| “A new piece by Joan Acocella was reason enough to cancel plans,” The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz wrote this week, in a Postscript honoring her former co-worker. Acocella, the magazine’s longtime dance critic and a wide-ranging cultural essayist, died this past weekend, at age seventy-eight, and Schwartz was far from alone in viewing the publication of an Acocella article as a special event. A playful presence on and off the page, Acocella was as insightful and informed as she was witty, and her curiosities proved infectious. Dance may have been Acocella’s first love, but her subjects ran an eclectic gamut, from vampires to Dante to the psychology of hoarding. “Her combination of passion, wit, engagement, erudition, and surprise was a highwire act that was thrilling to behold,” The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, recalled. Among Acocella’s favorite pieces, according to her editors, was her 1998 Profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov. The article followed the Soviet émigré and “mass-media ballet star” on a trip to his native Latvia—and as he prepared to dance alone on the New York City stage, at age fifty, for the first time. “No matter what role he is playing,” Acocella observes, “he always honors it completely, working every minute to make it a serious human story.” The same could be said for Acocella and her writing. Below you’ll find a selection of articles by the warmly remembered, and greatly missed, Joan Acocella. | 
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