JWA talks to Marisa Scheinfeld, founder and director of the Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project. 

As the year comes to a close, the New York Times Magazine published “The Lives They Lived,” an annual feature celebrating the lives of people who died over the last year. The collage is a mix of people known and unknown. This assortment of stories is more gender-balanced than the regular obituary section of the New York Times, which received criticism this year for its editorial policies regarding whose stories are important enough to record.