Saul Newman‘s book, titled Morbid, is now loosed upon the world of people who want to read books that make people laugh, then really think. Published by MIT Press, it’s based on and extends the research that won Newman an Ig Nobel Prize.
The 2024 Ig Nobel Demography Prize was awarded to Saul Justin Newman, for detective work to discover that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping. At that point, much of his research was reported in his paper: “Supercentenarian and Remarkable Age Records Exhibit Patterns Indicative of Clerical Errors and Pension Fraud,” Saul Justin Newman, BioRxiv, 2024.
For years, Newman had trouble getting demography research journals to publish anything he wrote. There’s a likely reason for that. If what Newman discovered in scouring official birth/death records is accurate — as appears to be the case — much research by senior demography researchers is now suspect.
You can read an excerpt from the book online. It bears the headline “Longevity Research Has a Bullshit Problem — How impossible ages, lost paperwork, and invented biographies become scientific fact“.