After the tragedies that come all too often—9/11, the Gulf, Newtown—the call goes out to Ken Feinberg to do what no man can possibly do: ease the pain by Chris Jones. Published in the January 2014 issue of Esquire.

“We live in the age of Feinberg. Between September 11 and today, he has overseen the accounting of thousands of dead: nearly all of the 2,977 victims of 9/11; the thirty-two faculty and students slain during the Virginia Tech massacre; the eleven lost oil-rig workers of the Deepwater Horizon disaster; the seven people crushed by a collapsing stage at the Indiana State Fair; the ten spectators killed by a crashing plane at the Reno Air Races; the twelve midnight moviegoers gunned down in Aurora, Colorado; the twenty-six educators and children murdered in Newtown, Connecticut; and, most recently, the four people either blown up or shot during the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath. Feinberg has also determined the compensation for everyone injured during those calamities, determining the value of lost legs and 85 percent of someone’s skin, as well as for the hundreds of thousands of oystermen and hoteliers and shrimpers affected by the oil slick in the Gulf.”