OC: Earlier this month, I posted a dashboard for exploring 2.2 million New York Times articles going back to 2000. I’ve now added a way to explore all 29,000 obituaries the paper has published during that period, and it reveals a lot about who makes history.
An estimated 1.5 billion people have died worldwide since 2000, so the Times has memorialized roughly 0.0019% of them. The number of obituaries rose briefly during COVID but has not grown much overall, despite the expansion of celebrity culture.
Very few obituary subjects were under 25. The youngest was Shannon Tavarez, the 11-year-old who played Nala in The Lion King. The oldest subject lived to 141 — Gramma, a Galapagos tortoise.
Despite efforts by the paper to address a gender imbalance, the Times still publishes roughly two obituaries of men for every one obituary of a woman.
And the imbalance is sharpest at the very top. Since 2000, only 51 obits surpass 4,000 words, a group dominated by presidents, popes, monarchs and major cultural figures. Of them, just five were women, and fewer than one in five were people of color.
The dashboard lets you explore the newspaper by topic, section, geography, and other dimensions: https://tedalcorn.github.io/nyt
by theodore_a
11 Comments
Since you have a color for non-binary, who was that obituary for?
It looks like important men die at 85, on average. life expectancy for the average American male is 79.
Did John Paul II not clear 4000?
It reveals a lot about who the New York Times thinks makes history. The NYT is not a neutral, objective chronicler.
Nice to see Sparky on here at least
Qaddaffis was too short.
Dude was extremely interesting.
Whoa cool chart! And thanks for sharing such an interesting data set!
I was surprised to see that Queen Elizabeth’s obituary wasn’t among the longest, given the crazy global media feeding frenzy at the time. Guess she’s more of a figurehead than a statesman?
I wonder how upcoming obituaries will rank, size-wise. Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffett, George Soros, etc. Even a few billion dollars (or even $100+ billion) can’t buy you immortality (yet).
A very sad commentary of coverage of women – I’m guessing the average length is very short as well, compared to men.
Who the heck is Edward Kennedy ..
Not my Nelson Mandela. I don’t belong in this version of reality!
Join me in operation berenstein to get us back to the reality that was taken from us.
Can you do the second graphic normalized for death count by age group?