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"path": "/26/05/who-merits-the-longest-ny-times-obituaries",
"publishedAt": "2026-05-01T19:55:00.000Z",
"site": "https://kottke.org",
"tags": [
"the NY Times Archive API",
"Below the Fold",
"is about obituaries",
"this infographic",
"The whole dashboard",
"infoviz",
"journalism",
"NY Times",
"obituaries",
"Ted Alcorn"
],
"textContent": "Using the NY Times Archive API, journalist Ted Alcorn built Below the Fold, a dashboard through which you can explore the last 25 years of Times coverage: 2.2 million articles containing 1.5 billion words. You can slice and dice this data in a bunch of different ways — it’s a fantastic resource.\n\nOne of the site’s sections is about obituaries. From that data, Alcorn produced this infographic of whose obits contained the highest word count:\n\nAs you can see, it’s a lot of world leaders, religious leaders, politicians, and white men. There only appear to be five women on the list. Notable non-politicians include Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Muhammad Ali, and Charles Schulz.\n\nThe whole dashboard is fun/enlightening to explore.\n\n**Tags:** infoviz · journalism · NY Times · obituaries · Ted Alcorn",
"title": "Who Merits the Longest NY Times Obituaries?",
"updatedAt": "2026-05-01T19:55:00.000Z"
}