A depiction of one of Frederik Ruysch’s anatomical displays. Image via the Public Domain Review.

• Sherwin B. Nuland, the author of How We Die, is dead.
• In Los Angeles, a group of ghost hunters are chasing the dead.
• The punk ethos of the Lower East Side is dead.
• The Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch died in 1731, but his deathly sketches still haunt us today: “not only did he exalt the human anatomy as a wondrous product of creation, but he presented himself as a veritable artist of death.”
• On the eastern seaboard, the hemlock is dying out. Though the tree bears only a superficial resemblance to the plant that killed Socrates, “it seems impossible to separate the hemlock tree from the hemlock plant’s poison, for a poet to keep the death of Socrates out of the picture—for death is in the forest, especially a hemlock forest, especially now.”