How The Times decides who gets an obituary.

“Eulogies aren’t résumés,” David Brooks wrote.34 “They describe the person’s care, wisdom, truthfulness and courage. They describe the million little moral judgments that emanate from that inner region.”

again revealing the extent to which social media platforms, and Twitter, in particular, are changing the hierarchical nature of who should find out about the death first.

Even as entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and billionaires invest their time, bodies and fortunes in the project of cheating death, they’re also increasingly finding solace in something else: an ancient Greek intellectual tradition that views the natural rhythms of the life cycle—which is to say, dying—as a central fact of being. Which, most would ar

We’d probably pay more attention if no one died all year, and then on December 31 the entire population of Chicago suddenly dropped dead. Or Houston. Or Las Vegas and Detroit put together. Instead, unless a celebrity or public figure dies, we tend to overlook the necro demographic as they slip away into history.

“[w]hat is happening on the profile pages of the deceased is nothing revolutionary but rather a new and in some ways logical platform for people to memorialize and grieve.”25