Dead People
: Russ Smith in today’s Wall Street Journal suggests, with quite a straight face, that the world needs a magazine called Obituary, all about the freshly dead.
It’s not insane. It’s perhaps sick, but it’s not insane.
I was at People magazine when they discovered the value of death. Once was, they would never put a dead person on the cover. But then John Lennon died and the issue sold through the roof of heaven. Pretty soon, there were so many corpses on the cover of people — with the likes of Karen Carpenter and Rock Hudson finding their comebacks only when they couldn’t come back — that I said we should change the logo and start calling it Dead People.
Death sells.
