No existential crisis here. I’m just interested in death – theoretically, anyway. That said, I know rationally that death will come a-knocking sometime and there is nothing I can do about it. Death and taxes and all that.

How we think about death has changed over a relatively short time, say the past hundred years, and that probably reflects the fact that we live longer and therefore think about living and dying differently. Even at the turn of the 20th century, a human life might have been conceived as “nasty, brutish and short” compared to now (in fact, English philosopher Thomas ...

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