Susan Sontag, 71

Susan Sontag has died. Among her talents, if the Times obit is to be believed, was the ability to have a bit of fun at the place where fun comes to die:

At Chicago, she wandered into a class taught by the sociologist Philip Rieff, a 28-year-old instructor who would write the celebrated study "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist" (Viking, 1959). He was, she would say, the first person with whom she could really talk; they were married 10 days later. Ms. Sontag was 17 and looked even younger, clad habitually in blue jeans, her black hair spilling down her back. Word swept around campus that Dr. Rieff had married a 14-year-old American Indian.