Today in unusual writing jobs: an inside look at what it’s like to be an obituary news writer for the New York Times.
Each day, it is our job to come to know such strangers intimately, inhaling their lives through telephone calls to their families, through newspaper and magazine profiles culled from electronic databases and through the crumbling yellowed clippings from the Times morgue that can fall to dust in our fingers as we read them. The clock ticks down, the traffic hums on Eighth Avenue, the 24th cup of coffee is drunk and thus, at 6 o’clock, we all make deadline, day in and day out.
