Summary: <p>700,000. That’s the latest<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/us/us-covid-deaths-700k.html"> COVID death count</a> to dominate a headline in the United States. Over the last 19 months, we’ve seen a steady trickle of these morbid milestones in the news. They are one way to measure, and try to understand, the COVID-19 pandemic. In the world of journalism, death is a metric that’s important. It indicates significance, newsworthiness, and tragedy. But death is also an inevitable part of the human experience. This is a fact that journalist <a href="https://twitter.com/katieengelhart?lang=en">Katie Engelhart</a> highlights in the title of her new book <em><a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250201461">The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die</a></em>. Brooke Gladstone spoke to Engelhart about the complicated ethics of physician-assisted deaths and the surprising parameters within which people can end their lives.</p>
