Beginning with the end

Tyler Cowen interviews Margalit Fox, the lead obituary writer for the NYTimes.

The criterion we look for, if we had to pick a single question that can be asked of every applicant at our gates, is: Did he or she change the culture?
 

Since death is a lagging indicator of cultural influence, it's reassuring but also depressing that we're now starting to see a shift away from obits for mostly white men.

FOX: No. But remember, think about what an obit is. It is not only the most narrative genre in the paper; it is the most retrospective. We are writing about the movers and shakers who made our world. I think of obit writing as the act of looking through a sliding window onto the past, a kind of window that slides back along the rails of time.
 

When I first started the job in 2004, we were writing overwhelmingly about the people on either side of World War II. We edged up into the Cold War. We’re now writing about Vietnam and the civil rights era.
 

And no matter how we feel about it in light of modern sensibilities, the stark reality of our world is, pretty much the only people who were allowed to be actors on the world stage in the 1940s, ’50s, were overwhelmingly white men.
 

I’m happy to say that in the 12 years I’ve been doing this job, as that window has slid up into the civil rights era and even the women’s movement, that page of ours has started to diversify.
 

One would imagine it's more efficient to pre-write obits for famous people, especially those who are veering closer to death, and indeed that's the case (with the exception of maybe Keith Richards, it's unlikely to be wasted work):

It is indeed the case that obits for many of these major historical figures — presidents, Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, old-time silver screen stars — those are indeed written in advance.

...

Things happen. Rockers OD. Planes go down. Things happen. But in general, we try to have a certain level of preparedness with the major figures. We do indeed have the advance obits — all but the top, as it were — written, edited, on file. We have about 1,700.
 

We had similar pre-written obits at Amazon back when there was a larger human editorial team there. Editors would assign obits for famous authors, musicians, and filmmakers/actors who were still alive but on the far side of the age curve. This batch of obits was referred to, with all due affection, as the ghoul pool.

It strikes me as a useful exercise, if you can get over the usual morbid associations around death in the West, to write an obituary for yourself and update it once a year, almost like maintaining a resume or LinkedIn profile.

The lady had dropped her napkin

The lady had dropped her napkin.
 

More accurately, she had hurled it to the floor in a fit of disillusionment, her small protest against the slow creep of mediocrity and missed cues during a four-hour dinner at Per Se that would cost the four of us close to $3,000. Some time later, a passing server picked up the napkin without pausing to see whose lap it was missing from, neatly embodying the oblivious sleepwalking that had pushed my guest to this point.
 

Such is Per Se’s mystique that I briefly wondered if the failure to bring her a new napkin could have been intentional. The restaurant’s identity, to the extent that it has one distinct from that of its owner and chef, Thomas Keller, is based on fastidiously minding the tiniest details. This is the place, after all, that brought in a ballet dancer to help servers slip around the tables with poise. So I had to consider the chance that the server was just making a thoughtful accommodation to a diner with a napkin allergy.
 

But in three meals this fall and winter, enough other things have gone awry in the kitchen and dining room to make that theory seem unlikely. Enough, also, to make the perception of Per Se as one of the country’s great restaurants, which I shared after visits in the past, appear out of date. Enough to suggest that the four-star rating it received from Sam Sifton in 2011, its most recent review in The New York Times, needs a hard look.
 

Pete Wells of the NYTimes drops Per Se from 4 stars to 2.

I have no idea if Wells is right or not, but I can't think of too many other food writers who can make a restaurant review as pleasurable to read. Writing about food is like writing about music; language can feel like an inadequate medium for describing something which we experience through our senses, bypassing the symbolic representations of words. Wells avoids those traps by, in large part, not trying to describe tastes.

The last word

Interview with the great NYTimes obituary writer Margalit Fox:

Is it hard for you to navigate sources that are so regularly in a fragile state?

It behooves you, in purely human terms, to treat them as kindly as possible. That said, you don’t want to lull them into the sense that you’re a friend, an advocate, or some sort of a grief counselor. You do have people break down crying on the phone and you just wait patiently for them to regain composure.

In what ways do families try to control the narrative?

Families will say, Oh, be sure to put in that he died surrounded by his loved ones, or, Make sure you add that she touched the lives of everyone she knew. Those are things I never want to put in because they’re these Victorian clichés, but also because the obituary as a form has moved beyond protecting the family’s narrative.

How else has the form changed?

Well, for one thing, they’re a lot more fun to read. They used to be very formulaic.

Since they were considered boring, editors used to assign journalists obits as punishment. You knew someone was in trouble if they were chasing down obituaries.

That started to change with the great Alden Whitman, Mr. Bad News. He was famous for his advances. He’d do all this research and sit down with his subjects and they’d give him these very revealing interviews because they knew nothing would come out till they were gone. Douglas Martin, a colleague of mine who has been on obits longer than I have, started writing them in this charming, lively way, which has influenced my own style.

Our last few obits editors at the Times encouraged, where appropriate, a lighter, more features-style treatment. If you get one of these wonderful characters who took a different route to work one day in 1947 and invented something that changed the world, or one of these marvelous English eccentrics, there’s so much space to play. In the course of an obit, you’re charged with taking your subject from the cradle to the grave, which gives you a natural narrative arc.

Also, this:

I have maybe one suicide a year and they all seem to be poets. If I were an insurance company, I’d never write a policy for poets.

I have many favorite Fox obituaries. Here's just the opening paragraph of one example of her mastery of the form:

Helen Gurley Brown, Who Gave ‘Single Girl’ a Life in Full, Dies at 90

Helen Gurley Brown, who as the author of “Sex and the Single Girl” shocked early-1960s America with the news that unmarried women not only had sex but thoroughly enjoyed it — and who as the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine spent the next three decades telling those women precisely how to enjoy it even more — died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.

My first few years at Amazon, before the human editorial department was cut back, the books, music, and video editorial teams had what was called the Ghoul Pool, a list of famous authors, musicians, and movie professionals who were most likely to die; the editors split up the duties of pre-writing obits and curating lists of the most famous work for everyone on the list. 

We're probably just a decade or two away from a surge in the number of public social media accounts that will suddenly just end when their owners pass away. What procedures or etiquette will arise for handling those accounts? Will they be turned off after some period of inactivity, or will they just live on in perpetuity until the services themselves expire, voices gone silent?

We remember many people in history through their collected letters and things like that, but with each generation we will have greater artifacts of ever greater resolution on the deceased. Thousands of tweets and status updates; pictures of all the bowls of ramen they ate across decades of life, helpfully and artificially aged with digital filters; videos of random moments of life that fell in between other moments of life. The sound of their voice. The number of steps they walked each day of their lives. Checkins at all the bars they ended many a night, looking for love, usually finding the bottom of an empty glass instead.

I'd like to think that even if I were no longer alive to view the ads these technology services would try to show me that they'd keep my content up, as a digital archive of my life, warts and all, for my relatives to peruse. Maybe people will have to specify so in their wills, and maybe a large business will be built on preserving these digital footprints, an Internet archive of the deceased, like some digital cemetery.

When I die, I hope to leave behind a witty Gmail “permanently on vacation” message that leaves people with one last chuckle.