Bogus Trend Stories, Summer Edition
Chubby is hip; laptoppers evicted from coffee shops; DIY burial.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, Aug. 14, 2009, at 3:20 PM ET
Slate.com

Finally, last month (July 21), in a story headlined "Home Burials Offer an Intimate Alternative," the New York Times hyped the idea that "a growing number of people nationwide" are turning family funerals into do-it-yourself events.

If the New York Times wants to maintain that a growing number of America's sons and daughters have taken to floating their dead parents on a bed of ice for a nice DIY service in the family parlor, surely somebody has performed a body count that documents that fact. Alas, the Times article presents no home-buried counts for any year. The closest the story comes to putting a number to the practice is when it reports that one "death midwife" has "helped more with 300 families with funerals" since 1995, weekend workshops that instruct folks in how to plant their loved ones "have a waiting list," and the number of "organizations or individuals nationwide that help families with the process" stood at two in 2002 and is 45 today. The first anecdote doesn't measure anything meaningful, and the other two only establish that there is some interest in home burial, not that it is booming. So desperate is the Times to put a face on this nontrend that it mentions parenthetically that Michael Jackson's family was thinking of burying him at Neverland. Right. I can see Joe Jackson washing Michael's body, Tito digging the grave, and Jermaine assembling the funeral bouquet.

This trend is DOA.

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