in a citywide tournament in May, said Eric Goldstein, chief executive of the Education Department’s Office of School Support Services.

Officials identified 15 schools with a core group of female wrestlers already competing on the boys’ squads, or where coaches and school officials believed there was enough interest from female students to give wrestling a try, Mr. Goldstein said. The 16th team, he said, will be a citywide “catch all” team for girls at schoos without programs.

“We had a growing demand for girls’ wrestling for the last few years,” Mr. Goldstein said. “We were really surprised at the response we got from the girls wanting to wrestle.”

Spring sports tend to be played outdoors, leaving more indoor athletic space available for wrestling, said Donald Douglas, the executive director of the P.S.A.L.

Female wrestling advocates said that starting teams in schools would attract girls who never considered that they could participate in organized wrestling.

“Nothing gets girls to join like seeing a girl throw another girl,” said Cheryl Wong, director of women’s wrestling at Beat the Streets, a nonprofit that promotes wrestling and that worked with the P.S.A.L. to start the new league.

Ms. Wong, an accomplished freestyle wrestler, has encouraged scores of girls to attend the clinics and practices that Beat the Streets runs as part of its mission to create and! strength! en school wrestling teams in the city.

There are 72 girls wrestling on boys’ teams in New York City public high schools, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. That number far outpaces the number of girl wrestlers in the rest of the state, but is far less than the numbers in states that already have separate girl wrestling programs, like Texas (2,416), California (2,008), Washington (1,071) and Hawaii (456).

Beat the Streets, which has helped reinvigorate school wrestling in New York City, will provide mats, uniforms, shoes and headgear to the new girls’ teams.

Rather than use collegiate rules that the boys’ league uses, the girls’ league will follow the freestyle rules used in Olympic wrestling. (The International Olympic Committee recently announced that it was dropping wrestling from the Summer Games). The style places more emphasis on westling on one’s feet instead of grappling on the mat.

One of the new teams will be Curtis High School on Staten Island, which already has a dozen girls on its boys’ team. At the Mayor’s Cup championships, a citywide competition held last month at the Harlem Armory that had a separate girls’ division, the Curtis girls won the girls’ team championship. One if its stars, Rosemary Flores, 17, who wrestles in the 126-pound class, won an individual championship.

For Ms. Flores, it was her third Mayor’s Cup title in a row. She is widely considered the best female wrestler in the city and one of the best in the nation at her weight classification.

Although Ms. Flores said she would rather wrestle boys than girls, she is looking forward to the girls’ program because “it’s great for female wrestling, and I can always use more matches.”

Kimberly Cardenas, 18, a senior from Petrides High School on Staten Island who won the girls’ 99-pound title at the Harlem tourna! ment, sai! d she was excited that Petrides would field a girls’ team.

Ms. Cardenas, who has more than 100 high school victories, against boys and girls, said that when she began as a freshman, “I was the only girl on the team and I got beat up pretty bad.”

“Some boys forfeited the match rather than wrestle me,” she said. “You could tell they were scared. They didn’t want to hurt me. Some boys were like, ‘Why does she have to be allowed on the team’ They were uncomfortable because they didn’t know how to practice with a girl.”

Ms. Torres, from Taft, also said that once she showed her mettle on the mat, male opponents began backing out of matches.

“One boy told his coach, ‘I can’t wrestle her because my friends are all here, and I can’t lose to a girl,’” said Ms. Torres, who took fourth in the girls’ division of the Mayor’s Cup tournament.

Her coach, Mr. Lee, said, “She’s, without a doubt, the toughest person on the team, and you can ask any boy on he team that.”

Musicological Sparring, Courtesy of David Byrne and Questlove

Because making music is, at heart, a formidable acting job, in which the performer projects a stage persona that may not be much like what he or she is like offstage, public interviews with musicians can be a gamble. One way around that is to find a couple of players who come from different musical worlds, yet have things in common that might not be immediately apparent, and let them quiz each other for 90 minutes. And you can rig the game by choosing musicians who are secret scholars of musical arcana, and who enjoy a bit of musicological sparring. That was the Public Theater’s strategy on Tuesday evening, when it presented the first installment of its Public Forum series at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, at New York University.

Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times David Byrne at the AfroPunk festival in Brooklyn in August.

In one corner, wearing a burgundy pullover and clocking in at 60 years old was David Byrne, the front man and composer of Talking Heads, who has gone on to a remarkably varied career since the band’s breakup in 1991, and whose latest project is a show based on his 2010 album “Here Lies Love,” to be staged at the Public in April. In the other, sporting a grey sweater with a large, colorful heart pin and a metal comb stuck in his anarchic Afro, was Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, the 42-year old drummer for the eclectic Philadelphia hip-hop and soul group the Roots, which performs nightly as the house band on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.”

Lloyd Bishop/NBC Questlove on the set of “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.”

Both were there in other capacities, too. Mr. Byrne is the author of “How Music Works,” a thick volume of musical reflections that was available, in a huge stack of autographed copies, in the foyer outside the hall. Questlove - or, as the moderator, Jeremy McCarter addressed him, at one point, Professor Questlove - is currently teaching a course on classic albums at NYU. He was engaged for that job, as h explained during the forum, after he responded, firmly but patiently, to a dismissive review of a Public Enemy album by a young National Public Radio intern.

Mr. Byrne’s book and Questlove’s course yielded the first potential fault line: hadn’t Mr. Byrne suggested, in his book, that the creation and adoration of revered musical canon was a bad thing Well, not exactly, Mr. Byrne said. He was “going after classical music,” not the pop canon that Questlove is teaching. And even at that, he said, “there’s some classical music that I really love, and some that I don’t get and I don’t think I will ever get.” What he! really o! bjects to, in fact, is “the subliminal thing going on, that listening to that music instead of the pop music I listened to, would make you a better person. It became this class thing.”

It was left to Questlove to defend the classics, which he did in an unusual way, noting that he had studied classical music, with his father’s encouragement, and had been accepted to the Juilliard School, but decided to work with his rap group instead.

“It’s funny you say that,” he told Mr. Byrne, referring to the class issue, “because I had a teacher who could speak both languages. And I remember when we first started studying Stravinsky - the class trip was going to see ‘Rite of Spring’ - and he finally found a way to explain it to us.” His technique He described Stravinsky as the Public Enemy of classical music. “For those who are unfamiliar with Public Enemy’s music,” Questlove added, donning his professor’s cap, “they wanted to be music’s worst nigtmare, the hip-hop version of the Sex Pistols. Just cramming in samples one on top of the other until it didn’t sound like music anymore, it just sounded like a mess. They wanted their music to give that experience where, ‘this is what it’s like in the inner city.’ Once he explained it to us, we couldn’t wait.”

From there, the discussion wandered freely through musical philosophy and history. Mr. Byrne worried about the professionalization of music - the idea that young people were being discouraged from making music for the love of it, and being taught that there was a professional class of musician whose job it is to create music, and a consumer class, whose job it is to listen. He and Questlove wandered through the creation of the New Wave scene in the late 1970s (Talking Heads enjoyed being part of it for a while, but later chafed at being categorized) and Questlove’s creation of a Philadelphia hip-hop movement, based on live jamming, 20 years later (he believed that the only ! way to cr! eate momentum was to bring like-minded but competing musicians together).

They talked about reviews: Talking Heads was eager to read them, but Mr. Byrne now waits a year; Questlove checks his computer regularly to see how his projects are being rated. They mused on the nature of success (Questlove, speaking of the Roots, said, “we were never platinum” - meaning, huge sellers - “so our saving grace was our critical acclaim”) and about the genesis of Talking Heads’ “big suit” (it was the result of a Japanese fashion designer’s comment about everything being bigger onstage). Questlove marveled at the way techniques used in Mr. Byrne’s 1981 collaboration with Brian Eno, “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” anticipated techniques used in hip-hop. And he held forth amusingly on his own long campaign, so far unsuccessful, to get Bill Withers to collaborate with him.

Hugh Brown/Cinecom International Films Mr. Byrne in the concert film “Stop Making Sense.”

Probably the most striking moments of the discussion, though, were Questlove’s theories about musical education. One should, he argued, start young: he recently loaded up a couple of iPods for a friend with a new baby, and attached it to speakers around the child’s crib. He would not say what was on the playlist, apart from Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, but he asked his friend to play the music around the clock. As for advice for older students, sought by a teacher in the audience, he took a strikingly traditional stand.

“I’m never that ‘follow you dreams’ guy,” Questlove said. “Because some people’s dreams will get realized, and some dreams won! ’t get ! realized, so I kind of feel it’s dismissive - ‘Oh! Follow your dreams, kid, see you later!’ My radical advice is simple: you have to practice, and you have to be organized. Which I know also sounds rather like bland, dismissive advice, but I think it’s true. If you look at all of history’s great figures, it’s discipline, practice, organization.”

Stars Sling Guitars at a Benefit for Country Music Hall of Fame

Rick Diamond/Getty Images From left, Jason Aldean, Gregg Allman, Warren Haynes, Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill, Ashley Monroe and Pat Monahan.

A guitar pull is a Nashville tradition in which songwriters and singers sit in a row on a stage with their acoustic instruments and take turns playing whatever song they feel like, usually preceded by a story about where it came from. It makes for a low-key, informal and often surprising show.

On Tuesday night, some of the best performers in Nashville came to the Best Buy Theater in Times Square for a guitar pull to raise money for the Countr Music Hall of Fame and Museum, which is undergoing a major expansion.

Rick Diamond/Getty Images Ms. Harris and Joan Osborne.

Vince Gill, Jason Aldean, Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell anchored the event. But the lineup also included the blues-rockers Gregg Allman and Warren Haynes from the Allman Brothers Band, the singer Pat Monahan from the pop-rock band Train and Ashley Monroe, a young country singer who is a member of Pistol Annies. “Or the best you could get for free on short notice,” Mr. Gill joked as they took the stage.

Kyle Young, the museum’s director, said the annual “All of the Hall” gala dinner and benefit concert was expected to raise between $100,000 and $150,000, though final figure! s were not available on Tuesday. The museum in downtown Nashville is undergoing a $100-million expansion, and so far about $71.6 million has been donated to cover the cost, including a major gift from Taylor Swift.

The show offered a peak at some new songs. Ms. Harris and Mr. Crowell, both Nashville veterans with multiple hits in their credits, performed some duets from their new album “Old Yellow Moon” (Nonesuch). And Ms. Monroe sang two songs from her recently released solo album “Like a Rose,” which Mr. Gill produced.

Michael Loccisano/Getty Images Mr. Allman.

Mr. Gil also tried out a new tune, a song with a classic country structure called “I Don’t Want to Ride the Rails No More,” and elicited good-natured laughter when he forgot the third verse. “I told you I shouldn’t do a new song,” he said, still playing the guitar. “I forgot the damn payoff for the whole song. But since this is free I’ll sing the third verse again.” And he did.

Mr. Aldean stuck to his big hits, like “Big Green Tractor” and “My Kinda Party.” He joked several times about having the misfortune to follow Mr. Allman and Mr. Haynes in the rotation, who thrilled the crowd with acoustic versions of Allman Brothers songs like “Melissa” and “Midnight Rider.”

The evening ended with Mr. Allman and Mr. Haynes singing a stark and wrenching version of “Long Black Veil,” the 1959 ballad covered famously by Johnny Cash about a man who allows himself to be executed rather than reveal his lover’s name. (The benefit happened to fall on Mr. Cash’s birthda! y.)

Gun-Control Advocate’s Win in Illinois Is Also a Win for Bloomberg

Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press Robin Kelly won a special Congressional election on Tuesday, helped by the financial backing of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

After a career that has spanned high finance, philanthropy and public office, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg may have found his next act: defeating candidates who oppose gun control.

The victory on Tuesday night of a Bloomberg-backed candidate for Congress in Illinois suggests that his fledgling attempt to become a one-man political counterweight to th powerful National Rifle Association is gaining traction.

Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire independent, had injected $2.2 million of his own money into the special Democratic primary for the House seat vacated by Jesse Jackson Jr., all but turning the campaign into a referendum on gun regulation in the wake of the massacre last December at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

But as much as anything else, it was a test of Mr. Bloomberg’s potency in races well outside of New York - a test watched closely by lawmakers in Washington who are still on the fence about President Obama’s gun-control plans and who could become the next target of the mayor’s campaign spending.

With Mr. Bloomberg and his cash at her back, Robin Kelly, once well behind in the polls, easily defeated her Democratic opponents for the Chicago-area seat. Much of that money was devoted to attacking Ms. Kelly’s leading opponent, Debbie Halvorson for opposing various gun-control measures. â€! œDebbie Halvorson’s record,” blared a commercial paid for by Mr. Bloomberg. “More guns in the hands of criminals.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s super PAC, Independence USA, has become involved in eight state and Congressional races since its creation last year: five of the candidates he has backed, all of them supporters of gun regulation, have prevailed; three have lost.

Howard Wolfson, a deputy in the Bloomberg administration who briefly led the mayor’s new super PAC, called the Illinois race a bellwether in the national gun debate.

“Anybody watching this race saw a decisive victory for the candidate who had a long record of support for common sense gun law and a repudiation of the candidate who had run with N.R.A. support,” he said. “That will resonate with members of Congress who are considering this issue as we speak.”

“For a long time the N.R.A. was the only player on the field,” Mr. Wolfson added. “And members had to take that into account. Now the mayor is helpin to even that out.”

Ms. Halvorson, a former Congresswoman, complained bitterly about Mr. Bloomberg’s intervention in the race, accusing him of trying to “buy a Congressional seat.”

“This is what’s wrong with super PACS,” she told a local television station in the days before the election. “Somebody can come in, spend all the money they want. In this case, it’s one person, one billionaire from New York.”

Despite charges of meddling and whispers about carpetbagging, Mr. Bloomberg’s intervention helped achieve its aim. Mr. Bloomberg learned of Ms. Kelly’s victory on Tuesday night via a text message from Mr. Wolfson. “Good job,” he replied.

Given the district’s heavy Democratic makeup, Ms. Kelly is widely expected to win the general election in April.

In Chicago, the gun debate loomed large as both a national and local issue: a surging murder rate has riveted the city and amplified Mr. Bloomberg’s message.

Mr. Bloomberg is just warming u! p, electo! rally. He and his aides are already scouting out future races, making little secret of their plans to open his wallet in support of Democrats or Republicans who share his views on guns.

On Wednesday, he will take his message to Washington. He has meetings scheduled with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and leaders of the Senate, including John McCain and Harry Reid. The topic: guns.

Brian Williams Comes Clean on ‘Pig Gate’

You can say this about the NBC “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams: it takes more than a phony animal-rescue video to rattle his cage.

On Tuesday, The New York Times published a report about a popular viral video that appeared to show a pig saving a baby goat that had become stuck in the pond of a petting zoo, but which was in fact an elaborately staged production created on “Nathan For You,” a new Comedy Central series.

When this viral video was first whizzing around the Internet in September, passed along by viewers who believed it depicted authentic events, it was also broadcast on several network and cable television news programs, inclding NBC’s “Nightly News.” (Before showing the clip, Mr. Williams had at least cautioned his audience, saying, “We have no way of knowing if it’s real.”)

With the video now shown to be staged, Mr. Williams said Tuesday on the “Nightly News”: “While we said at the time we have no way of knowing if it was real, despite checking, we now know it wasn’t. We can all thank Comedy Central for the hard work of a crew of 20 people, including scuba divers, animal trainers and humane officers. So well done, there.”

In his calmly cheeky manner, Mr. Williams dubbed the incident “Pig Gate,” a term we expect to see trending any minute now on search engines and social networks.

Sweeping Before the Storm

Dear Diary:

Another storm was approaching when he beckoned for me. Toting a wimpy broom, he stood on the top step of his brownstone - the 10 other steps covered by light coats of snow. His weight shifted onto a cane. He reminded me of the man in East Harlem I’d seen earlier that day. That man sat in his electric wheelchair, one of its motorized wheels caked in mud and spinning like mad, unable to gain traction.

I was up there for a meeting when I saw the man in his wheelchair in the middle of a path that cut through a housing development near 106th Street. Snow had mostly melted, leaving mud along paths and untended gardens - public space turned to wastelands. When he veered off the path, the right wheel sank into the mud. He tried backing out without effect. He tried again and pulled himself onto the path. But the wheel spun and spun and spun around.

I walked past him, noting he’d be getting nowhere soon, the meeting and approaching storm still on my mind.

Now, as I stood belw the man atop his stoop, I wondered if, like the man in his wheelchair, he’d ever get loose, ever get going down the stairs - if he’d move forward. In passing, I looked up and he called to me.

“Sweep my stairs,” he said blankly. I figured I’d help with that.

At the bottom I looked up, only a few feet from where I’d stood minutes before. The steps were cleared of snow now. The street was still quiet except for a passing car. He said thank you and I felt as though I needed to help him, perhaps because I didn’t want the second one to get stuck in the coming storm.

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Benjamin Moser to Write Sontag Biography

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Susan Sontag in 2000.

The writer Benjamin Moser signed an agreement this week to write the authorized biography of Susan Sontag, the legendary novelist, essayist and critic who died in 2004 at 71.

Ms. Sontag’s son, the writer David Rieff, and the literary agent Andrew Wylie approached Mr. Moser about the project. Mr. Moser’s biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, “Why This World,” was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award in 2009.

Mr. Moser, who grew up in Texas and now lives in the Netherlands, said in an inteview via e-mail that he expected the book to take at least three to four years to complete.

“It’s only since I’ve started reading her from A to Z that I realize how much she wrote and did,” Mr. Moser said. “How everywhere she was. It’s hard to think of a writer’s life that ranged as widely.”