Sam Roberts | Longreads | August 11, 2026 | 4,862 words (20 minutes)This is an excerpt from Are They Dead Yet? “I think that living forever would be a terrible thing,” I quoted her as saying in her Times obituary. Emily is dead, too, but so consumed by nostalgia—before being persuaded that “live people don’t understand, do they? One way to measure the trajectory of society’s fascination quotient, he figured, was to enlist New York Times obituaries as a cultural barometer. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, Foreign Affairs, and Air Mail.