Jason Jones

Aretha Franklin died on August 16, 2018, at her home in Detroit, at 76, of pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer. For months, her family and her lawyers proceeded on the understanding that the Queen of Soul had left no will. That held until the following spring, when a relative searching the house for records found handwritten pages in two places. What followed is instructive not because Franklin was famous, but because the pages she left were the kind ordinary people leave. Reid Kress Weisbord,...

Sumner Redstone controlled two of the largest media companies in America and was worth billions of dollars, and yet for nearly two years the single most consequential document in his life was not a merger agreement but a one-page advance health care directive. In October 2015, at ninety-two, he revoked it, removing Manuela Herzer — his companion of a decade — as his health care agent and from his Beverly Hills mansion, in the space of a single afternoon. What followed tested how a court...

Andy Warhol died on February 22, 1987, at New York Hospital in Manhattan, following complications from gallbladder surgery that was not supposed to be life-threatening. His will was, in one sense, remarkably simple: apart from modest bequests to his two brothers and to his longtime friend and business manager, Frederick Hughes, he left nearly everything he owned — tens of thousands of paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs — to fund a new foundation for the advancement of the visual...