Are They Dead Yet? Sam Roberts on the Art of the Obit

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It is August 4, but this show actually isn't gonna go out until August 11. Who knows what's gonna happen in the week, in the seven days between now and then? My guest today, though, might have some insight. He writes the obituaries for the New York Times, and he has a new book out, which is out on August 11, called Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit. Sam, Roberts is a legendary figure in New York, and I'm honored and thrilled that he's on the show today. Sam, any ideas who's gonna die in the next seven days?

00:01:09 Sam Roberts: Not really. We do have about 2,000 advance obituaries ready, in case some celebrity or someone of prominence dies. It used to be, of course, that you, wanted to have those ready in case someone died on deadline. Deadlines for print publications used to be once or twice a day. Now, of course, with social media and the Internet, there's a deadline every minute. It's immediate. So we've got 2,000 ready, and I have to tell you, there are never enough. People always surprise us and presumably surprise themselves too by dying unexpectedly.

00:01:51 Andrew Keen: So you're sometimes disappointed when you have a slow week when not enough people haven't died?

00:01:58 Sam Roberts: Well, sometimes you're disappointed in a funny kind of way, and this sounds terribly, cynical, I guess, when you write an advance obit, and, the person stays alive. I did one, on David Rockefeller a long time ago. He finally died, I think, when he was about 101. And if someone who worked for him, who was a mutual friend, called me up and said, you know, I just wanna warn you about something. And I said, what is that? You're gonna tell me mister Rockefeller is a good friend of the publisher or something? He said, no. No. No. Nothing like that. I just wanna let you know three other New York Times reporters have written advance obituaries of David Rockefeller, and they're all dead. So, you know, you do have some sort of expectation when you write in advance, obit, that eventually you're gonna run or at least you're gonna be alive to see it run.

00:03:00 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You probably have to be careful. You don't wanna you know, you wanna be in that bucket of people who die before their subjects. Recently, we did a show with the great film critic David Thomson, who's a neighbor of mine in San Francisco. I'm guessing I hope he won't die for many years, but when he does, he'll get a New York Times obit. And we talked about his new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light, wonderfully, irreverent and, controversial history of the movies. He calls it a revisionist history. He's also, of course, the author of one of the best books, best biographies of Orson Welles who made, Citizen Kane, of course, called Rosebud. It's a roundabout way, Sam, of asking whether the act of death itself is the defining quality of a life. Of course, in Citizen Kane, it's Citizen Kane's remark on death, Rosebud, that defines his life. So can one write an obituary before someone dies? Isn't it a bit redundant?

00:04:06 Sam Roberts: Well, if they have lived a fairly full life, you can do that. And usually we do advance obituaries of people who are relatively old. That, you know, definition changes nowadays, of course. But in the book, as I point out, what I look for, and not always find is that Rosebud moment, invoked, by Citizen Kane. The epiphany in someone's life that either was an event or was a, meeting with someone else or something that changed the arc and the trajectory of their lives, and made them ultimately worthy of a New York Times obituary. No one in making the film Citizen Kane and the film itself ever figured out what Rosebud was. We see it at the very beginning when he drops that snow globe, which we later learn is, emblematic of his innocent childhood in, Colorado, and before he was whisked off to be raised by a banker in New York and became a multimillionaire egomaniac. But the people making the film never know. We only see the sled being thrown into the furnace at the end of the film. One of my goals in writing obituaries for The Times is to find a Rosebud moment in someone's life. What was it that changed them, that changed their direction, who they met, a teacher, a friend, a neighbor, a colleague who made such an impression that that person was elevated into the stature of someone who, in our subjective way, merits a Times obituary.

00:06:02 Andrew Keen: There's a rumor, Sam, as I'm sure you know, that on the moment of death, our entire life flashes past us probably, as David Thomson might joke, like a sudden flicker of light. We get the very brief movie of our lives. Do you think that's true?

00:06:23 Sam Roberts: I don't know yet, but, I'm skeptical of those last moments. One of the things I point out in the book is there's a chapter on famous last words. I don't believe most people have delivered those words that became famous. The most likely last words are pretty innocuous, like help or get me a drink or something like that. And when you look at books of quotations of the last words, they're usually much more poetic and lyrical and involved and deep, than what we really expect someone to say on their deathbed. Similarly, in death, one of the questions I don't ask people when I'm doing an advance obituary and perhaps should is what do they think is next? I'm skeptical that every mobster when I used to work for the Daily News said that when he was shot, he saw his whole life pass before him. It seems almost too good to be true. But what is next might be an interesting question to ask people even though it is sort of ineffable. Nobody knows that for sure. Nobody, as far as we know, has come back to tell us. But it would be interesting to know perhaps what people think happens after they die. The obituary is occasioned by the death. But when people say to me, isn't it depressing to write about death? The answer is no because obituaries are about life, about the lives that people have lived, and death only figures in one sentence in that obituary.

00:08:10 Andrew Keen: I wonder whether it might be I know The Times is always trying to innovate its business models, whether you talked about being worthy of a New York Times obituary, whether, if you guys at The Times who had written these advance obituaries, you should give these people access to it. Give them maybe they'd have to pay, like, subscribers to The Times.

00:08:31 Sam Roberts: You mean beforehand?

00:08:33 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Obviously. Well, I mean, once they're dead, I'm not sure they could read it.

00:08:36 Sam Roberts: Probably not. Although, you never know. People place those in memoriam notices in the New York Times celebrating someone's birthday in heaven. So I'm not sure just how far our circulation reaches. But the answer is no. We do not let people vet their advance obituaries. Certainly, sometimes I will pass on some biographical material where they went to college, what their major was, what was the maiden name of their first wife, whatever, just to make sure we get that accurate. But the, entire obituary, the entire profile, which looks not into just chronological details or a stenographic record of the person, but an attempt as Ann Wroe of The Economist wrote, to look into the soul of the person we're writing out about. What was their essence? What made them think the way they did? What made them see the world they did? What were their accomplishments and failures? How do they impact the world and our culture? And why do we bother to remember them or, in effect, immortalize them in a written obituary? I don't think, those things should have to be vetted by the people we're writing advance obituaries of. And often, of course, the families are disappointed or object or critical when we include certain things. But our job is not to eulogize them. It's not to write encomiums of them or paid death notices. An obituary is, in effect, a news story that is supposed to be reasonably objective.

00:10:22 Andrew Keen: And that, of course, assumes that they have a soul. I don't wanna use the T word, but we all know who I'm talking about, the current president of the United States. If he saw his obituary in advance, Sam, I'm guessing he would probably sue The Times. I think he's in the business of suing The Times every time they print something he doesn't like. I assume that, everyone at The Times wants to write his obituary.

00:10:48 Sam Roberts: Probably. I there is one, of course, already written. I forget exactly who wrote it. I think our White House correspondent. But my guess is that not only would he sue if he saw it in advance, but he would probably say, I don't really care because I'll be dead, which, of course, you and I know given the ego involved is probably disingenuous. I am writing an advance obituary about, the former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani. Boy, is that tough to try and put that life in perspective. An aggressive prosecutor, some would say too aggressive, a mayor who proved New York City was governable, even though a lot of people didn't like the way he governed, and then a sort of bitter apologist for Donald Trump, who gets indicted himself under the same laws that he used to prosecute mobsters. So how do you, in one paragraph in a lead or even a headline, say what this guy was all about and what his impact was? Very difficult challenge. The two biggest challenges I think I face as an obituarist is, one, helping to decide who gets an obituary, very subjective judgment. Something like 150,000 people die every day. And as I point in the book, out in the book, three or four get published in the New York Times. And the second is how to put that life in context of, you know, the misdeeds, the mistakes, the anomalies. Where do you, place that trajectory of someone's life, when there's so many things involved, so many challenges that, and contradictions that might have occurred in the course of their career.

00:12:52 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, to do that, Giuliani obituary, Sam, you really need to be Shakespeare. It's a narrative of somebody who had a soul and then sold it. It does—

00:13:08 Sam Roberts: but, again, it's not a biography. It is not, I cannot be as an objective newspaper reporter, that subjective about, making a critical judgment, on someone. Try as best to be objective and place them in context and perspective, but I can't start off like some biographies biographers do with a predisposition saying, I'm gonna do an expose of this person, historical or current figure. It's different because these are newspaper articles, and they are not, editorials. They're not encomiums. And, you know, they require and demand a certain level of objectivity, at the same time trying to put the person's life in context.

00:14:02 Andrew Keen: Yeah. But with you know, I take your point, and all newspaper guys, especially on the New York Times, claim to be objective, but we know they're not. I mean

00:14:10 Sam Roberts: Well, you

00:14:11 Andrew Keen: you would choose but when it comes to Giuliani and I don't mean this in critically. If anything, I think it's about the art rather than maybe the science of the obit. I mean, what's interesting is what you would not include in the narrative of his life, isn't it?

00:14:29 Sam Roberts: There's almost nothing that I have not included, that people would say, how come you left that out? At least as far as I know at this point. Of course, his life isn't over. God knows what else, may occur in it. But I've included what I thought were the accomplishments, which were many, and a lot of the, flaws, which were many, and just tried to present as fair and full a picture as I possibly could in a limited amount of space without writing a biography, but writing for a newspaper obituary. That's a challenge.

00:15:15 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I know. It's a great challenge and a, a very intriguing one. Of course, many people's lives after death seem more interesting in some ways than their actual lives. Jeffrey Epstein comes to mind. What kind of obituary did he get in The Times, and what does that gap between when he died and his terrible reputation now, not that he had a great reputation when he died, what does that tell us about the art of the obit?

00:15:40 Sam Roberts: Well, that's a very good question. Obviously, his reputation would have gotten even worse than it was when he died. He was a controversial figure to say the least at the time of his death. The fact, or at least the appearance of his death by suicide made it, of course, even more dramatic, but context changes sometimes. When you look at, George H. W. Bush, when he was defeated for reelection, the guy was a loser. But when he died, he was considered something of an elder statesman. So these perspectives do change, and you have to take that into account. That's one of the great advantages of being able to sit down and assess someone's life, even when there's a limited time to do it. Advance obituaries, as I say in the book, at least give you a little more time to research, when you're doing more on deadline, which I, in a way, prefer because it sort of triggers the adrenaline. You've got to be very, very careful, and be as accurate as you possibly can and make judgments that may in fact be changed later by a larger perspective or by the, the time of evaluation by historians. So, you know, you're right. It is different, and that can change over time.

00:17:13 Andrew Keen: One of your blurbers, Roz Chast, who's an American cartoonist, suggested, having loved the book, she wrote, I almost died laughing, which was lucky she didn't die because then she wouldn't have finished it. It's a hilarious book. And, also, Sam, as you know, a very personal one. You begin with a story, not of Rosebud, but of your first memory of death of the public execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Tell me about them, your memories of that very public death, and how it shaped your sense of death and maybe even made you into one of the great obit writers.

00:17:54 Sam Roberts: Well, Andrew, I come from a family where I live in Brooklyn where, the most common reaction to death was denial. Perhaps the best example of that is around six months after my father died, his aunt his sister, my aunt, was asked by a neighbor, hey, how is Arthur doing? To which she could only reply so-so. This was six months after his death. The road—

00:18:23 Andrew Keen: Which is fair, isn't it? So-so?

00:18:26 Sam Roberts: Well, I guess, you know, that's one way of putting it. It's certainly putting the best gloss on it, I would imagine. I think I would have answered a little bit more directly. But she could not bring herself in the, you know, the nature, the culture of our family to even discuss death, not just us, to admit it that it had occurred. But the Rosenberg case is very interesting. I was about six years old, and the Rosenberg funeral was going by our block in Brooklyn. And my father took me to the corner of our block to see it go by. And what the family thought about the case, I was never quite sure. Were they guilty as spies, atomic spies? Were they not guilty? But what he said was, I want you to see history as it's happening. The same way he did a year or two later when we sat down in front of our little television, black and white set and watched the Army-McCarthy hearings. But what was so interesting about the Rosenberg case was right after I came to The Times, a new book came out about the case, and I was asked to say to write if there was any news in the book to write a news story, not just book reviews. And, I ultimately wrote a book myself called The Brother, in which Ethel Rosenberg's brother admitted to me after years of trying to get interviews with him, that he lied about the single most incriminating bit of evidence that sent his sister to the electric chair. That doesn't necessarily mean she was innocent, but I believe that in a court of law, in a fair trial, if he had told the truth, she would not have been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, much less have been executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing. So it wound up in an odd way, coming full circle and having an impact on my life and, having an impact on my view of death. I again, people say isn't writing about death depressing? My response is that what I find depressing is how much the people I write about have accomplished compared to what I have.

00:20:55 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's a kind of denial, but it's also a fear. I remember there's a great anecdote about Alfred Hitchcock used to tell about himself was when he was badly behaved as a six or a seven year old, his father would take him to the police station, and, the policeman would play along with the game and put him in a jail cell for a few seconds, which, according to Hitchcock, at least, defined his fear of maybe going to prison or guilt throughout his life. Is there a certain guilt, Sam, associated with at least the death of other people? Is do we feel guilty about ourselves? Is that why we feel so sad about guilt? It's not sad about guilt, sad about other people's deaths even if we don't know them.

00:21:46 Sam Roberts: We feel sad because we have a natural tendency to empathize, I think. We think about their lives, the fact that those lives are ended. We think about their accomplishments. We think about the impact of their death on family and friends and colleagues. But, there's also a quote at the beginning of the book, by William Saroyan, that, that points out that there is some, perhaps, cynical satisfaction in knowing that we're still alive. Those people are dead, for better or for worse, having lived full lives or not. But at least we get, to read about them because we're still here.

00:22:34 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And to read that full quote by Saroyan, do we mock the dead by staying alive, by reading their names in lists, by remembering them in the world, by speculating about those we never knew? Do we perhaps take pleasure from our own survival and even from their sad and joyous failure to do so? Bet your life we do. So do you agree with Saroyan on that?

00:22:57 Sam Roberts: Well, I think it is certainly partially true. I think it's one of the reasons that we, read obituaries as much as we do. It's not that we're infatuated with death, but we are, interested in people's lives and how they live them. And also, Roz Chast has a cartoon at the very beginning of my book, which shows somebody reading a newspaper, and all the headlines say died at 95, you know, twenty years older than the person reading it, or died at, 23, younger than the reader of the newspaper. So part of the interest in it is, you know, hey. I'm still alive. I outlasted that person. And, I think that generates an interest too, which isn't necessarily cynical. It's just the way we are as people.

00:23:54 Andrew Keen: Yeah. There's a sense of bemusement. This week, Franco Baresi, I don't think you probably know him, Sam. Very famous Italian footballer, defender, died at the age of 66, which is my age, and he was a remarkable athlete, one of the great athletes of the twentieth century. So there's always the bemusement that you could survive or one could survive physical specimens who were infinitely superior to themselves.

00:24:19 Sam Roberts: I got called at home, Andrew, one weekend to write an obituary about Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico ambassador. And he, I was surprised that we didn't have an advance obituary on him. And I asked the editor, how come we didn't? And the editor said, well, he was only 75. Well, having been 75 at the time, I felt pretty good about that. So our perspective does change over time.

00:24:52 Andrew Keen: You mentioned that people read the obituaries. You would say that, Sam, because you write them. Do people really read them? I went for the purpose of this conversation, I went to the obituary section of The Times. I have to admit, I'm a regular Times subscriber, go to the website many times a day. I mean, I, of course, I do read obituaries when famous people die, but I never go to this is the first time I've ever actually been to the obituary section. Is this one of the most frequented, sections of The Times online and in physical print?

00:25:30 Sam Roberts: It absolutely is. We now have ways of gauging that, because of the Internet and digital statistics that could actually say how many people have gone to an obituary, a particular one in The Times on any particular day. But I think that one measure, Andrew, is that I've written a lot of articles about a lot of subjects over half a century as a reporter in New York for the Daily News and the New York Times. No subject gets more feedback on a consistent basis than obituaries. Either people call and email and occasionally write and say, I love them. You really captured that person. You brought that person to life. Or how could you have said that about someone, when, you know, they're dead? You know, give them a break. Or sometimes, and this is a factor of the Internet in terms of timing, of course, you screwed up. You got their middle name wrong, or, you know, you had the, brother-in-law come from a different place than he really was born. And the advantage of that is, of course, that we can correct it quickly. We are humans. We are we do make mistakes sometimes as little as possible, and we do run corrections. But it also means, you know, you constantly have millions of readers looking over your shoulder. And that, in a way, can be a good thing too. As long as they're reading it, I'm happy.

00:27:17 Andrew Keen: So I have to ask you, Sam. I know it's a dumb question, but, it's my show. Do you have a favorite obit that you wrote that somehow captures the art of the obit?

00:27:32 Sam Roberts: That's a very good question. How do you define favorite? The one you like the most, the one you thought you were the most—

00:27:41 Andrew Keen: Well, you define it. It's up to you to define favorite.

00:27:45 Sam Roberts: Well, I find irony and quirks and that Rosebud moment, to be fascinating. I mean, someone who, in you know, runs a cheerleader academy and makes cheerleading a national sport, if you will, almost an Olympic sport. Where do these people come from? What motivates them? How do they become so interesting? What was the evolution of their lives that made them do what they did? I had a an obituary of a woman who climbed virtually every high mountain in the world, And she died in her home in the Rockies falling down a flight of steps. It's kind of a fascinating irony in that. It's not amusing by any means.

00:28:46 Andrew Keen: The death rather than the life, really.

00:28:48 Sam Roberts: Correct. But the fact was that she was driven as a matter of a career of climbing every high mountain in the world. What was it that drove her to do that? And that's something that, in writing an obituary and in writing the book, I start out with as a goal of trying to find out. You don't always find that Rosebud moment, but it's something that I always look for.

00:29:14 Andrew Keen: And what about one that you wish you could take back? Have you ever made a really serious boo-boo, Sam? I mean, of course, they especially these days can get fixed online, but what's the biggest error you've ever made? I assume what about the idea of, publishing the death of someone who didn't actually die? What was it Twain who talked about, the rumors of my death are exaggerated.

00:29:40 Sam Roberts: Greatly exaggerated. Exactly. I have never done that. Thank goodness. We always try to confirm a death with a member of the family. You know, they could be lying to us, of course, but, you know, you could only go so far in making a confirmation that name of the member of the family is in the second paragraph because once or twice, frankly, we have been scammed, or made a mistake and written about people who had not died, and corrected it, needless to say. But, you know, you think about someone who said an obituary is— one said that no man who has seen his own obit is ever the same again. And perhaps the best example of that, as I point out in the book, is Alfred Nobel. His brother died, and the newspapers mistakenly ran his obit instead. And when he read that he was such an awful figure who had invented dynamite and caused so many deaths and so much violence in the world, he endowed the Nobel Prizes to, in effect, make up for it. So, you know, there's an example of how even before you die, if you get a chance to read or think about what people are gonna write about you, how you're gonna be immortalized, how we as humans are concerned about posterity in a way that, that other creatures are not, that can make a difference in someone's life.

00:31:18 Andrew Keen: In other words, Nobel had more than one life. He invented gunpowder. [ed.: Nobel invented dynamite, not gunpowder] He invented the Nobel Prizes. I wonder whether, Sam, in terms of the art of the obit, whether you should learn from the movies, from Kurosawa, from his famous movie Rashomon, and always offer, especially when really famous people or really controversial people die, more than one obit.

00:31:43 Sam Roberts: It's an interesting, that's an interesting point. I mean, sometimes we used to review the theater, on a daily review, right, rushing from the opening night to write the review, and then a Sunday review with more reflection. I thought that was a great idea. But I think nowadays, people are only entitled to one obituary when they die, and we try to do it the best we can.

00:32:12 Andrew Keen: Is there someone you'd like to have written an obit of who perhaps died before your time? You— Christ, Jesus Christ comes up in your book. Would you have liked to have written his obituary?

00:32:25 Sam Roberts: What I found so fascinating, and I wrote that obituary as the New York Times might have written it at the time of his death. We all know what his impact has been over the past two thousand years, of course.

00:32:40 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Even more than Jeffrey Epstein.

00:32:43 Sam Roberts: Yes. In AD 33, how would we have written the obituary of Jesus Christ? And it was a fascinating exercise, to see the conflicting opinions. Was he a messiah? Was he a crank? How did people respond to him? You know, and I ended by saying, you know, he was buried and his body disappeared, because we didn't know, in fact, that much more about him at the time and certainly would not have known, the impact he was gonna have on our society globally. But I find that kind of fascinating that, as I mentioned about President Bush, the perspective on people certainly changes over time. And how would we have considered certain historical figures at the time of their death rather than decades or even centuries later.

00:33:41 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And you, of course, in your book, you quote the famous remark by, William Faulkner in, his Requiem for the— for a Nun about how, the past isn't dead. It's not even past.

00:33:58 Sam Roberts: What is that Alan Bennett, had a great quote in The History Boys, the play in the book. Yeah. History is one damn thing after another. Well, of course, in some one sense it is, but I'm a kind of informal amateur student of history, and I think it matters a great deal. And people's lives, are about history. Thomas Carlyle was an advocate of the great man, the great woman theory of history, but he said, who was greater? Hannibal, who led his elephants over the Alps, or some, you know, poor anonymous figure who invented the spade, who we've never heard of? And you could certainly make an argument for the spade man, as well as for Hannibal.

00:34:48 Andrew Keen: What about obituaries of, fictional characters, Sam? One of my favorite is, George Smiley, the John le Carré invention. Can one write or should one write obituaries of fictional characters? They're often, in some ways, more famous than the non the nonfictional humans.

00:35:09 Sam Roberts: We have written those. Our editor has made a great point of saying these did not originate with the obituary desk. They were more likely to have been imagined and conceived and executed by the culture desk or the book review. But among others, we've had a front-page obituary of Hercule Poirot.

00:35:31 Andrew Keen: Oh. We have a—

00:35:32 Sam Roberts: [unclear] stick as a Christie's publisher.

00:35:33 Andrew Keen: My daughter loves Poirot.

00:35:36 Sam Roberts: Yes. So, you know, we do because they have had an impact on our lives as well. People knew who Poirot was. They knew what impact he had on society. He was a well-known figure, and, you know, tongue-in-cheek, facetiously a little bit, we thought that his passing, if you will, was worthy of an obituary itself.

00:36:03 Andrew Keen: Probably the most famous Belgian. I don't think any Belgian probably ever get obituaries apart from, Poirot and maybe Tintin.

00:36:12 Sam Roberts: That's true.

00:36:14 Andrew Keen: You're not Belgian, Sam. You're from New York, very consummate New Yorker, worked there all your life, worked for many publications. Now the top of the heap, The New York Times. Do you— New York is always associated you know, people call it the Big Apple. Things are bigger there or perhaps they used to be, maybe not quite so much these days, the buildings, the sense of itself. Do you think death is viewed differently in New York? Is it bigger to die in New York than other places in America?

00:36:45 Sam Roberts: That's a fascinating question. I think, we take more things in stride in New York. Obviously, death can have an enormous impact. The impact of the terror attack on the World Trade Center when 2,000 people were killed [ed.: the World Trade Center toll was about 2,750] had an enormous impact on the city, although the city showed an incredible resilience in bouncing back. But one of the things we learned from that, was when the trade towers fell and thousands of people died, we initiated a feature called Portraits of Grief, and we did a profile of virtually every one of those people who had died. And one of the things I learned from that, as I point out in the book, is that there really are no ordinary lives, that everyone has some importance, some impact, without necessarily having been famous. As another, obituary writer once said, who would you miss most, your mayor or your mailman? And, you know, these ordinary people, even if we had never heard of them, never heard their names, never knew anything about them, had an impact, and those obituaries about them had an impact on our readers.

00:38:07 Andrew Keen: Given Rudy Giuliani's financial problems these days, maybe your mailman will also be your mayor. Maybe he'll need to raise some money for all the fines. Who do you compete with, Sam, on the paper? I have to admit, I really like your marriage announcements. They always speak to me of people I didn't know, and I find them very interesting. And I wonder whether maybe the guys at The Times should invest more in their birth announcements, although, of course, you never know about a life when someone's just born. Do you compete with the marriage section?

00:38:42 Sam Roberts: I don't think we could be. Certainly not as a matter of staff or space. I think they're doing two different things. The marriage section, the wedding announcements have gotten much more diverse than they used to be. They used to be, in effect, society pages. Now we try to write, about weddings, as we do about obituaries. People who are not necessarily, getting onto the obituary page because of a set of credentials, but because they're intrinsically interesting, because they've accomplished something, because they've had some kind of impact on our society. And I think that's what makes obituary writing and the book itself, certainly so interesting to me.

00:39:33 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, these days, I'm maybe The Times wrote a piece about this, about how people are planning birthdays and weddings. You go away for a week, and it's a bit of an obligation on the part of the guests. I had a friend who killed themselves who, choreographed their own funeral. So I wonder in the future whether the obituary and funerals are gonna become, if not celebrations, more showbizzy, more sort of influencer-like culture.

00:40:06 Sam Roberts: I think that, they can become that. And, obviously, when you have dozens of, people delivering a eulogy and it's a celebrity death, it has some broader impact, like that. But and people certainly plan their own funerals. And one of the reasons is in effect as, as Saroyan says at the beginning of the book, they're dead. We're alive, and we wanna read about them. And people, unlike lots of other creatures or beings, do care about posterity. And one of the ways of achieve achieving immortality to many people is getting an obituary in the New York Times.

00:40:54 Andrew Keen: Well, it's all being democratized now. Instead of the New York Times, you got Wikipedia. I checked you out, Sam, on Wikipedia. You don't have a huge entry. Do you compete with Wikipedia?

00:41:06 Sam Roberts: No. I don't think so. Wikipedia, is a great source. It is hardly a perfect source. They've done a better and better job of attributing, their information, but it's more stenographic. It's more chronological. It's more, of a profile that lacks what Ann Wroe of The Economist called the soul, the essence of the person. And that is what we try to, capture as best we can and often on deadline in a Times obituary and in this book.

00:41:42 Andrew Keen: Finally, Sam, I gotta ask you this. I know it's under the— beneath the belt question, but you open yourself up to it given the nature of this book. You've outlived Bill Richardson, I think, almost by ten years, so that's quite an achievement. At some point, like everybody else, you're gonna die. What would you like to have written in your obituary? You're gonna get one just because you're the obit writer at The Times, so one of your colleagues will feel obliged, I guess. What would you like to see?

00:42:14 Sam Roberts: Well, first of all, Andrew, we are very self-conscious about writing about ourselves. So a lot of New York Times people do not get published obituaries. It was very interesting. I taught a class, in biography, obituary as biography, at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at City University, and asked the students, most of these were grad students, to write my obituary. And none of them wrote what I thought was sort of most important.

00:42:46 Andrew Keen: Did they steal from Wikipedia, or did they actually make some edits?

00:42:50 Sam Roberts: They did a little bit of personal research, and I think they borrowed from Wikipedia. None of them interviewed me as an advance obituary and said, well, what do you think we should say? But among the things that I thought were interesting is not only that I've written a lot of books and been a reporter in New York for more than half a century, But some of the things that I've revealed as a writer include the fact that David Greenglass admitted he lied about the most incriminating testimony that sent his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the electric chair in a case that was considered the crime of the century and still reverberates, I believe, in echoes of the Cold War. I thought that was something, if not of an accomplishment, then certainly worth noting in an obituary.

00:43:47 Andrew Keen: Well, I'm gonna trust, Sam, that you're gonna live or, hopefully, I will as well. We'll live the next seven days, at least. We can be quite certain that, we're talking on August 4.

00:43:59 Sam Roberts: If not, I'll call you.

00:44:01 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I will be expecting. Although, I don't always answer all my calls, but we'll see. But I'm sure you will. Roz Chast said about Sam's new wonderful new book, that she almost died laughing. I would add that you almost died laughing and crying because it's in its own way, it's a very funny book, and in its own way, it's a very serious book. It's the art of the obit, and I think what Sam does is combine both the laughter and the seriousness of death in a wonderfully original New York-y kind of way. So, Sam, congratulations on the book.

00:44:34 Sam Roberts: Andrew, thank you.

00:44:34 Andrew Keen: And the one thing I hope is I won't be reading your obituary very soon.

00:44:38 Sam Roberts: I hope not. I won't be.