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Perhaps people have been rewatching S07E22 of The Simpsons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raging_Abe_Simpson_and_His_Gru...

Or Archer: http://archer.wikia.com/wiki/The_Double_Deuce

Or Barney Miller: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0519144/

I come from the retirement industry, and attention to tontines has been increasing at a steady rate for a number of years.

Some of the drivers of this are:

1) Ageing populations.

2) The people currently pondering retirement have significant assets because they lived through a time of significant economic growth.

3) Increasingly cash-strapped governments and their social security worries

It makes sense when you consider that for people that have been relatively diligent about saving for retirement, they still confront two big risks: longevity (outliving their assets) and long-term care (nursing homes/assisted living). This confronts one of the issues...

The Baader-Meinhof effect combined with a growing awareness of your own mortality?

Unlikely. These articles may be being spurred by some research from two years ago on modernizing tontine pensions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine#Tontine_pensions