Obituary Research

Ever wonder where the obit writers from the New York Times find so many facts about the subject, who, let's face it, is not a household name? I do. These are the tribute obits. The newsworthy obits that the Times bestows on the noted who have passed away.

The Times favors the creative types, film directors, artists and authors, and scientists when it come tribute time. The artists, who again, unless you're a gallery rat or majored in art somewhere, are generally completely unknown to you. Their works however do provide a lot of color and serve to fill out the six columns they generally get.

Scientists usually are of the Nobel winning type, and again, unless you did post graduate work in a research lab, you probably never heard of them. Writers, literary types, seem most favored amongst he tribute obit subjects. I have no hard statistics, but it always seems I get the chance to read about a writer who has passed away. (I'll admit, I'm not always interested.)

There's a new obits editor at the paper, Jason Stallman, succeeding long-time editor William McDonald. I'm sure there will be no change in applying the Gold Standard to tribute obits. Today's paper, predictably features a Nobel winning chemist, Rudolph Marcus, 102, who has passed away.

There is a lot of news about the prediction markets. Some insiders, like military people and  presidential teleprompter operators, have been snagged on making bets with decided inside information. That Kalshi and Polymarket even take these bets is beyond me, but there is money to be made. Lots of it.

Being a horse player and a person who has made bets over the years, I'm wondering if these platforms will entertain bets on whose obituary will show up, and what will be their occupation? Can I get action on saying that there will be three or more dead writers who get the tribute obit during a certain week? I don't make prediction bets. But I'm interested in finding out if there is such a thing as obit action. A new world beckons. Any alert readers out there?

Will we soon be reading about someone in the Times obit pool who has cashed in on "predicting" the subjects and their occupations that we will soon be reading about? It's a delicious possibility. Watch out. The Commodities Futures Trade Commission (CFTC) is appointed to monitor the activity is watching. The house doesn't like to be gamed.

But getting back to research, how did Clay Risen, one of the new obit writers who is extremely prolific, get enough goods on Shahrnush Parsipur, 80, Iranian Writer Who Persisted Despite Imprisonment to fill out six columns, with photos? (Mr Risen files two obits yesterday, taking up an entire page.) If you want to see your byline, head for the obits desk.)

Unless you're one of the Mensa crowd readers, of which I'm sure The Times has many, in all reasonable likelihood, you never heard of Shahrnush Parispur. That doesn't make her less interesting.

Her  best known work, "Women Without Men" was written in the late 1970s, but was not published until 1989. Her works had to be translated, and she was imprisoned on trumped up charges for four years. Her life goes back to injustices suffered under the Shah, and kept on going with the new Islamic regime's strict moral code. 

Shahrnush left Iran and returned multiple times. She lived out her life in California, apparently losing her literary anger because California didn't give her so many things to rail against, other than maybe traffic and taxes.

Aside form being a journalist and obituary writer, Mr. Risen has written  a well-received biography of Theodore Roosevelt. I gifted his book to my daughter, who is a HUGE Roosevelt fan having visited Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt's Oyster Bay Cove home many times.

The pièce de résistance in the Parsipur obit is Mr. Risen's quote of Ms. Parsipur's:

"The role of literature is quite clear." she said in a 2019 interview for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark,  "We must address these realities and write about how to solve them."

I'll leave it to your curiosity to read about how a  museum named Louisiana came to be in Denmark. Yes, Denmark the country, in Humblebæk . (I've provided a link. The NYT editor didn't think to use  one in the online version of the obit. Rules, I guess)

Turns out Louisiana refers to Louise, the name of the three wives of the original 1855 owner of the villa the museum is housed in. Johnny Carson's first three of his four wives, were named: Jody, Joanne, and Joanna. He used to joke he didn't have to change the monogram "J" on the bathroom towels.

What force of nature brought Mr. Risen to that quote? Did he learn Farsi and find it in an Iranian newspaper? Mr. Risen, by virtue of being a biographer of TR, would certainly know how to conduct research. But a quote from a speech at a Louisiana Museum in Denmark? The mind boggles.

Obit writers get their information from sources way beyond Google and ChatGpt. I know one obituary writer who was invited to give a talk at the C.I.A. at Langley. I'm not going to tell you who. 

The Gold Standard continues.

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