For the past four months, 59 Chicago-area funeral directors and drivers have been locked out of their funeral homes by the corporation that owns them, Texas-based Service Corporation International, or SCI. You…
October 23, 2013 | Blog
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Let’s Remember What Real Dead Bodies Look Like
It’s hard to remember what real human bodies look like anymore. Dodai Stewart at Jezebel has a great piece on how boring the bodies of female pop stars are: “Call it Naked…
October 22, 2013 | Blog
Guest Post: Suicide is the Cause of Death, Do You Share?
Jen Aitken is the genius behind the straight-talkin’ obituary website Last Words Obits. We like her style so much here at the Order that this is her second appearance. Check out her first…
October 14, 2013 | Blog
Funeral Homes Scared of Dead Bodies
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is pretty terrifying. It is an incurable brain disease that is invariably fatal. Tiny prions (infectious proteins) infect the brain and cause it to take on a spongy texture. Progressively…
October 11, 2013 | Blog
Wee Memento Mori Rosary Bead
No big deal. Just a rosary bead carved in bone, from 1741, informing us that we, too, will die. There are multiple elements presented here. One side is the face of a…
October 3, 2013 | Blog
Cemetery Love & Death Mystery
You’re hanging out in your local churchyard cemetery (as one does) and you stumble upon a strange headstone. Michael Murricane, died 1977, “in a road accident on the morning of his intended…
September 24, 2013 | Blog
Duane Michals’ “Death Comes to the Old Lady”
I’ve been trolling the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s open collections for a few weeks now. Yes, I’m forced to do ALL THE TROLLING myself until I have engineered death elves to do…
September 18, 2013 | Blog
I Wonder What the Dalai Lama Thinks About Death.
Hey, you guys know the Dalai Lama, right? You’re fans, even? His Holiness? Nobel Peace Prize winner? Beacon of human rights and Tibetan Buddhism the world over? I suspect you would probably…
September 11, 2013 | Blog
Ask a Mortician- Is the Funeral Industry a Pyramid Scheme?
Well my gracious word, I plum forgot to upload the latest Ask a Mortician onto the blog. If a tree falls on the internet and no one hears it, is the tree…
September 8, 2013 | Blog
Halp! Halp Death Get in to SXSW!
Chanel Reynolds, the amazing widow activist from Get Your Shit Together suggested that the two of us do a panel together at SXSW 2014 about what we call the “Death Space.” The…
August 21, 2013 | Blog
How to Fix Society, One Baboon Group at a Time
Chad Weber did such an excellent job in his last post on Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, that we asked him back to talk Sapolsky’s work with baboons. *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Robert Sapolsky goes to…
August 7, 2013 | Blog
Pamphlet from 1917 Shows Death Trends Are Never Ever Forever
My friend Susannah, urban preservationist extraordinaire, sent me this pamphlet from 1917 on Community Mausoleums in Chicago. The pamphlet is filled with high falutin’ rhetoric like, “Above all things we ask for…
August 1, 2013 | Blog