OC: Earlier this month, I posted a dashboard for exploring 2.2 million New York Times articles going back to 2000. I’ve now added a way to explore all 29,000 obituaries the paper has published during that period, and it reveals a lot about who makes history.

An estimated 1.5 billion people have died worldwide since 2000, so the Times has memorialized roughly 0.0019% of them. The number of obituaries rose briefly during COVID but has not grown much overall, despite the expansion of celebrity culture.

Very few obituary subjects were under 25. The youngest was Shannon Tavarez , the 11-year-old who played Nala in The Lion King . The oldest subject lived to 141 — Gramma , a Galapagos tortoise.

Despite efforts by the paper to address a gender imbalance, the Times still publishes roughly two obituaries of men for every one obituary of a woman.

And the imbalance is sharpest at the very top.…