 Now one thing I find interesting when I read obituaries is how much subtle humor is in them and how much of an attempt is made to make the first sentence be especially interesting. And often the last sentence contains a kind of nugget or surprise or twist on the story. Now the other parts of the newspaper typically aren't like this, be it the New York Times or elsewhere. So why do obituaries have this special status where there's room in them for this kind of humor and invention? Or alternatively, why don't more parts of the newspaper actually copy this if it works? Which I think it typically does. Well as to what more parts of the newspaper do or don't do, I can't speak. But of course as you know there are very ironclad conventions for the structure of news articles and historically obits were no exception to that. These conventions actually have been in place during the Civil War and it's worth digressing about them quickly because they're quite fascinating. One who's ever taken journalism 101 has heard about the inverted pyramid which is this upside down triangle that's supposed to be the model for the lead paragraph of any news story and in fact for the structure of the news story as it flows along. Broad based information first and then finer and finer, finer grain detail down to stuff at the end that you could possibly dispense with if you're short on space. And that model is an information processing model. It has endured for over 100 years because it's cognitively perfect. It came about during Civil War battle coverage when they had the medium of telegraphy for the first time available to reporters. Like much new technology it was bulky, lines went down and reporters learned in a do or die sort of way get the broadest information through first so if the lines go down at least your readers back in Boston or Baltimore will have something and your editor will have something to put in the paper. That model has endured because it's how we process information. It's cognitively perfect. And so old bits too were beholden to that model plus way down further by all of this boilerplate that has to be there so and so died when, where, of what illness, at what age. And that is why historically obits were considered one of the most boring sections of any daily paper. Happily in the last 20 or 30 years, particularly we at the times, have realized that underlying all of that potentially very leaden boilerplate is a pure narrative arc. Because what does an obit do? It's charged with taking subjects from the cradle John Doe was born on January 1st 1900 to the grave John Doe died yesterday. And that gives you a built-in narrative arc and indeed, obits turn out to be the most purely narrative genre in any daily paper. And so the reason we have these great leads and we hope great kickers as we call them at the end is that we are exploiting very happily this inherent narrative potential that is a news of it. In terms of the structure of the newspaper, certain rules and procedures have not been imposed on obituaries that are imposed on other news stories. What do you think it is about the nature of obituaries or maybe the role in the newsroom that has allowed that freedom to evolve? Because people who report on crimes, you could imagine I'm talking to one of them and they would say, well, this is the perfect narrative arc and we developed all these freedoms, but typically not. There's a pretty rigid structure to a crime story. See, I don't know that I agree with your initial premise because there is also a pretty rigid structure to an obit. It's there to put it in Chomsky in terms, in old-time Chomsky in terms. It's the deep structure. It's there undergirding everything, otherwise the story wouldn't cohere. There's a birth and a death, right? But all of the stuff is there. The trick is if you want to make it good art but also have complete fealty to the tenets of journalism, which we must adhere to, the trick is to disguise all of that infrastructure, all of those girders, and to make it where thematically appropriate, to make it kind of light and frothy and dancing and a really good read.