Jesse Kornbluthlendapg, whose sly chronicles of cultural excess, celebrity and author profiles, personal essays and investigative work enlivened the pages of a newsstand’s worth of magazines during the medium’s last golden age, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 79.

His brother, Richard Kornbluth, said the cause of his death, in an assisted living facility, was Lewy body dementia.

Mr. Kornbluth “rocketed out of Harvard,” as his fellow journalist Marie Brenner put it in an interview, as a published author in 1968. During his senior year, he had compiled “Notes From the New Underground,” an anthology of articles from the era’s counterculture newspapers. The book included samplings from the short-lived Boston broadsheet The Avatar, where he had worked for a time and for which he had spent a night in jail after being arrested for selling copies on the street. After graduation, he lived for a few months at a commune called the Farm in Montague, Mass., before realizing that commune life was not for him.

ImageMr. Kornbluth’s first book was published in 1968 and compiled during his senior year at Harvard.Credit...Ace Publishing

“He was not a manual labor type of person,66jogo” said Tom Fels, one of the commune’s members, recalling Mr. Kornbluth’s unhappy attempts to chop wood for the Farm’s stove.

“Jesse’s ultimate view of things was that we were all losers,” said Mr. Fels, whose 2008 memoir, “Farm Friends: From the Late Sixties to the West Seventies and Beyond,” included a chapter on Mr. Kornbluth, “and he wanted to go to New York and win.”

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The death in New York appears to be the second linked to E.E.E. this year in the United States. The first involved a 41-year-old New Hampshire man who died in August. Human cases of the disease have also been reported this year in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

On Friday, trouble came for the commissioner himself: Federal agents arrived at the residences of Mr. Donlon, 71lendapg, a former F.B.I. counterterrorism official hired after his predecessor departed amid an investigation. They seized documents that he said had come into his possession about 20 years ago.