Interview with Margalit Fox, senior writer at the New York Times and author of 1,200 obituaries over 20 years. “This work does skew your worldview a bit. For obit writers, the whole world is necessarily divided into the dead and the pre-dead. That’s all there is … 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” (1,900 words)

.. The one thing that has changed, in terms of journalistic practice, is the cause of death. It’s much less euphemistically couched than in the past. When I was growing up, newspapers were very Victorian when it came to describing death. If you saw “short illness” it meant heart attack and “long illness” meant cancer. In small town papers where obits are written to protect the families, you still see that, but we’re much more straightforward.