The History of Condolence Letters, and Why President Obama Allowed Suicide
In 2009, two weeks into his second tour in Iraq, Army Specialist Chancellor Keesling committed suicide. His family decorated a wall in his Indiana home ...
Category: Death in Popular Culture
Naked New Yorkers Jump to their Deaths, and other Lover’s Leaps
On Tuesday morning, two naked lovers clasped hands and jumped from the southbound side of the Tappan Zee Bridge, which spans the Hudson River 25 ...
Funeral menus old and new: Cup of coffee and sins of the dead
Starbucks has a new market, death. A store recently opened in a funeral home outside Dallas, Texas. Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, food is banned in funeral ...
Animal Funerals, from Dorothy the Chimp to Yellow-billed Magpies
Dorothy’s mother was killed by hunters. They then sold her to an amusement park in Cameroon where she was chained to the ground and taught ...
America’s richest dog dies while China’s has just been born
In 2007, real estate tycoon Leona Helmsley died of heart failure, leaving explicit instructions on what to do with her $4 billion fortune: the bulk ...
Narco lives means narco-wives and narco-tombs
Ignacio “El Nacho” Coronel and Arturo Beltrán Leyva, known as Mexico’s “Boss of Bosses”, were rival drug dealers and mortal enemies, but in death they ...
Why Glee killed Jean, and other famous TV kill offs
Last week’s episode of Glee featured a shocking development: the death of Jean Sylvester, a lovable woman with Down’s Syndrome.
Revenge killings, from Pakistan to Palestine to Papua New Guinea
He killed nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11 2001, earlier this month we killed him, ten days after that his followers attacked recruits at a ...
Will Osama bin Laden get 72 Virgins? A talk with an Islam death expert
Osama bin Laden’s body was placed on a flat board and slid into the sea, was that the proper thing to do? Will he attain ...
Are New York tourists sipping coffee beside tortured corpses of Chinese prisoners?
In the middle of downtown New York City, just blocks from Wall Street and right beside a row of sunny cafes where tourists sit along ...
China vs Egypt for “World’s Most Beautiful Mummy” distinction
Xiaohe is a beauty; she has long eyelashes, a button nose, auburn hair that falls across her shoulders, and has been dead for 3,800 years.
Remembering a mysterious Japanese death ritual: “marriage of the dead”
A year ago I took a train from Tokyo to Sendai, a city in the center of the region ravaged by last month’s tsunami, to ...
A flash flood reveals the secret world of Amish funerals
The Amish keep their death rituals private, but last month reporters were able to peek into this world after a terrible horse-drawn buggy accident in ...
Burning bodies outside becomes popular in Colorado, has roots in Bali
Belinda Ellis got her wish, upon death her body was covered in red cloth and laid atop a rectangular steel grate inside a brick hearth. ...
Mexican death art, both joyous and horrific, comes to New York City
There is a large face without skin, just bare muscles and eyes wide open and staring. In a cavern-like lair are a group of naked ...
