I love reading The New York Times' obituaries. When it comes to writing about dead people, by dead people, the paper has no rivals in the journalistic world with its elegant summation of a departed soul.
This week, the paper has outdone itself again, paying the ultimate tribute by deploying one of its crack team of dead editors to write about Edward Teller (right), the controversial physicist and father of the hydrogen bomb, who died on Tuesday in his home in Palo Alto, California, at the age of 95. Actually, this has become a bit of a Times ritual. In July, the obituary of funnyman Bob Hope carried the byline of Vincent Canby, the paper's veteran movie critic who died in 2000.
This time, Wednesday's obituary, charting Teller's career from maths prodigy in Budapest to the most powerful nuclear weapons advocate in the United States, was bylined by the Times' former science editor, Walter Sullivan, who died in 1996.
It's well known that the Times prepares obituaries on famous people long before they kick the bucket. Sullivan's seven-year-old piece really held up well because, obviously, there was nothing worth mentioning in the final years of Teller's life, except his meeting his maker this week.