Marta Voss, 55, professional mourner based in Copenhagen. She attends funerals of strangers for a fee and grieves with skill. She has attended 1,400 funerals since 2001. She does not consider this morbid; she considers it a public service in a culture that has forgotten how to grieve collectively. She charges more for funerals where no one else is crying. She has never cried at her own losses and does not know what this means.

Felix Andrade, 44, cartographer who specializes in maps of places that do not exist. His clients include novelists, game designers, and one government agency that has never explained its needs. He designs the maps before the places are described, arguing that geography precedes culture. He has been commissioned to map seven finished fantasy worlds and disagrees with the resulting books in four cases. He does not say so publicly.