[TheLarch]

I found this article disappointing because there's no advancement of a thesis or journalistic investigation. The author could have tracked down any number of illuminating statistics: number of wing suits sold over time; BASE/wing suit deaths over time; number of live videos posted over time. As the piece lacks either of these, it's almost pointless and thus the author attempts to tie it together with a question, just as you often see in college essays. There's no honest attempt to answer the question. So it's neither an essay nor investigative journalism. It's Reader's Digest. The article cashes in on prurient interest in death without paying anything back.

(To be clear this is an interesting topic to me. I followed Dean Potter for years, back from when he first made his name for slacklining and climbing.)