Margalit Fox: evaluation

Transcript context

…But how often is the family or the close friends surprised by what’s in the obituary? Divorces they didn’t know about; children they didn’t know about; they may have been an alcoholic when they were in their 20s; something they did in their career. Remember that we the reporter are starting almost always from an agnostic state. Of course, there are essentially two categories of obituaries that the Times does. One are the marquee names, the presidents, the kings, the queens, the captains of industry, old-time Hollywood film stars, and so on — people who are in the history books, people whom everyone has heard of. Their lives are well documented, and so there are rarely any surprises, either for the family or for the reporter working on the story. On the other hand, there is this whole other category of people whom I call history’s backstage players, these unsung men and women who are not household names but who, because they invented something, had an idea, wrote something, you know, way back perhaps in the 1940s — they put a wrinkle in the social fabric and changed the world. I’ve done, for instance, the inventor of the Frisbee, the inventor of Etch A Sketch, the inventor of the plastic lawn flamingo, of Stove Top Stuffing. Now, about those people, although clearly they did something that changed the culture — was transformative in some way — we reporters are almost always going in cold. We’ve very often never heard the name, much less anything about what this person did. And so, for that, of course, we’re obliged to rely to an extent, with appropriate double-checking and backstopping, on family knowledge because their knowledge is better and of far, far longer duration than ours. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned about an ordinary life writing one of these obituaries? Not a famous person but — .…

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