• by Ray Schultz , January 8, 2024

Joan Acocella, the long-time cultural critic who wrote for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, has died at age 78.

The cause was cancer, according to The New York Times.

In one of her feats as a journalist, Acocella went with acclaimed dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov to his birthplace of Riga, Latvia, for his first performances there since defecting from the Soviet Union in 1974.

While performing Twyla Tharp’s “Pergolesi” at the Latvian National Opera, Baryshnikov “gave them double barrel turns, he gave them the triple pirouettes in attitude (and then he switched to the other leg and did two more),” Acocella wrote in The New Yorker in 1998, according to the Times. “He rose like a piston; he landed like a lark. He took off like Jerry Lee Lewis; he finished like Jane Austen. From ledge to ledge of the dance he leapt, sure-footed, unmindful, a man in love.”

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said: “There was no greater experience than going to a dance performance with her and watching the occasional urgent note being taken, and then her mouth agape with wonder, but also the occasional eye roll.”

Joan Barbara Ross was born in 1945, in San Francisco and grew up in Oakland. 

As a harbinger of things to come, the precocious young author wrote her Ph.D dissertation on how artists and intellectuals in Paris and London reacted to Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes from 1909 to 1914.

She is survived by her partner Noël Carroll; two grandchildren; a sister, Victoria Aguilar; and a brother, Mark Ross.