Weekly News: Living past 100

It’s not unusual to hear that our life spans are increasing, what may be a surprise is that those who have passed 100-years are also living longer. Also in the news are movies, mourning, and honest talk about death. 

New on the blog this week:

• Justin Nobel: When Hollywood Actors Crawl Out Of Tombs–The Revenant, Leonardo DiCaprio and the Six Strangest Buried Alive Movies of All Time

Weekly News: Living past 100

Can good cheer and honest talk change our gloomy perspective on death?

1/26/2016–economist.com: DEATH is a hard thing to sell. People shrink away from the declarations of life-insurance companies and funeral-planning services (“you’re guaranteed to be accepted for a funeral plan if you’re 50 or over”), dismissing them as unpleasant and, unsurprisingly, morbid. Attempts to bring death into the public domain have been largely unsuccessful; last year, IDEO, a leading global design firm, sought to “redesign death” in the form of a slick app to help put one’s affairs in order. It was abandoned, with few prospects for uptake. Another “Death-Positive Movement”… Read the full story

The Disappearance of a Distinctively Black Way to Mourn

1/26/2016–theatlantic.com: As a child, Richard Ables played hide-and-seek with his brother among the caskets. He has spent his entire life in the family business, the Hall Brothers Funeral Home, founded in Washington, D.C., by his uncles in 1938. Along with the funeral parlor down the street, they once buried nearly everyone in LeDroit Park, the historically African American neighborhood in the heart of the nation’s capital… Read the full story

How you might die: colorful interactive graphic shows odds based on sex, race and age

1/25/2016–oregonlive.com: Just fill in your sex, race and age into a graphic designed by a statistician to get a hint about how you could die. Statistician Nathan Yau publishes data visualizations and more on the website Flowing Data, and one of his projects can simulate how likely a person is to die of various causes. The interactive graphic relies on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Underlying Cause of Death database, which provides information for the number of people who died in the U.S. from 1999 to 2014, according to Yau. Causes of death are classified under 20 categories of external causes and diseases… Read the full story

The centenarian tide is on the rise

1/25/2016–cnn.com: Death rates have been dropping for Americans of almost every age for decades now. A study of centenarians, Americans 100 years and older, suggests that they are joining the ranks, as their death rates started to decline in 2008. Using data from the United States Census Bureau and death certificates filed in the United States, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined the death rate and causes of death in this oldest-of-the-old population between 2000 and 2014… Read the full story

African Burial Ground Discovered in East Harlem

1/23/2016–thesource.com:  For almost ten years, the word up and down 125th Street was that there was an African cemetary on the East end of the one mile and a quarter long strip just one block north at the 126th Street Transit Depot. It’s been on public record for decades that the bus depot was built on a Reformed Dutch churchyard where Blacks in New York were buried from the 1600s to the 1800s. No one was ever able to prove it because no remains were ever discovered until now… Read the full story

Molly Shannon Will Make You Cry More than You Thought Possible in Sundance’s Other People

1/22/2016–vanityfair.com:  It may only be three weeks into the new year, but Saturday Night Live alum Molly Shannon has already established a toehold in the nascent 2017 supporting-actress race, with her humorous and heartrending portrait of a dying mother in Other People, the dark comedy from S.N.L. writer and first-time director Chris Kelly that opened the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday evening… Read the full story

This is how we will say goodbye to the rock-and-roll generation

1/22/2016–washingtonpost.com: It was one of those waves. David Bowie died on a Sunday. Seven days later, it was Dale “Buffin” Griffin from Mott the Hoople and proto-rapper Clarence “Blowfly” Reid. Then, Glenn Frey of the Eagles the day after that. And here’s the thing about waves: Some are bigger than others, but they never stop coming. So now, with an entire generation of rock boomers approaching the twilight, our society braces for a new era of mourning, a situation that’s as dizzying as it is inevitable. Our heroes are about to vanish in great numbers, and our grief is about to become more frequent, more communal, more intense… Read the full story

Even Centenarians Are Living Longer

1/21/2016–scientificamerican.com: The oldest of the old are living even longer, a new report shows. In recent years, the death rate among American centenarians — people who have lived to age 100 or older — has decreased, dropping 14 percent for women and 20 percent for men from 2008 to 2014, according to the report, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In other words, “the risk of dying for centenarians decreased” over this period, study author Dr. Jiaquan Xu, of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, told Live Science… Read the full story

Related: More Americans are living past their 100th birthdays

What will be your cause of death? Interactive test could hold the answer

1/21/2016–medicalnewstoday.com: Nathan Yau, a statistician from the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), has developed an interactive chart that can calculate how a person is likely to die at a specific age based on their current age, gender, and ethnicity. Yau created the chart using information from the Underlying Cause of Death database from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which includes mortality and population data for all counties in the US… Read the full story

The Forgotten, Macabre World of Mourning Jewelry

1/21/2016–huffingtonpost.com: In our selfie-filled world where every phone is a camera and every phone owner an amateur photographer, it’s hard to imagine our daily lives devoid of taking pictures. How can this pug, latte, or karaoke night go undocumented? Before its invention in the early 19th century, the absence of photography affected the way people experienced different stages of life. Including the grand finale — death… Read the full story