by: Joe Pompeo | Capital New York

On a recent Thursday evening, Noah Rosenberg and a dozen other journalists in their '20s and '30s were huddled around a skinny picnic table at a Greenpoint beer hall called Spritzenhaus. The topic was death.

One of them was working on a feature about what it’s like to live in an apartment where the previous resident met some sort of tragic end. A second idea being kicked around was to do something about the old potter's field on Hart Island, a resting place for 850,000 souls just off the eastern shoreline of the Bronx. And another one of the writers was working on something about assisted suicide, a topic for which access to potential subjects was proving difficult to arrange.