Throwing 40 years’ worth of journals into the fire.

The something that Chochinov decided to create was a formal written narrative of the patient’s life — a document that could be passed on to whomever they chose. The patients would be asked a series of questions about their life history, and the parts they remember most or think are most important. Their answers would be transcribed and presented to them for editing until, after going back and forth with the therapist, a polished document resulted that could be passed on to the people that they loved.

They came wearing bowties and fancy hats, skinny jeans and peasant blouses. They came armed with smartphones, tablets, and laptops. On the evening of Friday, May 20, 500 young adults gathered at the New York Public Library (NYPL) to do what no one had done before: spend the entire night in one of the city’s great public spaces, indulging in an ambitious, interactive game that would test their collaborative abilities while introducing them to the library’s vast holdings.

“If you were at a cocktail party and you go, ‘Oh, you’re a person who’s into this?’ ” Mr. Schur said recently at his office in Studio City, “now I know what you and I are doing for the next two hours. We’re talking about this.”

“Hitchcock: Piece by Piece” by Laurent Bouzereau.

“I hate that instant memorialising,” he said. “Little shrines erected in some university library around the handkerchief in which Graham Greene blew his nose in 1957.”

Notes on Empire of the Sun Photograph: Estate of JG Ballard/The British Library

“Butler had not invited the fugitives in or engineered their escape, but here they were, literally at his doorstep: a conundrum with political and military implications, at the very least. He could not have known — not yet — that his response that day might change the course of the national drama that was then just beginning. Yet it was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that an unanticipated bureaucratic dilemma would force the hand of history.”