Duende

Make Your Own Memento Mori: Befriending Death with Art, History and the Imagination with Morbid Anatomy Founder Joanna Ebenstein

In July 2020 Joanna Ebenstein will be offering an 8-hour online course in the history, mystery and art of the memento mori: Death is the great mystery of human life. Each of us – barring some medical miracle – will die. Foreknowledge of our own death is a defining characteristic of humanity; the ancient Greeks … Read moreMake Your Own Memento Mori: Befriending Death with Art, History and the Imagination with Morbid Anatomy Founder Joanna Ebenstein

Morbid Curiosity: A Wickedly Fun Party Game About Death

Morbid Curiosity is a Trivial Pursuit-style party game designed to encourage engaging conversations about death. According to co-creator Kimberley Mead: It all started with a group of children. Strange for a game about death, but, it did. I was working at a grief center, facilitating a children’s group. I was struck with the remarkable difference … Read moreMorbid Curiosity: A Wickedly Fun Party Game About Death

Did Houdini and Doyle Really Investigate Supernatural Mysteries?

The 2016 TV series Houdini and Doyle teamed these two very famous figures, together with pioneering female police constable Adelaide Stratton, in investigating apparently supernatural mysteries in early Edwardian London. Obviously, the series was a work of fiction inspired by some historically real characters and situations, with a lot of creative license applied. For example, whereas the real Harry … Read moreDid Houdini and Doyle Really Investigate Supernatural Mysteries?

Discovering a Vintage “Spook Show” in my Dad’s Antique Collection

by Tony Wolf (originally published via the Atlas Obscura on October 9, 2017) After my father died in mid-2016, the family was faced with a daunting question: “What to do with the collection?” Dad had been acquiring and restoring all manner of curious antiques since the 1960s. His vast collection filled “the studio”—a huge, barn-like building … Read moreDiscovering a Vintage “Spook Show” in my Dad’s Antique Collection

Death, Redesigned

This excellent longform article by Jon Mooallem is unfortunately no longer available via the California Sunday Magazine, so I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing the text here. There’s an ugliness — an inelegance — to death that Paul Bennett gradually came to find unacceptable. It seems to offend him the way a clumsy, counterintuitive kitchen tool might, or a … Read moreDeath, Redesigned

Constellation Park: Columbia University’s DeathLab Imagines the Future of Cemeteries

Picture a gently glowing city of the dead suspended beneath the Manhattan Bridge … It’s a bold and beautiful vision, conjured by Columbia University’s DeathLab project which aims to find creative solutions to a very practical problem. Traditional cemeteries are running out of space; what will we do with our dead?