“There’s only two people that I know that walked out of their own grave alive, and that was Jesus Christ and me.” So begins an episode of this nine-part podcast about people who have faked their own deaths—from a 14th-century nun who wanted out of her chaste life to the former professional boxer Ramon Sosa, who pretended to have bit the big one to evade a hit man on his tail. Then there is the British M.P. who staged a drowning to evade mounting debts, and the 19-year-old Internet star who, after an alleged death by leukemia, turned out to be a middle-aged mom from Kansas. Pseudocide is colorful and entertaining, but it also gets at the questions that keep us up at night. What if a loved one isn’t dead after all? And what’s it like to live twice? —J.V.
A Monthly Culture Matrix For the Cosmopolitan Traveler
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