Departures: Dilbert cartoonist dead at 68

Scott Adams

A satirist and cartoonist who chronicled life within the four cubicle walls of corporate culture, Adams died Jan. 13. He was 68. Adams began drawing cartoons while an engineer at Pacific Bell in the 1980s. By 1989, he turned his doodlings into the syndicated comic strip Dilbert. Adams lampooned cubicle culture and the interactions between managers and engineers. In 1996 he was able to quit his job at Pacific Bell and focus on his cartoons full time. Eventually, Adams’ Dilbert would run in 2,000 newspapers and get adapted into books and even a short-lived television series. Later, Adams became a popular conservative commentator on social media, racking up more than 1 million followers on the social platform X.

Michael Reagan

A conservative talk radio host and eldest son of the 40th president, Reagan died Jan. 4. He was 80. Born John Charles Flaugher, he was quickly adopted by Ronald Reagan and his first wife, actress Jane Wyman. While his father’s political career flourished, Reagan occupied himself with a variety of jobs from business to acting. By the 1990s, Reagan had transitioned to con­servative talk radio, establishing himself as a powerhouse in Southern California. By 2000, more than 200 radio stations carried Reagan’s show in syndication, reaching about 5 million listeners daily at its high point. After retiring from radio, Reagan led the Reagan Legacy Foundation, which is dedicated to his father, and was a Newsmax commentator.

Richard Smallwood

An influential gospel singer who helped mainstream the sounds of the black church, Smallwood died Dec. 30. He was 77. Smallwood built his musical chops as a student at Howard University singing in the school’s gospel choir before forming the Richard Smallwood Singers in 1977. The group released multiple albums beginning in 1982, earning a handful of Grammy nominations and winning a pair of Dove Awards. Before the group broke up, they toured the Soviet Union in 1989, breaching the Iron Curtain with the gospel. Smallwood wrote “Total Praise,” a modern choral standard, for his subsequent group, Vision, in 1996. Smallwood was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2006.

Brigitte Bardot

An actress and model who leveraged her physical beauty to become an international movie star, Bardot died Dec. 28. She was 91. Raised in a glamorous neighborhood in Paris, Bardot originally trained as a ballet dancer before becoming a teenage model and an actress. By the mid-1950s, Bardot would find international success when her French cinema films became popular around the world as her on-screen sensuality challenged midcentury norms. In 1956, she starred in And God Created Woman, a film that was then the highest-­grossing foreign film of all time in the United States. Typecast, she tired of film and retired to a second career in animal rights advocacy in 1973.

Norman Podhoretz

A thought leader and magazine editor who helped define the politics of a generation of neoconservatives, Podhoretz died Dec. 16. He was 95. Born to a liberal Jewish family in New York City, Podhoretz would become the editor of Commentary magazine from 1960 until 1995. Like many intellectual Jewish New Yorkers, Podhoretz’s— and his magazine’s— politics would drift rightward in the 1960s and ’70s as a reaction against the radical New Left and the disorder common in American cities. By the 1990s, he had made interventionist foreign policy synonymous with neoconservatism, arguing for regime change in Iraq before the 2003 U.S. invasion. In 2004, Podhoretz received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.