Tag: Death

16 Lessons I Learned From Studying the $700M Brand Liquid Death

I’m not going to repeat the story of Liquid Death. If you’re curious, CNBC Make It did an excellent interview with the founder Mike Cessario here. Mike Cessario’s Linkedin After consuming multiple hours of podcast interviews and just about every article ...

The Economics of Life and the Economics of Death

What do you see when look around the world today? Are you instantly a little exhausted just scanning the headlines? I am. Here’s what I see. I see a planet scarred and broken. Whose lungs are black and whose bones are melting. Ravaged and raped by centuries of exploitation, treated like ano...

Swedish Death Cleaning Gets Real

If I could time travel and advise my younger self, I would tell her to just say no. Don’t rescue a U-Haul full of furnishings from Grandma’s house just because she left them to you in her will. Your daughter doesn’t need more than one American Girl doll. And those books? You can ch...

The Economics of Life and the Economics of Death

Love Can Last Decades After Your Death

My parents were killed in a car accident when I was fourteen. I’m fifty-two now. When people find out about my tumultuous teen years, most are baffled because I seem so ‘untroubled’ today. I suppose I am relatively trouble-free. I have a solid 27-year marriage, our thr...

The Last Time I Fed My Grandmother

The last time I saw my grandmother alive was not a coincidence. It couldn’t have been one, as I believe there is no such thing. It is so easy to be wise in hindsight, right? In reality, that day was an ordinary day, and I was just a typical, pissed teenager doing a chore because my mother made...

My Near-Death Experience in The War of Gaza

It was in the war of 2014 on Gaza. In the last few nights before our departure from our village to the neighboring city, we couldn’t sleep. Usually, the sounds of rockets hitting near the border of Gaza and our other neighboring village from the right are not enough to make us wake up in the n...

Afterlife: The Life After Death

Fear of death is natural, arising from uncertainty about what comes after life, the loss of loved ones, and the fear of the unknown. Our cultural and religious beliefs play a significant role in shaping our attitudes toward death, either offering solace or intensifying the fear. Well, none of ...

How Many Steps it Takes to Walk Away from Death

The benefits of walking for overall physical health and mental well-being are significant and indisputable. The topic has been studied to death. But if scientists do anything well, it’s to study a thing over and over, to support or refute the previous findings or merely refine whatever’s...

My Near-Death Experience in The War of Gaza

Swedish Death Cleaning Gets Real

Seven Ways Running Helped Me Cope With My Brother’s Death

My brother died on July 9, and the only run I missed while caretaking and grieving was on July 9 itself. Did I feel guilty going for my runs as my brother fought pancreatic cancer? Absolutely. I felt like a heartless, insensitive, and selfish bitch. Yet, something pushed me out the door. Manny wa...

Avoiding Death by Meetings

Do you dread opening up Google Calendar? Not because you don’t know what you’ll see, but because you do? Meetings. One after the other. All freakin’ day long. Whether you take meetings in person or via Zoom, a stacked day of meetings can be a total slog. Let’s...

Cabaret and the Death of Queer Equality

Historian Robert Beachy calls Berlin the birthplace of modern LGBT identity in his 2014 book Gay Berlin. Writing in The New Yorker, Alex Ross agrees with Beachy that the Germans first invented gay rights more than a century ago. By the mid-1920s, public attitudes in ...

The Life and Death of Mad Sam, The Chicago Mob’s Most Deranged Killer

Sam DeStefano was a notorious loan shark and murderer who terrorized Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s. He was associated with the Chicago Outfit, a powerful organized crime syndicate that dominated the city’s underworld. But he was never made a full member of the Outfit due to his lack of loyalt...

The gradual death of neon lights in Hong Kong

If you Google search the keywords “Hong Kong”, chances are that you will come across pictures of vibrant and flashy Neon lights. These Neon lights have been an intricate part of Hong Kong’s culture. Movies such as Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2047, Fallen Angels, 2046 and Chungking E...

Five New York Times Bestselling Books with the Dagger of Death

This was something that I knew nothing about until I came across the Tiktok videos of publishing house business analyst Bryan the Business Analyst (@bryantheba on Tiktok). These videos by Bryan explained a phenomenon that I never knew about but that is very acknowledged and followed amongs...

The Death of Domitian, 96AD

On the 18th of September 96 AD the Roman Emperor Domitian was assassinated in a plot orchestrated by his wife. The jury is still out on Domitian, and whether it will ever return to give its verdict is another matter. Some historians reckon that he was among the cruellest and most bloodthirsty of ...

The death of Cicero, 43 BC

On 7th December 43 BC the orator and politician Cicero died at the hands of his enemies, aged 63. He had been a staunch defender of the old Roman Republic but backed the wrong side in the shenanigans that transformed the republic into an empire, and he paid the ultimate price for so doing. He cam...

Unexpected Love and Death in the Heart of the Castro

Love and death pulse through Harvey Milk Plaza, the throbbing heart of San Francisco. The plaza, dedicated to the pioneering gay politician, celebrates his messages of self acceptance and caring for oneself and others. It also acknowledges his violent assassination. But I never expected to witness d...

The life and death of Australian hardcore

The bus engine roars as we slowly pace down towards the spot where Broadway and Parramatta Road meet, heading further away from the city and into the outer suburbs of Sydney. I look out the window and notice the abundance of ‘For Lease’ signs and empty shop fronts that appear to plague t...

To Fear Life is Death

As I sat here, watching Prince’s 1986 performance in Detroit, I couldn’t help but feel amazed and in awe. I spent most of the hour watching live performances of some of my favorite artists after being inspired by Victoria Monet’s energetic performance on Jimmy Fallon. ...

Swedish Death Cleaning Gets Real

Actually, my younger self knew that. At 22, I vowed never to own more than could fit in the trunk of my VW bug. I was a minimalist before it was a thing. Thirty years ago, in the early days of the internet, I moderated a discussion group for practitioners of voluntary simplicity. My intentions were ...

Running Towards Death

I just returned from my first ten-day silent meditation retreat, at Southern California Vipassana Center. The site is located in Twentynine Palms, an hour north of Palm Springs, just past Joshua Tree. It’s safe to say that it was the strangest experience of my life. Many of you asked me to tel...

Processing Death Amongst Toxic Christianity

She was always a petite woman, but she became disturbingly so in the last couple of years. She had cancer and dementia, and in the end, hospice workers were spoon-feeding her in an effort to get her to eat something, anything. In her final days, she slept seemingly peacefully in her bed and little n...

My Mother’s Death Reshaped My Faith

I told my mother to stay at home and I got her groceries and prescriptions. I brought her to my house for Thanksgiving that year. I was happy to fix dinner for her, and we had a good time together. Little did I know that was the beginning of a two-year nightmare. Two days later, her neighbor call...

Death rituals and their significance for Hindus

Hinduism is a collective term applied to the many philosophical and religious traditions native to India. Hinduism has neither a specific moment of origin nor a specific founder. Rather, the tradition understands itself to be timeless, having always existed. Indeed, its collection of sacred texts is...

The Death Sutras in Rigveda

If I were to imagine history and context as mentioned in these Sutras, I would imagine a Purohit reciting them as the body of the dead head of the family (Male) resides there, lifeless. Death, go in a different way, not the gods’ path. I speak to you with eyes and ears. Spare o...

The importance of death rituals

Last year, I was visiting my native place — Gaya (also called Gaya Ji, a city in Bihar). We were there to perform ‘shraadh’ for a departed relative. It was the first time in my adult life that I was witnessing this ritual and was curious to know more. The pandit&nbsp...

How Sobibor Was Different From Other Death Camps

This week, I’ve been reading Daniel Finkelstein’s brilliant new memoir, Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin and the Miraculous Survival of My Family (Doubleday 2023), which deals with his Jewish family’s life in Nazi death camps and in the Gulag. The “miraculous” i...

The Death of Critical Thinking

Someone I frequently run into at the coffee shop where I do most of my writing recently asked me where I get my news. Over 30 years ago, it was an easy question to answer. We had NBC, CBS and ABC on television. The local newspaper came every morning. There weren’t thousands of so-called ...

Near Death Experiences: The Fallout

Imagine waking up one morning after a calamity and discovering — you’re a superhero! Something akin to Doctor Strange, you can sense disaster and potentially mitigate its damage, assess the physical health of strangers and administer energetic healing, converse with entities like ghosts ...

A Nurse, an ERROR and a DEATH: But was it CRIMINAL?

Charlene Murphey was born and raised in the Gallatin area of Tennessee. She worked at Walmart for 24 years before having to retire due to health issues. She and her husband, Sam, were married for over 50 years at the time of her death. Ms. Murphy was suffering from headaches and loss of vision in...

AI Won’t Be the Death of Lawyers; It Will Weed Out the Lazy

We know generative AI is an active component within the legal industry. I’m not referring to tools such as Lawdroid Copilot. I’m strictly referring to the use of OpenAI, Bard, Bing, Perplexity AI, and similar tools. These generative AI tools possess the ability to search and create ...

Roe’s Death was Years in the Making

In March of 2016, mere hours after it was announced that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died and even before President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland as his replacement, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell took to the Senate floor. “The next justice could fundamentally...

Gun Free Zones Are Death Zones

In December of 2022, an Amazon employee was shot and wounded in the parking lot of an Amazon warehouse. The shooter was not working for Amazon. I say ‘was’ because the shooter is dead. He was killed by another Amazon employee who was carrying a gun that day. How could this happen? ...

A Coward With a Gun is a Death Waiting

When I was 18 years old (1974) a friend and I were traveling south towards Greensboro, NC on US 220 late one night when his car started overheating badly. After going as far as he dared drive the car we pulled to the side of the highway in front of a house that had the lights on, and turned on the 4...

A Brief Look at Death Cannons

Why hello there, traveler, and welcome to the "Apocalypse Tour." This is the tour for all those thrill seekers out there who want to see some things that are downright insane. We note the problematic locations, tools, and, in this case, weapons that contributed to species 947's (947 we...

Life and Death, Frozen in Time

When my father was a part of the retreat from the Chosin reservoir he thought a lot about life and death. The year was 1950. It was between Thanksgiving and Christmas and the North Korean army backed by Communist China had encircled the US forces, triggering an epic battle and ultimately, a US defea...

The Black Death Revisited: Lessons from the Bubonic Plague Pandemic of the Middle Ages

1. Understanding the Black Death: The Black Death is believed to have originated in the early 1330s in the plains of Central Asia. It was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which commonly infected fleas that lived on rodents like rats. This bacterium could be transmitted to humans thro...

Your risk of death by killer bees has gone way, way up.

The term ‘killer bees’ is typically associated with a Harrison Ford adventure movie, not necessarily your family trip to Phoenix, AZ. But for a man in Marana County, Arizona in August of this year, a disturbance of an enormous beehive resulted in death. With encounters like the...

When Your Doctor Becomes an Angel of Death

Think about any great strides we’ve made on our way to a civilized society — from ending the practice of burning witches at the stake, legalizing abortion, giving women the right to work and vote, and even institutionalizing democracy. Today, we consider these normal or even required in ...

The Black Death — Part Two

This unseen terror, claiming lives with terrifying speed, ripped through the fabric of medieval life, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. Institutions that formed the bedrock of society — the Church and the feudal governments — were left stunned and helpless, like victims of a dr...

The Most Unusual Way A Doctor Learned to Predict His Patient’s Time of Death

In 1946, a Ukrainian man named Konstantin Pavlovich Buteyko joined the First Medical Institute of Moscow to study medicine. There was nothing unusual about this except for his first assignment: he was tasked with monitoring the breathing habits of terminally ill patients prior to their deaths. ...

Re-Thinking The ‘When’ And ‘How’ Of Brain Death

The traditional view of death, symbolized by the abrupt cessation of vital functions resulting in a ‘moment’ of death as declared by a physician, is increasingly being seen as an oversimplification. Research by a number of labs is suggesting that death is not a moment but rather, a proce...

Come Dreamer/Death of Reason

Come dreamer to the night Enveloped in the glomin’ Demons glaring, grinning Gnawing on the brainpan Shavings flaking off Read More

Power, Money, and the Inequality of Death

“Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.” — Edmund Burke We would like to believe that the loss of any life would garner the same societal response. But we treat death differently depending on context. ...

Day Care Death Due To Drugs

New York City police said a 1-year-old boy died, and three other children were hospitalized after apparently “coming into contact with an opioid” at a home-based childcare site in the Bronx on Friday. Police said the 911 call came in just after 2:40 p.m. on Friday. Officers al...

The Opioid Tragedy, Part 2: ‘It’s Not a Death Sentence’

Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died of opioid overdoses in recent years. While opioid deaths in the United States have started to level off, more than one in five Americans still have at least one opioid prescription filled or refilled per year. And a dependence on prescription opioids can ...

Netflix’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Talks Horror to Death

The creator of Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House, Mike Flanagan, comes to Netflix with a vicious horror series based on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. The Fall of the House of Usher is a series of flashbacks held together by the present-day main storyline, ...

Can you survive a total ego death?

As the psychedelic renaissance is thriving and meditation retreats have gained some popularity, the term ego death has also entered the more common awareness. You might have come across people sharing their bizarre experiences on shroom trips or powerful changes to their mentality caused b...

The Dance of Death: Untangling the Mystery of The 1518 Plague

Setting the Stage for Chaos Picture this: it’s a sweltering summer day in Strasbourg, a quaint city where life typically moves at a leisurely pace. Then, out of nowhere, enters Frau Troffea — a seemingly ordinary woman who’s about to unleash a whirlwind of madness. With an impro...

What Exactly Was the Death Ray of Archimedes?

Archimedes of Syracuse was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, and inventor who lived in the 3rd century BC. He is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time and is responsible for many important discoveries in the fields of geometry, mathematics, and physics. One of Archim...

Through Wounds and Death: About Medical Museums (Article Reshared)

I was approached by someone (John Charles in this case) on Twitter last year. It was a platform called Mainly Museums, where people submit posts about museums around the world. John invited me to write something about anything, and I agreed. The next thing I knew was that my work load suddenly ex...