Joan Acocella, who died on Sunday at the age of seventy-eight, was an elegant tornado, both in print and in person. It was an intimidating honor to share the pages of The New Yorker with her acute, stylish, passionate, hilarious, altogether magnificent prose. My colleague Alexandra Schwartz has a lovely remembrance on our website. David Remnick adds: "I sometimes thought she wrote as some combination of Virginia Woolf and Heywood Broun (a wry sportswriter of yore); it was as if she were watching her two-thousandth performance of Jewels, with all of ballet history in her head, and yet joyfully puffing a stogie in the corner of her mouth and taking discerning notes in her mind. She could be critical, disapproving, she was no patsy for the dull or the witless or the aggressively earnest, but, as a critic, as a noticer, she was a lover, above all…"