The Importance of Diversity in History

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"We are not in the revision business. We can't revise history no matter how much it may be painful to look on it with hindsight," he says. "I will repeat myself until I'm blue in the face through no fault of anyone's who is active in the world today, those people regrettably were overwhelmingly white men." The obituary for a Harvard economist named Richard T. Gill was one that his editors almost jumped out of their skims with excitement when they discovered they could assign him.

The stereotypical obituary is a formulaic recitation of facts — dry, boring, and without craft. But Margalit Fox has shown the genre can produce some of the most memorable and moving stories in journalism. Exploiting its “pure narrative arc,” Fox has penned over 1,200 obituaries, covering well-known and obscure subjects with equal aplomb.

In her conversation with Tyler Cowen, Fox reveals not only the process for writing an obituary, but her thoughts on life, death, storytelling, puzzle-solving, her favorite cellist, and how it came to be that an economist sang opera 86 times at the Met.

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