America’s richest dog dies while China’s has just been born
In 2007, real estate tycoon Leona Helmsley died of heart failure, leaving explicit instructions on what to do with her $4 billion fortune: the bulk ...
Author: Justin Nobel
Digital Dying is written by Justin Nobel, whose stories about science, culture and travel have appeared in publications such as the Chicago Tribune, Audubon, Gourmet.com, Nunatsiaq News, Point Reyes Light and The Smart Set www.justinnobel.com. Comments and ideas can be sent to justinnobel@gmail.com.
Interview with a man who cleans up blood and brains for a living
Where do the blood and guts go after a horrific suicide or grisly accidental death? Often it is scrubbed away by Aftermath, a crime scene ...
Narco lives means narco-wives and narco-tombs
Ignacio “El Nacho” Coronel and Arturo Beltrán Leyva, known as Mexico’s “Boss of Bosses”, were rival drug dealers and mortal enemies, but in death they ...
Remembering Dr. Kevorkian’s suicide machines and other deliverance contraptions
We all know Jack Kevorkian was a doctor, but few know he was also a painter and a jazz composer; his 1997 CD, “The Kevorkian ...
Why Glee killed Jean, and other famous TV kill offs
Last week’s episode of Glee featured a shocking development: the death of Jean Sylvester, a lovable woman with Down’s Syndrome.
Revenge killings, from Pakistan to Palestine to Papua New Guinea
He killed nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11 2001, earlier this month we killed him, ten days after that his followers attacked recruits at a ...
The history of manhunts, from Sabbah the Assassin to Yahya the Engineer
Killing Osama bin Laden involved an especially massive manhunt but it’s not the first time such effort has been put into eliminating a single man. ...
Will Osama bin Laden get 72 Virgins? A talk with an Islam death expert
Osama bin Laden’s body was placed on a flat board and slid into the sea, was that the proper thing to do? Will he attain ...
Interview with playwright Eric Coble, whose boobytrapped Brooklyn mother teaches a lesson on dying with grace
Eric Coble has written and produced plays on Edgar Allen Poe, Pinocchio and Pecos Bill; his latest, Velocity of Autumn, is about an elderly Brooklyn ...
Talking death with pharmacopeian Hamilton Morris, who traveled to Haiti in search of zombie powder
Hamilton Morris, a pioneering young pharmacologist, has hacked through the Amazon looking for ayahuasca and hunkered down in a missile silo with an LSD kingpin; ...
Are New York tourists sipping coffee beside tortured corpses of Chinese prisoners?
In the middle of downtown New York City, just blocks from Wall Street and right beside a row of sunny cafes where tourists sit along ...
China vs Egypt for “World’s Most Beautiful Mummy” distinction
Xiaohe is a beauty; she has long eyelashes, a button nose, auburn hair that falls across her shoulders, and has been dead for 3,800 years.
Remembering a mysterious Japanese death ritual: “marriage of the dead”
A year ago I took a train from Tokyo to Sendai, a city in the center of the region ravaged by last month’s tsunami, to ...
A flash flood reveals the secret world of Amish funerals
The Amish keep their death rituals private, but last month reporters were able to peek into this world after a terrible horse-drawn buggy accident in ...
New green burial method mimics recipe of infamous British “Acid Bath Murderer”
Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak has developed a new way to bury human bodies. First, freeze them with liquid nitrogen, then, use mechanical vibrations to shatter them into ...
