Online Supersleuths There’s an estimated 40,000 unidentified human remains in the United States. When writer Deborah Halber heard this figure, she did some research and discovered a thriving community of internet sleuths who spend hours trying to attach names to these John and Jane Does.
Brooke Gladstone, On the Media (July 12, 2014)
WNYC’s radio programme, On the Media, has been an invaluable resource for the Death Reference Desk these past five years. I never created an ‘On the Media’ tag, but I know that I’ve used its shows a number of times.
This week is a great example of the stories that OTM runs. Brooke Gladstone interviews Deborah Halber about her book Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America’s Coldest Cases and the volunteers who work on unsolved and cold cases involving unidentified human remains.
I have to imagine that some of Death Ref’s regulars, particularly the librarians, might already know about this online crime solving.
Feel free to send the Death Reference Desk examples of cases that were helped and/or solved through online volunteers.
Florida Republicans want to show they’re serious about immigration reform by giving honorary citizenship to a Spanish-speaking patriot … who’s been dead for some 200 years.
I’m not exactly sure how the logic works here but it is interesting to learn that Winston Churchill, Mother Teresa, and the Marquis de Lafayette are some of the other dead people awarded posthumous US citizenship.
What everyone should be discussing is how apes grieve for their dead. The New York Times Magazine ran an article in June 2013 on this topic. The Death Reference Desk has also written about Chimpanzees and grief before, in 2010 and 2009.
You can also read more generally about animals and death here.
Whenever we Humans start discussing our primate cousins and grieving, we run the risk of going on an anthropomorphising rampage. That said, it’s clear that our Great Ape relatives could teach us a few things about understanding mortality and the finality of time.
Nothing Focuses The Mind Like The Ultimate Deadline: Death
A Swedish inventor came up with a wristwatch that counts down the seconds left in your life. He calls it “the happiness watch” because he thinks living with the reality of one’s mortality can enhance how we value our lives.
Lulu Miller, National Public Radio (December 31, 2013)
At the very end of last year, National Public Radio ran a story by Lulu Miller about a watch that can ‘predict’ when you’re going to die.
It’s a clever invention that is obviously geared towards cultivating conversations about death and dying as opposed to locking-in a termination date.
I’m not sure that you need a watch to get those discussions rolling, but I’m open to all possibilities.
The wonder of producing the 31 Days of Death is that it’s possible to pull stories from the files that never made it to the Death Reference Desk for numerous reasons.
I was writing a verbose and longish post about radical life extension today but then this story about a man dying during a hot dog eating contest popped up and, well, living to 500 can wait.
I’m inclined to say that this is a mid-year entry into the annual Darwin Awards but it sounds like the gentleman who died was a decent guy. He just had some bad luck.
Out of curiosity, I started poking around the internet to see what kind of safety warnings accompanied eating contests and, lo, I was not disappointed. This WebMD article, helpfully titled Competitive Eating: How Safe Is It?, covers all the bases. Then this Time article called Here’s What Competitive Eating Does to Your Body really goes in-depth on what these contests do to your innards and made me never want to eat food again.
And while this specific story is certainly tragic, it did remind me of the hot dog eating scene in the movie Meatballs.
I don’t click on the various quizzes and lists and general monkey-business that BuzzFeed produces. It’s not my thing.
Heather Havrilesky’s take on how BuzzFeed’s content might actually remind people (or, at least, her) of death’s inescapable touch is intriguing. The hook with John Updike and his Rabbit books makes her essay all the more eclectic for the New York Times.
I still won’t click on any of Buzzfeed’s listicles but at least now I find their impending death reminders more interesting.
Throughout this past week a series of news articles appeared in The Guardian newspaper about end-of-life decision making and assisted dying in the UK.
One of the very first posts that I ever wrote for the Death Reference Desk was on assisted dying in the UK. Over the past five-years, I’ve written countless variations on that same post. Again and again.
During the coming 31 Days of Death, I’ll spend time focusing on some of the specific reasons for the UK debate.
This week saw the coming together of different but related events. Professor John Ashton, who is president of the Faculty of Public Health in the UK stated that individual’s should be helped to die if and when they’ve decided a terminal condition is no longer worth fighting. This led Bonnie Ware, a Palliative Care Nurse, to say that she agreed and that more people should pay attention to the growing Death Midwife movement.
The entire week was capped off by author Terry Pratchett saying that he couldn’t attend an event in his honour because his Alzheimer’s Disease was finally stopping him. Pratchett personally entered the UK’s assisted dying debate in 2010 when he called for the creation of a tribunal to review a person’s request to end their life.
The io9 blog and news site (motto: We Come from the Future) is a reliable and entertaining source for science fiction, fantasy, technology, and scientific research information.
Every once in a while, a death related question or story pops up. A lot of the articles focus on radical life extension, which is to be expected.
The most recent death listing was different enough that I decided to feature it today on Death Ref.
Charlie Jane Anders asks a straight-forward but really intriguing question: Which Science Fiction or Fantasy book do you want read at your funeral? I’ll add in Memorial Service in case you don’t have a standard funeral.
Since my early teen years, the introduction to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams was something I wanted read at my funeral. In case you’re wondering, I really did think about these kinds of questions when I 13. I was a walking Judy Blume character.
After thinking more about different options, I came back to a perennial death soliloquy favourite. The problem, however, is that it’s in a film. I’m cheating. I admit it.
The final monologue by Rutger Hauer’s character Roy Batty in Blade Runner always lingers in my brain whenever I think about dying with dignity and grace. Blade Runner is of course based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but Roy Batty’s final bit of dialogue was improvised by Rutger Hauer.
Talk about sticking the landing.
You can post your responses on the io9 page or, actually, here in the Death Ref comments section. I will send the requests over to io9.
Three days into the 31 Days of Death and I’m already writing about necrophilia. It was going to happen, this much I knew, but I didn’t think so soon. So it goes.
Necrophilia is one of those topics that always grabs a person’s attention. Most recently, allegations of necrophilia appeared in the UK news and involved the deceased and publicly disgraced Jimmy Savile. An editor at The Conversation, a news and information platform that features articles by academics, asked if I could address why it is people find necrophilia simultaneously fascinating and disgusting.
That article is at the top of the page.
This request wasn’t entirely random. Indeed, I’m asked to discuss necrophilia at least 2-3 times a year and there’s a good reason for the requests. In 2008, I published one of the few peer reviewed academic journal articles on necrophilia and necrophilia laws. That article, Abuse of a Corpse: A Brief History and Re-theorization of Necrophilia Laws in the USA is available on the Academia.edu website.
If Meg, Kim and I have learned anything these past five years it’s that stories about dead bodies and sex, especially dead bodies being used for sex, will always attract attention on the interwebs. And then, if you’re lucky, people will start e-mailing you their tasteful nude photography taken in cemeteries. This really happened. I’m not making it up.
I have a hunch that before these 31 Days of Death are over I will end up discussing necrophilia at least once more. Maybe twice.
You should also check out Carla Valentine’s blog posts on necro topics.
I’m kicking off Day 2 of Death Ref’s 31 Days of Death project with a fundraising appeal.
A really smart Brazilian journalist and Anthropologist named Andreia De Sousa Martins needs your help to start her Ph.D. on Virtual Wakes and Digital Death at the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society.
I would be Andreia’s Ph.D. Supervisor in Bath and I really want to work with her.
Here’s the rub and hence the fundraising campaign: Andreia received a scholarship from the University of Bath but it doesn’t cover everything. She needs to raise £8,000 (which is just under $14,000) in order to cover some University fees and, most importantly, afford her Visa to study in the UK.
As a non-UK citizen who works in England, I can tell you that Visas are extremely expensive to procure. I’ve spent thousands of both pounds and dollars over the years on Visas. And hours filling out forms.
Andreia isn’t letting the need for additional funding dissuade her from starting her studies. Indeed, her resolve to begin the Ph.D. seems to only get stronger with each passing day.
One of the only ways Andreia has been able to raise the necessary funds is through a crowdfunding website called Student Funder. It’s a legit company and I think her campaign is worth supporting.
Andreia has FIVE DAYS left to raise the £8,000. She’s currently at £3,455.
So anyone and everyone– think about making a donation. It’s a worthwhile cause. I will also make sure that Andreia periodically updates the Death Reference Deask on her studies.
If you click here you will go directly to Andreia’s fundraising page.
I have also added in Andreia’s own appeal for funding and a video of support that I created.
My name is Andreia and I’m a 28 year old journalist and anthropologist from Brazil and since 2008 I have been studying the ways social networks and social media help us deal with death and dying. I have presented a research project and have been accepted for a PhD at the Social and Policy Sciences Department at the University of Bath. My research is about Virtual Wakes.
What is that?
A wake is a ritual where the family and friends of a deceased accompanies the body before it’s buried or cremated. The virtual wake is a live broadcasting of that very moment, and was created so that the ones who could not attend the wake itself can be present with the helping of new communications technology. That moment can be shared with those who never knew the deceased, so my research will be a qualitative study of how the Virtual Wakes can help us deal with death and dying, deepening work I started in 2011.
I am deeply in love with my research area, which only continues to fascinate me every day. In addition, I desire to become a professor in the future and this PhD has been my priority since 2012. Death is a fascinating topic and I am extremely interested in learning how we have been dealing with it in different aspects and eras – and what ways we will come up with in the future.
In 2011 I was awarded a scholarship to complete my masters in Brazil and I have attended, chaired and coordinated sessions in several death-related academic conferences in Argentina, Romania, Austria, England, Chile and Brazil. My master’s thesis was awarded with Praise and Distinction. Bath has awarded me a 75% discount scholarship on the tuition fees but, despite
this generous help, I am still lacking the final £8,000 to pay my fees and gain my visa.
That’s why I have set up this StudentFunder campaign and ask sincerely for your kind support.
Please do take me up on the perks outlined to the right so I can show my appreciation to you, my supporters.
