Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

A few decades ago, it was rare for anyone but men to work in the business of funerals; the stereotypical mortician conjures an image of an older man who has been running the family funeral home business for decades. But today, 65 percent of funeral service education students are women and the emerging “death positive” movement is mostly attributed ... See more

Every human death feels unnatural. Even the peaceful passing of elderly relatives who’ve lived rich lives and completed the full circuit of experiences we all feel entitled to—work, marriage, children, vacations, holidays—are attended by a grief so massive that it slips our processes of rational cognition. It hits us obliquely, and never chronologi... See more

Of course, even in our carefully crafted realities, death still exists, even if we can’t easily make space for honest discussions about it, even if we find it really hard to sit and listen to the dying. We shield ourselves from reflecting on mortality, loss, and fear because these topics constitute the collective shadow of our busy, consumer-driven

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Venture capital will seed companies that make efficient and novel use of people’s posthumous data. Just as lifestyle product development reached its zenith in the vast proliferation of colorfully branded DTC companies, we’ll soon see an outcropping of companies embedding value back into the death condition: Boutique hardware-accessory production fi... See more