Hey there, Steven Dubner.
Today on the show, the latest installment of our freakonomics Radio Book club.
I am not very good at predicting the future, but I am predicting that you are going to love this episode.
It is guest hosted by Maria Kanakova, the New Yorker writer and author of the biggest bluff, which was the very first selection of our book club last summer.
That episode, if you would like to listen back, is called how to make your own luck.
It's episode 424.
Maria also happens to have a PhD in psychology.
Today she is speaking with Caitlin Doty about her book smoke gets in your eyes and other lessons from the crematory.
It is a fascinating and timely discussion, and it starts right now.
Here is Maria Konnikova.
What do you say when someone dies?
I don't know about you, but I've never really learned how to talk about death, how to think about it, what to say to someone who's recently bereaved.
Just think about the language we do use, passed on in a better place, laid to eternal rest.
How about just died?
The discomfort runs deep.
Money doesnt lie.
And our aversion to death, especially in the United States, is big business.
We pay for the body to be transported, embalmed, gussied up, and cremated or perhaps buried in expensive caskets.
What used to be an intimate and essentially cost free process taking place at the home has in the last 150 years, grown into a professionalized $20 billion a year funeral industry.
Increasingly, funeral homes are part of larger chains in corporate entities, along with every other element of the business, from caskets to gravestones, the personal is further and further removed.