Reading obituaries can boost creativity by exposing you to distant ideas, fueling the associations that lead to unexpected breakthroughs.
2025-04-2716:40279123thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
Reading obituaries can boost creativity by exposing you to distant ideas, fueling the associations that lead to unexpected breakthroughs.
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There is a real danger that obituaries of people in the early 21st century will become inaccessible to future generations due to obituary rot:
https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/obituary-rot.html
> An unfortunate side effect of this move to digital-only obits will likely only become apparent a few decades from now, and it will likely frustrate the next few generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st century ancestors.
> Print newspapers were well suited for both the distribution and preservation of obituaries. Distribution isn’t a problem for digital obituaries, and in many ways the web is better than print in this respect. But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that make digital obits in their current state particularly susceptible to rot.
By detourdog 2025-04-2719:47 What we have already lost is the process of reading the newspapers that birthed the obituary.
Newspaper's used to have strong local coverage and a collection of vignettes into the outside world. The way the author uses the obituaries is the way I used to use the newspapers. Getting multiple newspapers (and magazines) from all over the world was a fixture for New York City creative offices pre-internet.
By jayknight 2025-04-2722:33 When in doing genealogy, I tend to save obituaries in archive.org and archive.ph and sometimes paste the content into the wikitree profile.
None of those are guaranteed to be around in 50 years, but hopefully it helps a little.
By smartmic 2025-04-2720:47 I think the idea from the original article is great! But although I'm a fan of printed newspapers and even subscribe to a renowned one, I unfortunately can't take part in it, simply because in my cultural circle (Germany) there are no detailed obituaries of ordinary people in the newspaper, only death notices. But that's always been the case here - at least that's how I know it.
By toomuchtodo 2025-04-2718:252 reply Obits should intentionally be committed to the Internet Archive for longevity and preservation, but I digress.
By DoingIsLearning 2025-04-2718:302 reply The Internet Archive is massive force for good and a huge not-for profit effort.
However in certain aspects of preservation of History (for example if deemed high value at a national level) we should also expect national archives to duplicate the effort to preserve this and other information with historic value.
I wonder how much would such national digital archives resist rewriting of history.
It is much harder to doctor hard copies of newspapers or books. You can burn them, but altering them is a complicated challenge, and someone may own another copy of the originals.
With digital records, the temptation is stronger because the editing is easier, and other "unofficial" copies that diverge from the officially archived version may be declared to be fake/misinformation etc.
By bryanrasmussen 2025-04-2810:38 Well, I have some experience with the Danish National Archives, but may be out of date.
First, the rule used to be that they could crawl all Danish sites or having interest to Danish government (so I guess also news reports of Denmark or discussion in other nations) ignoring robots.txt, which yes I found that to be a very wrong headed rule but that's what it was. So obviously they need to put in a good deal of effort to get content into the archives that would be getting blocked otherwise.
At the same time governmental records, including the records and cases in communities around the country get added to archives (but of course are only available to scholars at some future date)
So theoretically this is a lot of data. I suppose other national archives probably have similar rules and situations.
It would seem unlikely that one could rewrite history easily with so much data, without alerting people to what you were doing. But I guess that is actually the lesson of Fascism, they don't care if you see what they're doing.
They will do it and then hope you forget how it got to be like it is.
By akoboldfrying 2025-04-2722:441 reply Timestamping services that use digital signatures solve this, basically.
By inglor_cz 2025-04-289:18 Archives are meant to last for decades and centuries.
I am not sure if any currently used timestamping algorithm remains unbroken in 2100 or so.
The Internet Archive is constantly under attack for daring to preserve pressure waves. One of these days the destruction will be successful. Probably right now, under a Republican landslide government.
Are you saying Republicans are pro copyright and democrats aren't?
Democrats are the party of doing nothing and maintaining the status quo.
Democrats are conservative in the traditional sense, which is identical to Liberal with a capital L. Are you confused about the way labels shift and parties change their ideologies over time?
What does "conservative in the traditional sense" mean? I suspect you're throwing words around.
Me: some statement
You: "you just defined conservative"
Me: "yes, that's conservative"
You: "how do you define conservative?"
My reaction: ??????
By gosub100 2025-04-3012:32 I asked what that word salad meant. Not how you defined the single word.
If you need 3rd grade simplified reductions like you just posted, we cannot continue here. Divorce from reality and truth is why your party lost trust with intelligent voters and must appeal to emotion and crisis to rally support, ultimately losing elections. Congratulations
It wasn't a landslide by any definition except the Trump campaign's; Trump won by an extremely narrow margin. It's important to be accurate about this to try to preempt despair.
By genewitch 2025-04-287:36 Half the 2020 blue counties switched red. Say what you want about the popular vote, but a lot of people had to wonder which of their neighbors...
Trump won by an extremely narrow margin in the popular vote, but by a high margin in the electoral college, which was the real prize fought over by the two candidates. He took all seven swing states.
IDK if this counts as landslide in the American sense. I mostly heard that expression used for results of European elections.
Edit: instant downvote, didn't even take a minute from the original posting! Wow.
Sheesh, people, don't be so sensitive about political topics. The fact that Trump got 312 electoral votes to Harris' 226 is just that, a fact. It does not reflect any subjective attitudes or preferences of anyone taking part in this discussion, wisdom or idiocy of current White House policies etc.
A lot of Republicans are calling it a landslide, but I think they've forgotten what a landslide looks like; along with forgetting a lot of other things.
Out of 538 votes, in 2024, Trump had 312; in 2020, Biden had 306, just a few less, and Trump had 304 in 2016, only 8 less than his "landslide". In 2012, Obama had 332 and in 2008, he had 365. Clinton had 370 and 379. I wouldn't call any of those landslides though.
GHW Bush had 426 which is quite a lot, but Reagan before him had 489 and then 525. Those are landslides.
Nixon got 301 the first time, which is just a win; but he got 520 in his second term. That was a landslide.
I would draw a line in the sand at 90% of the electoral vote is a landslide, and anything less is puffery. Ranked by percentage of electors, Trump's "landslide" is only 44 out of 60. That's the saddest landslide ever. 58% of electors is a clear and undebatable win, but it's not a landslide and it's not a mandate, or even a large margin. It might be an indictment of the Democratic Party or some other lesser hyperbole though.
By peterbecich 2025-04-288:011 reply I agree with you the true landslides were Nixon, Reagan, FDR, etc.
The absence of electoral landslides in recent years implies both parties are better tuned and optimized now. Their data collection to enable a "winning campaign platform" is probably much better now, resulting in close elections.
By vintermann 2025-04-2813:58 My theory is that it's a result of institutionalized corruption: neither party wants to win by a landslide anymore. They want to win, in Dick Cheney's words (quoted in Obama's biography), "fifty percent plus one".
They want to share the spoils of victory with as few as possible. Winning with a big margin, to the party apparatus, is evidence that you wasted valuable political capital on pleasing voters that could instead have been spent on pleasing donors.
By nothrabannosir 2025-04-2721:242 reply > Sheesh, people, don't be so sensitive about political topics.
However, I am sensitive about shoe-horning political talking points into a conversation.
Did I do that? Not knowingly; my main intent was to reflect on what "landslide" may mean in various perspectives.
Personally, I am more to the right than to the left, but I don't enjoy the clusterfuck of the current administration at all, doubly so because our local security (a small NATO member which used to be subjugated to Moscow) has been thrown into total uncertainty.
By nothrabannosir 2025-04-283:38 You didn’t, the (grandparent)post you replied to did.
Landslide is about popular vote not electoral. Because a small shift in popular vote can result in a massive swing in electoral vote. Claiming somin has a landslide is silly
By lolinder 2025-04-284:08 This is partially true but not the whole picture. A small shift in popular vote across the seven swing states can result in a massive swing in electoral vote. Shifts in safe states don't register in the electoral college but do register in the national popular vote.
By pcthrowaway 2025-04-2722:371 reply Even the popular vote was the biggest landslide in ... the last 8 elections I think?
By sethherr 2025-04-284:16 Absolutely not. Trump got 49.9% to Harris’ 48.3, he didn’t even get the majority.
Biden was 51.3 to Trump’s 46.8 in 2020.
This was not a landslide. Trump did not get the majority of votes.
He has much less of a “mandate” than Biden did.
By rdtsc 2025-04-2721:42 > Trump won by an extremely narrow margin
It was 312 vs 226 votes, including seven swing states, and got the popular vote. I guess to make ourselves feel better we’ll just say an extremely thin margin. But as long as it’s with a nod and wink; kind of like saying that alligators also fly, just extremely, extremely low.
By D-Coder 2025-04-2721:35 [flagged]
By throw0101a 2025-04-2815:59 > There is a real danger that obituaries of people in the early 21st century will become inaccessible to future generations due to obituary rot:
When my father died we got a 'complementary' online posting from the funeral home for ~1 year (for funeral/service details), but I also made the effort to pay to put one in the newspaper for posterity.
When my mother-in-law died, I immediately registered a domain for her name and created a website and added the obituary, eulogy, and a photo gallery and shared that with friends and family for exactly this reason.
By pabs3 2025-04-281:39 Which domain? I'll send it to archive.org using ArchiveBot.
That's cool, but doesn't it have the same problem? When you die or decide to stop paying, the website dies too.
People are going to be surprised Pikachu when that goes down, either from poking the law bear or just because everything dies eventually.
By thesuitonym 2025-04-2816:24 In 1000 years, you're unlikely to find any given book, hard drive, or newspaper that is still legible, but accessing any of those is far more likely than finding an Internet Archive datacenter, spinning it back up, and accessing the contents.
By Jaygles 2025-04-2719:33 Companies that aggregate and sell data suck up all of the obituaries as they are public record and unburdened by regulations on sharing and selling it. Although it may not be in its original form (as far as I know), info from obituaries may actually be positioned to survive a very long time.
There's a danger, but also a natural way of things. Why should we default to records being accessible in perpetuity?
Mind I can get behind the genealogy argument, yet feel that our post-life records being accessible by default is not an assumption we can make unilaterally.
By globnomulous 2025-04-2719:531 reply > Why should we default to records being accessible in perpetuity?
The historical record is important and we don't know what will be useful to future generations.
Take Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms as an example. It briefly recounts the multiple legal proceedings that the Roman Catholic Church brought against a humble Italian Renaissance-era miller who spread strange, heretical ideas about the cosmos (involving the cheese that was apparently the moon's substance and the worms that ate it). Ginzburg draws on Church records, including the man's own written defense, and builds a fascinating picture of his mental world, intellect, and disposition.
If I remember correctly, these small, cloudy windows into the Early Modern past even let Ginzburg identify likely traces of pre-Christian, or folk, traditions largely hidden from the written record.
This is a funny example, I suppose, because in all likelihood the miller would have been tickled to know that his ideas survived and found an audience not just despite but because of Church persecution.
Still, his case nicely illustrates the importance and unpredictable value of the historical record.
By 20after4 2025-04-286:50 An early example of the Streisand effect? Should it be more accurately named the Ginzburg effect? :D
It's really hard to find stuff from the "old internet" on google. I know it's there. But instead it feeds me garbage marketing articles that just touch the surface and then try to sell me something.
By lubujackson 2025-04-2720:39 I suggest trying Yandex, no joke. It feels like 2005 Google - no industry forced filtering or rerouting, no BS recipe sites boosted by SEO and "time on page" manipulation...
By thesuitonym 2025-04-2816:33 wiby.me, marginalia.nu, and kagi.com seem to do a better job at this. Wiby is specific to old web, and even has a delightful "Surprise me" button that can take you to some fun little websites that provide an insight into someone's life.
By dogman1050 2025-04-2810:41 Neither of my parents obits are available online. They passed in 1998 and 2002. My wife's mother's obit is still out there from 2012.
The bigger danger is that all obituaries will be written by an AI.
By hackable_sand 2025-04-2719:471 reply That is okay. People deserve the right to die.
By 6502nerdface 2025-04-2720:432 reply But not the right to be forgotten.
By magicmicah85 2025-04-2812:13 EU begs to differ, but the right to be forgotten certainly ends when you die.
By hackable_sand 2025-04-2721:401 reply [flagged]
"There are people who have done great evil, who perhaps want to be forgotten if they were dead. But it would not be morally right to forget their deeds and the lessons we can draw from them. Because of that, the right to be forgotten upon death is a conditional one."
The above is the moral reasoning expressed in the comment you are responding to, and of course whether or not one agrees with this line of reasoning can vary from person to person and belief to belief.
By hackable_sand 2025-04-3014:10 Fair enough
By AStonesThrow 2025-04-284:391 reply > inaccessible to future generations
No, it's not going to go down this way.
Here's what currently happens: obit links get passed around among friends, family, loved ones. Anyone who catches wind of a death and is remotely interested in family history/geneaology is going to archive it and plug it in somewhere. Such as Find-a-Grave, ancestry.com, etc. Ancestry themselves should be actively indexing all these obits and such.
Digital obits will last so long that you will hate them forever, and curse the day they wrote yours.
Because here's what's going to happen next: every "data point" in those obits will be plugged into databases. Family Trees, Find-a-Grave Memorials, personal ancestral files. Those will be indexed, searchable, and every single factoid will be repeated and reduplicated and copy-pasted in perpetuity.
Unfortunately, anyone who reads obits and knows some family history also knows that obits are riddled with errors. Sometimes they're deliberate! Sometimes they misdirect or protect the innocent, minors, whatever. Sometimes they're spiteful and sometimes they're simply papering over scandal with something anodyne.
So you've got a 95% true obituary that's being traded and scraped and plugged into databases, and those 5% falsehoods are going to multiply like a pernicious cancer.
Once I delved into my family tree, I found that most of my effort and resources were in disproving connections, removing sources, and reconciling conflicts due to inept researchers who didn't check anything. I hacked off entire "trunks" due to false bloodlines (usually to Revolutionary heroes, nobility, notables, etc.)
Let's get real here: obituaries were published in newspapers! Newspapers are periodicals designed to last only as long as you read them, and then you wrap fish in them and toss them on the fireplace! Don't get so precious about these fleeting words. Because many people will care far too much, preserve them with undue care, and we'll be worse off than before.
By magicmicah85 2025-04-2812:11 You only live as long as the last person to remember you. Now the internet is going to make us all immortal as our descendants research the family tree.
By dredmorbius 2025-04-283:00 Obits are among my idea-stirring hacks. Some thoughts on why they work, and some similar ones.
Obits are written long in advance. I noticed following Jorge Bergoglio's death that NPR's obit was written (and voiced, in the newscast / headlines) by Silvia Poggioli, though she'd retired from the network in 2023 (here: <https://www.npr.org/2025/04/21/1013050313/pope-francis-dead>). This means that they're both well-researched and polished writing, unlike most breaking news coverage. They also compress a lifetime into a few paragraphs (~75 in the case of Poggioli's article), which tends to bring out highlights.
Another format that often brings out interesting ideas, outside my own area of expertise: interviews. Especially with those not from the worlds of politics or mainstream business. All the better, historical interviews, from earlier times. These often give either perspectives on a different world, or a perspective on circumstances which presage the world we find ourselves in now.
Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" and the Studs Terkel archive are two particularly excellent examples. As I'm expanding my language comprehension, interviews and histories in foreign languages are another excellent option.
A third option: academic author interviews. The New Books Network has poor production values (bonus: well-produced audio is almost certainly a skippable ad) and a large number of duds, but where it hits the topics are almost always well outside the mainstream but at the same time the product of expertise. There's a huge back-catalogue:
There's another outstanding use of obituaries - genealogy research.
My paternal grandfather had some issues with his racial lineage and left home at a very early age after his dad died to join the military to fight in Korea. For whatever reason he ended up adopting a name he was not born under - his father's - and kept it a secret his whole life and didn't tell a soul. it wasn't uncovered what he had done until decades later when his mother died and his birth certificate was found in her belongings.
When trying to figure out who his dad's family was, where no one in the family really had any idea and in the past they had a lot of incentive to hide their ancestry and keep their records inaccurate/incomplete (this was during one-drop law times, where people would hide marriages and assume fake identities all the time to avoid persecution). I was stuck for months until someone mentioned using newspapers.com archive to try to see if anything came up (not a plug, this service is genuinely amazing).
Jackpot! Public records often lie, but obituaries rarely do. I was able to piece together his paternal side's relatives via obituaries (who leave surviving relative names quite often) and found his precise lineage all the way back to the 1850's and before emancipation, something that is typically quite hard to do. Could not have possibly done it without obituaries.
By ac2u 2025-04-2819:59 People are always surprised at what can be unearthed if you cast a wide net and start pulling on threads, even if only to rule certain threads out early on. Nice work.
