Paul Conrad was powerful, inspiring -- and a friend
By Tim RuttenHe never lost his sense of outrage.
My friend Paul Conrad, who died Saturday at 86, was the premier editorial cartoonist of his generation and, for many years, this newspaper's most visible public face. Outrage informed his journalism and animated his art. He woke up each morning angry about some new injustice and allowed sleep to overtake him each night only so that he could get up mad the next day and do it all again.
He was always and everywhere on the side of decency and ordinary men and women. His targets were the self-satisfied powerful, those indifferent to or antagonistic to our common good, and they included presidents -- as in these cartoons -- as well as governors, mayors, popes and corporate executives. Among his proudest accomplishments was making Richard Nixon's enemies list.
Conrad had the strength to speak out so forcefully -- through his incomparable drawings -- because he was, in Yeats' phrase, a "rooted man." His values were rooted in the New Deal's politics of remedy, in the social gospel of his Catholic faith and in the experience of the family he treasured beyond all else. The astonishing thing about his three Pulitzer Prizes was that he won them in three decades that were among the most tumultuous in modern American history. His willingness to engage our common condition, intensely and personally, was a hallmark of his work.
For those of us who came of age on The Times in the 1970s, he was an inspiration. Those of us who worked with him got up each morning hoping we'd live up to his example and knowing we'd fall short.
Fragile health and a wandering soul drew Robert Louis Stevenson to Samoa. This view, toward Apia, is from near his grave site. He and his extended family began to build a home, called Vailima, in these hills in 1890. 
Olivier Assayas’ highly-anticipated Carlos has been added to the lineup for the Cannes Film Festival in an Out-of-Competition screening slot in its long 5hr 30min version and also it is to be shown as a three-part TV drama on television Canal+.
A view from the restaurant Herman of the Moorish-inspired Nimb Hotel, with its more than 3,000 light bulbs, as the summer sky turns a brilliant blue. During summer, the sun is out for nearly 18 hours a day.
The list of writers able to express themselves in a language not their mother tongue is short. One thinks of Vladimir Nabokov, mastering English after publishing a number of well-regarded novels in Russian, and Joseph Conrad, of course. But what about Billy Wilder, who came to the United States in the 1930s, knowing hardly a word of English, and became one of America's great stylists of vernacular prose?
Paul Conrad was powerful, inspiring -- and a friend
