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Dead from the NYPL - LIVE Shorts

948 views · Published 19 December 2008 · 8:41 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: The New York Public Library · 2008 · Entertainment

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http://www.nypl.org/live

LIVE from the NYPL presents "DEAD from the NYPL," The Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries: ANN WROE, MARILYN JOHNSON & DANIEL OKRENT, LIVE from the NYPL, October 27, 2008.

Ann Wroe, co-author of The Economist Book of Obituaries and its current editor, commissions some of the best obituaries in the world. She discusses the making of obituaries, their thrills and pitfalls, their rewards, and their insidious influence with Marilyn Johnson. Johnson has studied the art and peculiar habits of obituary writers around the world. She is author of The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. Daniel Okrent, who was the first Public Editor for the New York Times, and the creator of Rotisserie League Baseball, begins every day (as he has for the past 40 years) turning to the New York Times obituaries page to see who has died and how they have lived. In recent years, he pays ever more attention to how old they were. It is impossible, Wroe says, to write obituaries for a living, and not be drawn into musings on life and death. For her, each obituary is in fact "a progress report on a life that continues, somehow, elsewhere".


Filming: One Dream Sound
Editing: Sebastian Howard

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