15
DIED
Kathleen Blanco,
who was Louisiana’s
governor during
Hurricane Katrina, on
Aug. 18 at 76.
HELD
A funeral for
Iceland’s first
glacier lost to
climate change, by
scientists there on
Aug. 18. Before it
melted, the Okjokull
glacier stretched
6 sq. mi.
ARRESTED
James Patrick
Reardon, who
attended white-
nationalist protests
in Charlottesville,
Va., in 2017, for
allegedly threatening
a Youngstown, Ohio,
Jewish community
center, on Aug. 16.
He pleaded not guilty.
NAMED
Former student-loan
industry exec Robert
Cameron, as the
Consumer Finance
Protection Bureau’s
student-loan
watchdog, by the
bureau on Aug. 16.
STRIPPED
The British
citizenship of Jack
Letts, known as
“Jihadi Jack,” who
left his home in
the U.K. in 2014
allegedly to join the
Islamic State.
REMOVED
Hugh Hurwitz, as
acting head of
the U.S. Bureau
of Prisons, by AG
William Barr, on
Aug. 19, shortly after
the suicide of Jeffrey
Epstein while in the
bureau’s custody.
BARRED
A Palestinian gay-
and transgender-
rights group from
holding West Bank
events, by the
Palestinian Authority
on Aug. 17.
Fonda in The Wild Angels in 1966, a few years before
Easy Rider made him an icon of the decadepeTer fonda was The son of old hollywood royalTy, and
although he rejected the mantle of tinselly fame he stood to in-
herit from his father Henry Fonda, his own personal glamour
was always something to behold. Fonda, who died on Aug. 16 at
age 79, got his start in small television roles in the early 1960s.
But it wasn’t until the end of that decade that he found his true
path forward, in the iconoclastic 1969 road drama Easy Rider, di-
rected by and co-starring his friend and fellow free spirit Dennis
Hopper and written by Fonda, Hopper and Terry Southern. (The
script would earn the three an Academy Award nomination.)
Easy Rider, with its plot involving free love, a cross-country mo-
torcycle trip and lots of drugs, became a grand temple of counter-
culture cinema, and Fonda’s Wyatt—a lanky, untroubled adven-
turer open to the world—its patron saint. After that, Fonda never
became a star in the conventional leading-man sense, but he gave
marvelous performances throughout his career, especially in the
1990s: he won a Golden Globe for his role as a Vietnam vet turned
beekeeper in Ulee’s Gold (1997), and in The Limey (1999) he gave a
superb performance as aging record mogul Terry Valentine, a slick
charmer who earns this acute appraisal from one of his young girl-
friends: “You’re not specific enough to be a person. You’re more of
a vibe.” Fonda, though, was both a person and a vibe. His perfor-
mances were gorgeously idiosyncratic, and the mere act of watch-
ing him was its own kind of freedom. Decades after Easy Rider, he
could still make you feel just like Wyatt: beautiful and wild and
ready for anything. —sTephanie zacharekDIED
Peter Fonda
Counterculture starMilestones
APPOINTED
Winnie
Byanyima
A first in the fight
against AIDSwinnie Byanyima, The
former Ugandan revolu-
tionary and diplomat who
was appointed the execu-
tive director of UNAIDS on
Aug. 14, will take charge of
the embattled United Na-
tions HIV/AIDS program at
a fraught moment. While ad-
vances in vaccines and a pos-
sible cure are on the horizon,
recent data show an increase
in new HIV infections in sev-
eral countries, along with a
decline in donor support. In
addition, a damning report in
December detailed a culture
of bullying at the 25-year-old
organization, as well as alle-
gations of sexual harassment.
Byanyima, 60, will be the
first African woman to hold
the post, and deftly handled
a sexual-abuse scandal at
the antipoverty NGO Oxfam
International in her prior
position as executive di-
rector there. She should be
uniquely poised to tackle her
new role—and aware of how
hard the job will be. “The end
of AIDS as a public-health
threat by 2030 is a goal that is
within the world’s reach,” she
said in a statement. “But I do
not under estimate the scale
of the challenge ahead.”
—aryn Baker