Read the Obits
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
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.
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.
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.
I am not sure if any currently used timestamping algorithm remains unbroken in 2100 or so.
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.
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.
However, I am sensitive about shoe-horning political talking points into a conversation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You: "you just defined conservative"
Me: "yes, that's conservative"
You: "how do you define conservative?"
My reaction: ??????
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
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.
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.
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.
None of those are guaranteed to be around in 50 years, but hopefully it helps a little.
> 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.
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.
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:
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.
A guy keeps going to the newsagent: he scans the headlines and then leaves.
The newsagent sees him do this a few days in a row and finds it to be strange behaviour, so one day he asks him:
“Comrade, what are you doing? Can I help you?”
“Thank you comrade, but I’m only interested in the obituaries.”
“But comrade, the obituaries are at the back!”
“Not the ones I am looking for, comrade!”
It has acquired a certain acuity in today’s America where the leaders are a series of unpopular men approaching their eighties.
There is a widespread “Is He Dead Yet?” meme that’s the contemporary direct equivalent of the Soviet joke.
And a time when the Chairmanship was not a revolving door, though it became more of one immediately afterward.
It's called the Swan Lake moment: Swan Lake on loop on the state media TV. That's what happens when everything is turmoil and nobody knows what will come next.
Maybe wait until you have at least 1 anecdote, anywhere in the history of the world, of major creativity from reading an obituary, before recommending it?
Obits are mini bios, but better than living bios, and more accessible than bestselling bios that make you think you have to be Rockefeller or Lincoln
And I object in principle to telling silly stories about desirable activities to try to justify them. This is how we get bad ideas like 'Mozart for babies' or 'we should make kids play chess because it correlates with being smarter'. Chess should be played for its intrinsic value, because if it can only be justified by its instrumental value in raising IQ or grades, the case for that was weak, much weaker than its proponents were willing to admit, and has since turned out to be false - but along the way, wasted a lot of time and money and made a lot of kids miserable playing a game they didn't like, and the proponents just made the world a worse place by wasting all those resources, filling the literature with useless analyses and research on chess correlates, and decreasing public trust in science.
from https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/items/a8357c0b-1e41-4eff-8ad1-fe3b...
reading the obits might fall under "cultural exposure".
As opposed to OP. Which adduces so little evidence for the claim about reading obituaries that a rando like me could actually write a more persuasive argument for the benefits of reading obituaries (because I at least wrote one thing tenuously inspired by reading an obituary the other month: https://gwern.net/traffic-lights ).
Even the most shameless periodical usually tries for at least 3 anecdotes, no matter how dubious and strained, before declaring it the hot new trend or It Is Known fact.
* One of Sawyer's research topics, as it happens.
Interesting, what's your recommended resource for learning more about this?
I don't know if the concept of "point of no return" is really such an obscure thing. It was part of my standard Illinois drivers education in the mid-00s. Every drive I did with the instructor he'd ask me to call it out when we approached a signal.
We, since I will gladly agree with the criticism and add myself to that side, are asking for one example of the supposedly creativity-inducing action to have even perhaps tangentially produced some sort of creative insight.
As an example I would submit that the simple advice of "take a walk/shower" has much better attestation for prompting creativity than "read the obituaries". It hardly seems like a stretch to ask the author to provide even a single example of this achieving something.
1. "Functional fixedness" was explored in a classic Candle Problem[1] found that high drive (ie rewards on a deadline) led to fewer subjects solving the problem.
2. Quality versus quantity. Sadly I can't find the TED talk (likely a decade ago?) that I saw about this but the basic idea: give subjects some kind of design problem (paper airplanes, egg drop, bridge building) and a metric measure them by. Then split them into two groups; one you measure on how many they build and the other on how well their final product is. I think there may have been some intermediate evaluation step as well, wish I could find the original research. Paradoxically, the quantity group wins on quality scores. Lesson being not to focus on perfecting your first solution.
Everything the author said about creativity checked out from my experience, except that I'm not working in such a generalist field that obituaries light up relevant 'unrelated associations' for me. However, it seems completely plausible from my perspective.
One approach that I often do, is to go to fivebooks.com when an any random subject or topic strikes me and then try to read the books their interviewees have recommended on that topic. I have found many interesting books in this way.
Like their lists about the Spanish Civil war lead me to 'Forging of a Rebel' by Arturo Barea.
Another source is to look into famous/interesting peoples reading lists. Many famous people including Gandhi, Tolstoy and others kept lists of all books that they read.
The whole piece would be begging the question were there a question. It's a statement of faith.
It's like the saying about the Velvet Underground: 'very few people came to their concerts but everyone who did, started a band'.
This is a good distinction.
I make it a point to hang with folks from vastly different backgrounds from me.
I can get some very good (and bad) ideas from them.
My father unexpectedly passed away a few years ago so this stuff is especially close to my heart.
I’ve learned a lot from lives of others so think this is wonderful advice for finding gems and remembering the normal goodness that exists in this world.
One striking thing about reading biographies is that real people are seldom "chosen ones". That's a literature and movie trope.
When the notable figures of our day pass away, they wind up on our screens, short clips documenting their achievements, talking heads discussing their influence. The quiet lives, though, pass on soundlessly in the background. And yet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. They’re the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning.Of course, there are long dead historic figures that we know about. But being dead is rarely the very first thing you learn about them.
Max Planck
Works best in big libraries.
Back in the day, we would read a biography or at least the damn Wikipedia article.