 The one obit I wrote, and I've written more than 1200 for the times by now, the one that got the most reader traffic of any, because it happened to hit at a time when Twitter was really taking off, was an obit I wrote in 2012 for a man named John Fairfax. He was an Englishman and adventurer. He was like a character out of Ian Fleming, Graham Green, and Hemingway all rolled into one. He rode across the Atlantic, single-handed in a rowboat by himself, 4,000 miles, and then, not to be outdone, he, with another person, rode across the Pacific 8,000 miles. He was the first oarsman in recorded history, the first single oarsman to cross any ocean. And what we say in the obit was that those feats turned out to be the least of it. Here's what we said. For all its bravura, Mr. Fairfax's seafaring almost pales beside his earlier ventures. Foot loose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Green, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in. At nine, he settled to dispute with the pistol. At thirteen, he lit out for the Amazon jungle. At twenty, he attempted suicide by Jaguar. Afterward, he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries in his otherwise crackling resume. Well, readers went nuts for this. They said, this is the original most interesting man in the world from the Dosecki's commercials. This is the most bad-assed obit I've ever read. And, as I've said elsewhere, when does the adjective bad-ass ever used to modify anything in the pages of the New York Times? So that really took on a life of its own. That was one of the fun ones and had a very, very cool reader response.