Suicide’s a funny thing. When a healthy 28 year old dies out of nowhere it could be something else (undetected heart condition, epileptic seizure, sudden bacterial sepsis, murder…), but it’s probably suicide. And eventually news coverage will straightforwardly include the S-word; but there’s often a slow walk, as it were, to the scaffold.
This Daily Princeton article about a brilliant cutting-edge engineering postdoc, for instance, notes that no cause of death has been given, but also says in its last sentence:
[Haoran] Li’s death is at least the eighth of a current or recent student at Princeton in the last four years, including four determined to be suicides.
And the word “suicides” will get the article’s last word. Nuff said.
September 29th, 2025 at 11:55PM
When a rich college student dies, it is often suicide. When a poor young person dies, it is often fentanyl overdose.
September 30th, 2025 at 2:28AM
A way of death closely akin to suicide, gasstation…