“Obituaries are about life, about the lives that people have lived. Death only figures in one sentence.” — Sam Roberts
This is, remarkably, episode 3,000 of Keen On America — three thousand conversations since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010. Fitting, then, that today’s guest has written nearly 1,500 obituaries for the New York Times. Sam Roberts is a reporter on the Times’ obituaries desk and has a new book about the art of the obit entitled Are They Dead Yet?
We recorded this a week before airtime, so I began by asking who’s going to die in the interim. He wasn’t sure — but noted that the Times keeps 2,000 advance obituaries ready. There are, he added, never enough. Beware, though, the Rockefeller curse. Roberts wrote David Rockefeller’s advance obituary, whereupon he learned that three other Times reporters had written Rockefeller advance obits — and all three were dead. (Rockefeller made it to 101.)
Borrowing from Citizen Kane, Roberts hunts for the Rosebud moment, the epiphany that defines a life. He hunts for the soul of the subject, not the résumé. Hence his cheerful paradox that obituaries are about life, whereas death only figures in one sentence. As for famous last words, he’s a skeptic — most were composed later by better writers. The real ones, he suspects, are “help,” or “get me a drink.”
And the obituarist’s own Rosebud moment? We have to go back to Brooklyn when he was a six-year-old boy. His father walked him to the corner to watch the Rosenberg funeral procession pass. “I want you to see history as it’s happening,” he explained. Half a century later, Roberts got David Greenglass to admit he had lied about the testimony that sent his own sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the electric chair.
From the Times’ Portraits of Grief after 9/11, Roberts learned the book’s deepest lesson. There are no ordinary lives. Who would you miss more — your mayor or your mailman? Or maybe your obit writer (or even your podcaster)? Sam promised that if he died before airtime, he’d call. The phone hasn’t rung. I’m still going too. On to episode 3,001.
Five Takeaways
• 2,000 Obits, Never Enough. The Times keeps some 2,000 advance obituaries on file, regularly updated — and people still surprise the desk (and presumably themselves) by dying unexpectedly. Print once had a deadline or two a day; now there’s a deadline every minute. The occupational hazards are real: three Times reporters wrote advance obits of David Rockefeller and predeceased him — Roberts, the fourth, survived to see his run when Rockefeller died at 101. And the genre changes its readers: “no man who has seen his own obit is ever the same again.” Alfred Nobel, mistakenly obituarized as dynamite’s merchant of death, endowed the Nobel Prizes in response — proof that a premature obituary can be the most consequential document a man ever reads.
• The Rosebud Method. Roberts’ organizing device comes from Citizen Kane: the Rosebud moment, the epiphany — a teacher, a meeting, an accident — that changed the trajectory of a life and made it worth recording. The model, via The Economist’s Ann Wroe, is the soul rather than the stenography: Wikipedia has the chronology; the obituary hunts the essence. Advance obits are never vetted by their subjects — facts checked, yes; the portrait, never — because an obituary is a news story, not a eulogy. And the form’s great secret is optimism: obituaries are about life. Death gets one sentence. (Famous last words, meanwhile, are mostly posthumous fiction. The real ones: “help,” or “get me a drink.”)
• Giuliani, Trump, Epstein. The hardest working file on Roberts’ desk: Rudy Giuliani — aggressive prosecutor, the mayor who proved New York governable, then a bitter Trump apologist indicted under the same statutes he once used on mobsters. How do you compress that into a lead paragraph? Andrew’s suggestion — a narrative of somebody who had a soul and then sold it — requires Shakespeare; Roberts insists on newspaper objectivity, omitting nothing and editorializing never. The Trump obituary already exists (its subject, Roberts guesses, would sue). And context keeps moving after death: Bush the defeated loser became Bush the elder statesman; Epstein’s reputation kept falling posthumously. Of the 150,000 people who die each day, three or four make the Times.
• The Rosenberg Rosebud. Roberts’ own epiphany arrived at age six, on a Brooklyn street corner where his father took him to watch the Rosenberg funeral procession: “I want you to see history as it’s happening.” His family otherwise met death with denial — six months after his father died, an aunt asked how Arthur was doing could only answer “so-so.” The Rosenberg thread ran through his whole career: decades later, for his book The Brother, David Greenglass admitted to Roberts that he had lied about the most incriminating testimony against his sister Ethel — evidence that, truthfully given, would likely have spared her the electric chair. When Roberts assigned graduate students to write his own advance obituary, none of them led with that. He would.
• No Ordinary Lives. From Portraits of Grief — the Times’ profiles of virtually every victim of the World Trade Center attack — Roberts drew the book’s central lesson: there are no ordinary lives. Who would you miss more, your mayor or your mailman? Carlyle asked whether history belongs to Hannibal or to the anonymous man who invented the spade. The desk has honored the principle in both directions: a front-page obituary for Hercule Poirot (the most famous Belgian, as Andrew noted), and a Jesus of Nazareth obituary written as the Times would have run it in AD 33 — ending, for lack of further confirmation, with the report that he was buried and his body disappeared. No beat generates more reader feedback. “As long as they’re reading it, I’m happy.”
About the Guest
Sam Roberts is a fifty-year veteran of New York journalism, an obituaries reporter and former Urban Affairs correspondent at the New York Times, and the host of the Times’ “Close Up,” which he inaugurated in 1992. His many books include The Brother, Grand Central, A History of New York in 101 Objects, and Only in New York. A history adviser to Federal Hall, he lives in New York with his wife and two sons. Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit (Bloomsbury, August 11, 2026) draws on the nearly 1,500 obituaries he has written for the Times.
References:
• Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit by Sam Roberts (Bloomsbury, August 11, 2026). Carl Hiaasen: “Mordantly wonderful.” Roz Chast: “I almost died laughing.”
• The Brother by Sam Roberts — in which David Greenglass admitted lying about the testimony that sent his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the electric chair.
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