Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
13 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I would say, don’t feel you can or should specialize. The child has not been born who comes home from first grade clutching a theme that says, “When I grow up, I want to be an obituary writer.”
02 / belief
“What I’ve learned is, death sucks. But I think I pretty much knew that before, and I think you pretty much know that, too.”
03 / belief
“Recording technology has improved since then, and I think he was on such an exalted plane that he gets a bye.”
04 / belief
“I think just what a melancholic he was. Now, that’s far from unusual for creative people, but it was — his personal story was rather painful.”
05 / evaluation
“I mean, perhaps had he not done it, someone else would have. But the point is, he did, and he was transformative enough — albeit in a perhaps campy way when viewed through a postmodern lens.”
06 / evaluation
“He had the idea — and again, just in a stroke of inspiration — of making a creature that would connote the ongoing pleasure of endless summer. I think we say in the obit “the saturated pink promise of endless summer.”
07 / evaluation
“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.”
08 / evaluation
“In Riddle of the Labyrinth, unraveling this Aegean script that was unearthed on clay tablets in 1900, not solved for 50 years because they not only didn’t know what the tablets said when they were unearthed on Crete, they didn’t know what language they were in.”
09 / evaluation
“For the first time, a few decades later, cats actually passed dogs as the most popular American pet. So, again, here’s somebody who did something spontaneously because he was inspired and who put a wrinkle in the social fabric.”
10 / evaluation
“Of course, very often we do because we’re a small department, and things happen.”
11 / evaluation
“I have other headaches. But half of all the ones we have on file, half of all the ones we run — no, a very small percentage, I would say, of those we run in the print paper every year are advances.”
12 / evaluation
“To my surprise and delight, when I started pulling old clippings and researching the obit, we found that not only did he document the beat generation, but he enterprisingly started a business called Rent-a-Beatnik for these society matrons who wanted to be au courant, wanted to have a beatnik play the bongos or read poetry at their fancy parties in Scarsdale, but didn’t quite know how to go about it.”
13 / disagreement
“See, I don’t know that I agree with your initial premise because there is also a pretty rigid structure to an obit.”