I just learned that Jean-Michelle Baudrillard has passed away on March 6 in Paris at the age of 77. Baudrillard was a brilliant cultural theorist and critic. He understood the power of the media, image and culture, i.e. post-modernism, is ways that few others could. His notions of simulation and the simulacra were groundbreaking and have given culture and cultural theory so much. Many of my media and cultural studies papers and theses own much to his work. Hell, even a law school paper or two touched on his work.