They dance with abandon on Friday nights, and they’re always gone by the time the clock strikes 10. Joseph Bernstein’s fly-on-the-wall treatment of the rollicking weekly institution known as “Geezer Happy Hour” — complete with photography that’ll plaster a smile on your face — is the perfect crowd-pleaser to take into the weekend. May we all keep the same energy as we head into our sixties and beyond.
The staff of Live, which transforms into a bottles-and-tables dance club for young professionals around 10 p.m., adores the elderly crowd.
“They have the most fun,” said Chelsea Anderson, a 31-year-old bartender, who has been working the happy hour for six years. “Everybody loves each other. It’s a stark difference from the late crowd, where everyone is upset and barfing.”
This is a highly moving and deeply personal essay on choosing when to die. Robin Williamson carried out the “SWITZERLAND Schedule” — her mother’s assisted suicide at Dignitas — along with her family, after a final month of them all living together, contemplating what is to come.
As unpleasant and difficult and tiresome as it was, much of that month leading up to the event was a kind of idyll. For one, my mother was still alive. And it had been so long since we’d been together as a family. Or the last time ever, depending on how you look at it. I see this period in summary in the image of a family around a television. My father, my brothers and me are spread across the sofas, beers for us, red wine for him. My mother is beside a sofa, sitting on her scooter, a glass of scotch just within reach. An ordinary family in ordinary times.
Andrew Deck and Raksha Kumar | Rest of World | January 10, 2023 | 5,737 words
Justice can mean equality, and it can also mean retribution. In the case of Artsiom Kulik and Ashton Bingham, who have carved out a robust career orchestrating “scambusting” videos, their conception seems to skew heavily to the latter. But Kulik and Bingham’s gleeful payback has a discomfiting subtext. Somewhere along the way, Trilogy Media graduated from simply annoying phone scammers to releasing mice and cockroaches into a Kolkata call center — and as the stakes have gotten bigger, so has the sense that this isn’t really about justice at all. Andrew Deck and Raksha Kumar’s piece is a profile on its face, and an investigation at its core. With the fake Best Picture Oscar on display in their office, the Trilogy duo sees itself as destined for bigger and better things; what they don’t see is that they’ve gone from coming up to punching down. This isn’t the first story to reveal the craven heart of a content creator’s ambition, but it’s the rare example that goes a step farther to tease out the troubling power dynamics at play. —PR
Ryan Lenora Brown | Business Insider | December 30, 2022 | 5,363 words
In 1999, Sergio and Arnold Motsoeneng stunned the running world by cheating in the Comrades, an ultra-marathon in South Africa. The country was barely out of apartheid’s grip, and the twin brothers’ decision to swap clothes in a portable toilet was seen as a betrayal. In the eyes of racists, it was also a harbinger. “It felt to many like it was saying something … about the moral character of Black South Africans generally,” Ryan Lenora Brown writes. “Look, they said, this is who you’ve handed our country to.” Twenty-three years after the fact, Brown found the brothers, and they agreed to be interviewed. The resulting feature is a “where are they now” story, but Brown also considers where they were then. When the brothers cheated, there was serious money on the line — the Comrades winner would receive the equivalent of more than 70 years’ worth of the salary earned by the twins’ father. “Nobody wants to be poor forever,” Sergio told Brown. This is a complicated story, written with grace, and Brown does a memorable job describing both scenes and their stakes. —SD
Kate Evans | bioGraphic | June 4, 2022 | 4,304 words
Stumbling upon this piece, I didn’t expect to find it gripping, never having had a particular penchant for giant snails. I was wrong. The world of the nautilus is fascinating, and Kate Evans’ buoyant writing had me hooked. Only a handful of scientists have studied these creatures, even though they have survived all five of Earth’s past major extinction events; for centuries, writes Evans, their beautiful swirling shape has inspired “art, architecture, and math across many cultures.” These guys are both survivors and influencers. They are also smart: In one experiment, they are taught to navigate to deeper water by a beacon in their tank, but when the beacon moves and the tank shifts, they unexpectedly start to orient themselves using a wall poster of 20th-century chemist Rosalind Franklin, which hangs in the lab. I appreciated Evans taking the time to break from the science and detail their cheeky side — spending time with some nautiluses is akin to hanging out with “a gang of troublesome 12-year-olds.” However, it is not all lighthearted, and the nautilus researchers Evans spends time with have some stark warnings about a warming ocean; climate change may be the one event these cephalopods can’t survive. —CW
Jenny Diski | London Review of Books | July 31, 2008 | 2,791 words
In the last few years, sleep and I have had a strained relationship. I make appropriate advances in the form of a consistent bedtime, dutifully parking my screen for a paperback during pre-sleep reading. My phone remains in Do Not Disturb mode 24/7, yet sleep spurns me. As humans, we always want what we can’t have. That’s why I was drawn to the late Jenny Diski’s 2008 essay at the London Review of Books about her childhood love affair with the process of falling asleep, of lingering in that liminal stage between sleep and wakefulness, confident in the fact that sleep would surely come. (If only!) “Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep. Actually, my speciality is not sleep itself, but the hinterland of sleep, the point of entry to unconsciousness. So I remember it, and so it still is, at its best, the border territory of sleep. The whole point is to extend the unsleeping moment, and to drop into a state where all logic and reason disappears, while I nevertheless retain an essential degree of awareness of the strangeness I’ve achieved. ” —KS
Adam Reiner | Taste | January 1, 2023 | 2,243 words
“Menus provide a window into history, a vital connection to our foodways,” writes Adam Reiner in this fun read about restaurant menus. Frank E. Buttolph, a volunteer archivist at the New York Public Library, amassed 25,000 menus from around the world before she died in 1924. Today, the NYPL’s Buttolph Collection numbers 40,000, dating back to 1843, with most menus from between 1890 and 1910. What was served in the first Japanese and French restaurants in New York? What dishes were considered expensive or high-end or adventurous in the early 1900s? The collection’s menus, writes Reiner, are sources of inspiration for today’s chefs, researchers, and the simply (epi)curious. The scanned ones featured in his story are lovely to look at, and make you want to visit the NYPL yourself so you can pore over these pages. In our era of restaurant apps and QR codes, Reiner has also opened my eyes to the value of a physical, printed menu; I’ve always enjoyed reading the descriptions of dishes and cocktails, but after reading his piece, I realize how much a menu can also illuminate the historical and cultural context of the food they describe. —CLR
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In this excerpt from RIKERS: An Oral History by Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau, staff, visitors, and the incarcerated recount the horrors of their first visit to the New York jail complex.
YUSEF SALAAM, detained 1989 to 1994, Central Park 5 case: I can’t really describe in words this horror and this horrible feeling coupled with that horror, but it had a lot to do with the smell of the place. We’re talking about a place that smelled like death, vomit, urine, feces, and like the bad train stations in New York City all wrapped up in one. And one of the first encounters I had with somebody coming up to me while I was inside the holding cell, they were asking me to check out my watch, and I didn’t realize this, but they were trying to steal the watch from me.
And I remember [the Central Park 5 co-defendant] Antron [McCray] saying, “No, don’t let them check your watch out, man. You know what I’m saying? Like they’re trying to get you, this is a trick, you know?”
KATHY MORSE [detained, 2006]: I just remember how medieval the reception cells were. The toilet didn’t flush, but people were still using it. They were going to the bathroom or to vomit. It was just a mess. I don’t do drugs so I have never been exposed to that. There were women on the floor throwing up, getting violently sick because they were withdrawing. One woman in the cell had crack hidden in her hair, and it fell out. And they all scrambled around the floor, like it was a piñata that had been opened. That was the first time I had ever seen crack in my life. It was just a horrible experience. And the officers were trying to figure out who brought it into the cell. They did take away what they could, but they only got a portion.
In 1999, twin brothers in South Africa cheated in the Comrades, an ultra-marathon. They did it by swapping clothes in a portable toilet halfway through the race. Their actions stunned the country, and their names became synonymous with deceit. But why did they do it?
It’s hard, sometimes, not to read everything that happens in South Africa as a metaphor. This is a country where the jailers handed the keys to the inmates, and everyone was told to forgive. While the whole world watched, Nelson Mandela shook hands with apartheid’s last president, FW de Klerk, and told him, What is past, is past — “Wat is verby, is verby!”
The story of two young men, born into one of the most unequal societies on earth, trying — imperfectly, deceitfully — to find their way out of it also feels like something bigger than itself. It’s a version of what South Africans have been doing for a generation now since the end of apartheid. As Sergio tells me, “Nobody wants to be poor forever.”
For Sergio and Arnold, the past was something they believed they could, quite literally, outrun. It didn’t turn out like that, but it didn’t turn out like that for most Black South Africans either. In the generation since the end of apartheid, inequality has remained stubbornly persistent. The wealthiest 3,500 South Africans own more than the poorest 32 million. Much of the country’s elite is now Black, but so too are nearly all its poorest people.
When Sergio and Arnold cheated, it felt to many like it was saying something not just about them, but about the moral character of Black South Africans generally. Look, they said, this is who you’ve handed our country to. As I sat speaking to Sergio, South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was fighting for his political life after revelations that wads of cash, potentially ill-gotten, had been stolen from inside his sofa.
Of course corruption isn’t limited to Black leaders, in South Africa or anywhere else. The apartheid regime was shot through with graft. Its first Black government inherited a state that was nearly bankrupt. And a generation, like Sergio and Arnold, came of age promised a world that was, for most of them, never going to materialize.
“You have to be Zola Budd level to get out of here,” Eugene remarked to me, referring to the bare-footed white South African teenager who became a record-breaking runner for England in the 1980s. “People steal millions, and yet this [Sergio] is the guy they want to go after.”
Before he sits down to write, Pravesh Bhardwaj looks for inspiration. Nearly every day, he reads a short story freely available online and shares it on his Twitter thread. Each year he chooses his 10 favorites to share with Longreads readers.
Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You is a collection of interlinked short stories following a Jamaican family living in Miami. “In Flux” is excerpted from this collection.
“Why does your mother talk so funny?” your neighbor insists.
Your mother calls to you from the front porch, has called from this perch overlooking the sloping yard time and time again since you were allowed to join the neighborhood kids in play. Always, this signals that playtime is over, only now, shame has latched itself to the ritual.
Perhaps you’d hoped no one would ever notice. Perhaps you’d never quite noticed it yourself. Perhaps you ask in shallow protest, “What do you mean, ‘What language?’” Maybe you only think it. Ultimately, you mutter, “English. She’s speaking English,” before heading inside, head tucked in embarrassment.
In this moment, and for the first time, you are ashamed of your mother, and you are ashamed of yourself for not further defending her. More so than to be cowardly and disloyal, though, it’s shameful to be foreign. If you’ve learned anything in your short time on earth, you’ve learned this.
Two grieving siblings must take a road journey in this dark and complex story by Lauren Groff.
He woke to an angry house and darkness in the windows. Aunt Maisie had packed his suitcase the night before and left it near the front door, and so he dressed himself without turning on the light and came out and dropped the pajamas on top of the suitcase. She was in the kitchen, banging the pans around.
Buddy, she said when she saw him, set yourself down and get some of this food in you. Her eyes were funny, all red and puffy, and he didn’t like to see them like that. When he sat down, she came up behind him and hugged his head so hard it hurt, and her hands smelled like soap and cigarettes and grease, and he pulled away.
He ate her eggs, which were like his mother’s eggs, though her biscuit was not like his mother’s biscuit; it was too dry, and there was no tomato jam. When he was finished, she took his plate and fork and washed them.
Ken Liu’s disturbing story is told by the family members of a young woman killed in a mass shooting. The story is included in Ken Liu’s collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.
So you want to know about Hayley.
No, I’m used to it, or at least I should be by now. People only want to hear about my sister.
It was a dreary, rainy Friday in October, the smell of fresh fallen leaves in the air. The black tupelos lining the field hockey pitch had turned bright red, like a trail of bloody footprints left by a giant.
I had a quiz in French II and planned a week’s worth of vegan meals for a family of four in family and consumer science. Around noon, Hayley messaged me from California.
Skipped class. Q and I are driving to the festival right now!!!
I ignored her. She delighted in taunting me with the freedoms of her college life. I was envious, but didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of showing it.
In the afternoon, Mom messaged me.
Have you heard from Hayley?
No. The sisterly code of silence was sacred. Her secret boyfriend was safe with me.
“If you do, call me right away.”
I put the phone away. Mom was the helicopter type.
As soon as I got home from field hockey, I knew something was wrong. Mom’s car was in the driveway, and she never left work this early.
The TV was on in the basement.
Mom’s face was ashen. In a voice that sounded strangled, she said, “Hayley’s RA called. She went to a music festival. There’s been a shooting.”
“In a Jar” comes from Morgan Talty’s collection Night of the Living Rez. The story is set in Maine on the Penobscot Indian reservation where young David finds a jar of teeth which might be a curse left by someone wishing David’s family ill.
On those steps I wasn’t playing for too long before I lost one of my men to a gap between the stairs and the door. It was a red alien guy, and although he wasn’t my favorite, I still cared enough about him to go get him. Looking behind the steps, my knees were wet when I knelt in the snow, and my hands were cold and muddy when I pulled myself up. The sun warmed my neck, and a sliver of sunlight also shone behind the concrete steps, right at the perfect angle, and in the light I thought I saw my toy man. But when I reached into the slush I grabbed hold of something hard and round instead. I pulled it out.
It was a glass jar filled with hair and corn and teeth. The teeth were white with a tint of yellow at the root. The hair was gray and thin and loose. And the corn was kind of like the teeth, white and yellow and looked hard.
‘Mumma,’ I said. ‘What is this?’
‘David,’ she said from inside the shed. ‘Can you wait? Please, honey.’
I said nothing, waited, and examined the jar. My hand was slightly red from either the hot glass sitting in the sun all afternoon or from the cold snow I crawled on.
Mom came out of the shed, squinting in the bright light.
‘What’s what, gwus?’ she said. Little boy, she meant.
I held the jar to her and she took it. I watched her look at it, her head tilted and brown eyes wide as the jar. And then she dropped it into the snow and mud and told me to pack up my toys. ‘No, no, never mind,’ she said. ‘Leave the toys. Come on, let’s go inside.’
She got on the phone and called somebody, whose voice on the other end I could hear and sounded familiar. ‘I’ll be by,’ he said. ‘I can get there soon. Don’t touch it, and don’t let him touch anything.’
Karnoor, a poet, translator, and novelist writes some memorable women characters in this short story.
Rituparna had been an ideal student. She hung on to Sameer’s every word and spent long hours with him in the studio. She was also a good guest – she not only helped with the chores but took on some of the household responsibilities upon herself and was always thanking Aruna for allowing her to stay. ‘This is not an internship, this is the continuation of the guru-shishya tradition,’ she would say and jokingly call Aruna her ‘guru-ma.’ After this, there was no way Aruna could have been threatened by the proximity of her husband to this sultry, curly-haired woman nearly 15 years their junior. Moreover, Aruna was herself every bit the shade of monsoon clouds with a cascade of ringlets like the falling of nights that held the promise of laughter in them. She had turned many a head in her time and though slightly heavier under the chin now and with some grey peeking out at the temples, she was aware of her charm. That’s why she noticed nothing when a month later, stylishly unkempt Sameer began paying special attention to his grooming. And that’s why she noticed nothing when guru and disciple began going on long walks into the hills to discuss art history. She was just happy to have the house to herself and enjoy the peace of solitude. She noticed nothing when something furtive crept into Sameer’s behaviour and Rituparna began avoiding eye contact. That’s why it took her a couple of hours before realizing something was amiss when one day she came home from shopping for supplies to find them both missing and his car gone.
Mieko Kawakami’s novel Heaven was short-listed for the International Booker Prize in 2022.
It took only thirty minutes to cut down the wisteria tree. Its roots, abandoned on the dirt, resembled arms that grasped at something in midair. The excavator crushed everything, mixing the laundry pole, the flowerpots, and the stones. It trampled the porch and bulldozed through the house, mercilessly clawing through the furniture and screen doors. So that’s how you destroy a house, I thought, half-amused and impressed. The old two-story house that had stood majestically in the corner lot diagonally across the road was being destroyed, and I was watching the spectacle from my second-floor kitchen window.
An old woman had lived there. I would sometimes see her. When we moved into the neighborhood six years ago, we tried to pay a visit to the house a few times, but no one ever answered the door. Every once in a while, I would pass the old woman on the street as she walked slowly around the house in the morning and evening hours, leaning against a cart. We never exchanged greetings, and yet I felt strangely serene in those moments. She always wore a black blouse with a black cardigan draped over her shoulders, and in the spring evenings, I would see her walking slowly out of the rusted gate onto the sidewalk with a broom and dustpan in her hands. When the wisteria tree shed its flowers, the gray asphalt would be covered in shades of white and pale purple, and every time the wind blew, the petals would dance in the air. The old woman would spend a long time sweeping up those petals from one corner of the road to the other. The petals fell even on seemingly windless nights, and the following day, the old woman would emerge slowly with her broom and dustpan again. This would continue until the flowers were gone. But I had not seen her recently. When was the last time I saw her?
A bank teller falls in love with an easygoing older customer who doesn’t want to have an exclusive relationship.
“What is your name, dear?” he asked carefully, pulling out his wallet and putting it down on the counter.
“Angela,” she said.
“Angela, my name is Thomas.” He handed over his bank card. “Could I please have three hundred dollars in cash from my savings account?”
She rolled her eyes slightly, but as soon as she did she regretted it. She liked the man, and even if this was something that could have been done at the A.T.M. she shouldn’t have rolled her eyes. She was simply so used to disliking her customers, and she immediately apologized. “I’m sorry I rolled my eyes. It’s just habit.”
“A lot of things are habit,” he agreed, and didn’t seem offended.
“I have lots of bad habits,” she said.
“I do, too,” he said. “It takes a lifetime to get rid of them, and even then that is not enough time.”
As she counted out his money, she asked, “What habits have you overcome and which do you still have?”
“I no longer smoke or drink, but I tell little white lies. In fact, I do smoke and drink sometimes. No, I guess I haven’t overcome any.”
“I forget to exercise, and I eat junk food all the time.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Your body knows what it needs better than you do, better than all the magazines do, better than the doctors do, better than your girlfriends do. You just keep eating your junk food and lazing around.”
“Thank you,” she said. “No one has ever said that.”
“You do whatever you want. It really doesn’t matter.”
When her promising career is halted by the betrayal of a childhood friend, a young woman finds it difficult to reconcile her new situation or with the childhood friend who faces eviction. “Tumble” is one of eight interlinked stories in Sidik Fofana’s debut collection Stories From the Tenants Downstairs.
Usually, they give you time. You might see a notice on someone’s door for the whole year. Now, several units were getting one on the same day.
So less than a week into my time as a building liaison, Emeraldine hands me a printout of Banneker tenants who got notices in the past month—twentysome in all. She does it with this attitude like she’s waiting for me to object, but I just take the list and act like the new worker who’s happy to get work.
We gonna start setting those folks up with the Citizens Legal Fund, she goes.
I hold up the list doing my best to murmur the names. Michelle Sutton, Darius Kite, Verona Dallas. Then I get to one that cold knocks me out. I move it close to my face to make sure it’s not a mistake. Kya Rhodes.
Tochi Eze’s story about two sisters announces the arrival of another promising writer from Nigeria.
I was six years old when Kambili was pink and soft. Dad and Mum were loud with their joy—after five years of trying again, waiting again, Kambili was their prize at the end of those frantic years. Daddy’s trophy. Mummy’s answered prayer. Mine to watch and care for.
Mummy had returned from the hospital that Sunday after mass while Daddy fried yams and egg sauce in the kitchen. I could still taste the hot honeyed Lipton tea stinging my mouth when Daddy waltzed out to the parlor, swaying to highlife music from Oliver De Coque, his happiness hung on his neck and lips, on the bridge of his nose. I wanted to pull his neck to my chest, hear his laugh close to me, tickling me till I was bouncing and laughing too. I reached out, my arms wide open in their endless regard for him, wanting, even at six, to be picked up and lifted in the air. But then the gate rattled, the car honked, and Daddy and I knew that Mummy was back. She stepped out of Baba Kunle’s yellow taxi, with grandmama behind her, both of them smelling of white powder and fresh baby.
When Kambili was five months old, I snuck into her room as Mummy fried akara in the kitchen and I pierced her tiny baby shoulder with a razor. I watched her baby blood spurt into the sheets, and I screamed, and she screamed, and I ran to fetch Mummy.
Ursa Story Company, helmed by Dawnie Walton, Mark Armstrong*, and Deesha Philyaw, offers audio and web versions of their stories. “Happy Family” is set in a Chinatown restaurant in a bygone era.
When the real estate business was failing, and my parents’ marriage was also failing, my mother and my stepfather took out a second mortgage and opened a restaurant. This was on Grand Street, on the other side of Chinatown. My parents christened it “Ga Hing” for “Happy Family,” which didn’t make sense to me at the time because we were barely a family, and nowhere near happy. My stepfather wasn’t happy because he played mahjong, and had accumulated the kind of debt that was so impossible to pay off, he was convinced that turning back to the game could save him. My mother wasn’t happy because she said that she already knew what it was like to be poor, and that being poor again was worse because it was now entangled with bitterness and regret. I wasn’t happy because I somehow understood, even then, that there were things that I would never be able to get back. I was fourteen; I was about to start high school. In short, it was the end of my childhood.
It was expected of me to work at Ga Hing, to contribute for the good of the family. And while my classmates could spend their afternoons at the Ice Cream Factory, or roam the halls of Elizabeth Center for anime action figures and keychains and fancy pens, I had to work at the restaurant, and at most, wish that I could be elsewhere. One wouldn’t think that at such a young age, I could learn how to take orders, serve dishes, or even work the register. But when push came to shove, I found that I could learn rather quickly.
On first mention, the idea sounds great: Turning the tables on phone scammers. Both karma and catharsis, it’s a huge part of the reason Arsion Kulik and Ashton Bingham’s videos have garnered hundreds of thousands of subscribers. But there’s something far less great lurking here too — something that this Rest of World profile-slash-investigation deftly exposes.
Trilogy’s pursuit of vigilante justice has proved a hit with their many fans, whom they refer to as “the squad.” But for some, their antics lay bare an uncomfortable power dynamic in which YouTubers in Los Angeles gain viral fame at the expense of Indian call center workers, physically harassing people whose situation they may know little about.
A high school English teacher in Georgia delivers a withering critique of the conservative crusade to undermine public education. Ian Altman suggests that what drives the effort is fear of enlightenment — and fear of being found out:
The current horde of book banners and goons at education board meetings (not a new thing in this country) could be seen as evidence of how education fails, thanks to teachers dutifully following instructions and carefully avoiding the touchy political matters that lie at the heart of any serious study of literature and history. These adults’ caterwauling grew out of the wholesome compliance and deference to rules and decorum they learned in school, though without seeming to have paid much attention to what they read. We do not need to look beyond ostensibly respectable classics to see the irony that almost anything worth reading and studying will be filled with morally ambiguous and repugnant characters, narrate foolish or appalling behavior, and cause us to engage with discomfiting ideas. The desire to avoid good literature — or to teach it badly, as though it were somehow safe — comes at the cost of intellectual and moral stunting.
It is not unusual, for example, to find antiheroes in American war novels: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage has Henry Fleming fleeing the battle and seeking to overcome his shame; in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry takes shrapnel while eating a piece of cheese, saying that words like courage are obscene, and escapes summary execution from his own allies; Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 identifies not the Nazis but the U.S. Army bureaucracy as Yossarian’s enemy. As for family values, recall Mercutio teasing Romeo with an image of anal sex, Edna Pontellier’s adultery and suicide in The Awakening, Odysseus and Telemachus torturing Melanthius to death and feeding his genitals to dogs. And race cannot be sidelined: the tragedy of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is caused not by incest but by the threat of miscegenation, and Richard Wright’s Native Son spins a doomed web with an executioner at its heart. We don’t need any theory, critical or otherwise, to justify teaching these books. This is the work of a public school teacher. Teachers didn’t invent the subversion threaded throughout canonical literature or the thorns and complexity of history. Reading anything worthwhile means discovering those ideas, as I did when a student’s comment about the theft of Black Americans’ history caused me to rethink how I taught August Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson. As I thought about what he said, it became clear to me how different it is merely to have history than to possess it, with all the ethical and political weight that possession carries. Teaching that through the play’s symbolism gave students a new way to interpret some facets of America’s twentieth century. Perhaps some adults are frightened not of what students will learn about themselves but of what they’ll learn about their parents and older generations.
Those who trouble over this could learn something from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In it Ivan dreams that the Grand Inquisitor arrests the risen Christ to preserve happiness and the security of not having to choose good over evil, arguing that having the power of choice does not help the church, that moral freedom is too awful a burden for most people to bear. We wouldn’t be wrong to detect Lucifer’s pride in the inquisitor’s arguments. For all their talk of liberty, those who would threaten and abuse teachers and proclaim which books are evil seem awfully afraid of their children having the power to choose virtue.
In this piece, Kate Evans explains just how unique and magical nautiluses are. Be prepared to find yourself fascinated by an animal that has often been labeled a “dumb snail.”
Number 3 was the teacher’s pet. Number 13 was always trying to break out of her car seat. Number 9 lived the longest in captivity, 10 years, and he was Basil’s favorite: “Oh, he was a prince.” He would curl his tentacles around her finger when she reached into the water, and when he got old, Basil gave him a “retirement tank” and his favorite food—lobster carapaces she scrounged from fancy New York restaurants.
This is a lovely essay exploring the writer’s bond with some sanctuary wolves. They keep calling to her over great distances, and for many years, displaying the importance of the connection she found. Eventually, she finds peace with where she is, but the wolves remain unforgotten.
I found my stride when the cool spring winds blew during long summer days. Somewhere between the crunch of earth beneath my feet; the sun on my cheeks; the fur in my hands; the labor, stillness, and isolation; the caw of ravens; the march of tarantulas; and the lock of golden wolf eyes, I was forged into someone new.
Transcendental meditation: is it the key to world peace or corporate hokum? For The Baffler, Lauren Collee learns the practice and explores some of TM’s curious history to find out for herself.
Previously, the Maharishi had claimed that for quality of life to improve, at least one percent of the population had to practice TM; an equation that was known as the “Maharishi effect.” After the introduction of the TM-Sidhi program, he proposed that if the square root of one percent of the population practiced Yogic flying at the same time, noticeable benefits would be seen in society. This was known as the “extended Maharishi effect.” Doug Henning did the math and incorporated it into his 1993 federal election campaign in Canada. “Seven thousand yogic flyers can create a perfect government with the ability to satisfy everyone,” he explained to his would-be voters. “All of our national problems are basically caused by stress. And the best antidote is Transcendental Meditation and seven thousand yogic flyers.”
Is TM extracting money via false promises to potentially vulnerable people? Most certainly yes. But is the whole enterprise one big sham? It depends on how you look at it. Over the years, TM has grown and splintered. Some of its branches are undoubtedly rotten. Others perhaps remain well-intentioned. All things considered, I regret giving money to the organization, and wish that I had trained with teachers who situate themselves outside of the official TM umbrella, as some of my friends have done. At the same time, I do not regret learning TM. I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling that my mind and I weren’t the best of friends. The central principle of TM—that every person’s mind has a natural tendency towards a state of happiness and tranquillity, and need not be viewed as an enemy to be subdued—is deeply reassuring to me.
Yes, this is the second story about professional wrestling appearing on Longreads in a single monthweek day. But Dan Brooks’ story — about an upstart character in an upstart league who upends everything you thought you knew about the sport — is also one of the best explications of kayfabe’s meta-fineries I’ve ever read, and accomplishes the nearly impossible task of making me wish I followed the sport.
Danhausen’s dubious command of occult forces is only one aspect of his absurd presentation, which blurs the line between what is supposed to be real in the fictive world of pro wrestling and what is supposed to be his character’s own delusion. He is not “6-foot-7, probably,” as his self-reported measurements claim, nor does he weigh in at “over 300 pounds.” At 5-foot-10 and roughly 175 pounds, the real Danhausen is physically unimposing. It was this final element — active denial of his own limitations as a wrestler — that turned his whole gimmick into a kind of commentary on wrestling itself. And he has found that this commentary resonates deeply with the class of obsessive fans who attend indie shows and watch videos of indie wrestling on the internet.
Professional wrestling’s enduring grip on pop culture might baffle me, but I always enjoy reading smart stories about the people behind the spandex — and Jay Deitcher’s profile of Horowitz, a Jewish everyman who became a Jewish quasi-star, qualifies beautifully. Someone’s gotta lose in the ring; why not be the person who elevates it to a fine art?
If you watched pro wrestling during the late ’80s and ’90s, you knew Horowitz as the enhancement talent who loved patting himself on the back. He was clotheslined. He was body-slammed. He was pile-driven through the mat, often getting pinned in less than three minutes and making his opponents look like Greek gods. He also was professional wrestling’s most outwardly Jewish performer, never afraid to hide his heritage, parading to the ring to “Hava Nagilah” and rocking a Star of David on his trunks.
The late Jenny Diski explores sleep and the childhood pleasure she took in prolonging the precipice of sleep, that liminal space between wakefulness and coveted slumber.
Actually, my speciality is not sleep itself, but the hinterland of sleep, the point of entry to unconsciousness.
One of my earliest memories of sensual pleasure (though there must have been earlier, watery ones) is of lying on my stomach in bed, the bedtime story told, lights out (not the hall, leave the door open, no, more than that), the eiderdown heavy and over my head, my face in the pillow, adjusted so that I had just enough air to breathe. I recall how acutely aware I was of being perfectly physically comfortable, as heimlich as I ever had been or ever would be, and no small part of the comfort was the delicious prospect of falling slowly into sleep. Drifting off. Moving off, away, out of mindfulness. Leaving behind.
When Krista Lee Hanson’s son Lucas was born, he couldn’t breathe on his own. At 2 months old, his doctors inserted a permanent tracheostomy tube. He has needed breathing support ever since, including the constant suctioning of saliva and mucus to clear his airway. Hanson weaves her reflections on the challenges of raising Lucas with an account of an experience at the symphony with him, and the whispers and raised eyebrows that came with it. Hanson’s essay on parenting and caring for a disabled child, and being seen, is at once tender and powerful.
The Seattle Symphony conductor enters from stage right, bows to polite applause, then lifts his arms to begin. I try to wait for the loudest crescendos to do the suctioning, but sometimes Lucas can’t wait. I feel smug disdain scratching at the back of my neck from the people behind us. I can’t hear them, but seated at our angle, I see them out of the corner of my eye. They point at us and whisper. I summon all my powers of meditation, of focus, to try to ignore them. I remind myself: We have the right to be here. The symphony donated these tickets to an organization for disabled people, so they knew who they were inviting.
An essay that questions the clear association that has developed between sport and drinking. Complete with shocking statistics that make it clear just how necessary it is to shed light on this issue.
He’d ridden his bike 10 miles on open roads when he couldn’t even operate the key to his house. Ashamed of how much he’d endangered himself and others, he slept on the couch in the basement that night. The next morning, he told Trish he was done drinking. Not a break this time. Permanently.
Blood enters the left atrium, a thin-walled upper room in the house of the heart, through the pulmonary veins, and you enter the Heart Wing through a southern-facing door engraved with a health insurance logo. You step into a tall, red-ceilinged room with crown molding where giant blood molecules float across beige walls and children dart hummingbird-like between stations. Blood enters the left atrium rich in oxygen because it just came from the lungs, and you — if you’re me — enter the museum’s Heart Wing well-fueled because you’ve just dined on a packed lunch in a courtyard outside.
A spiral of life-sized plastic hearts rotates at the center of one station. The hearts are in ascending order, from smallest to largest. The heart at the bottom is the width of an M&M. It’s the heart of a woodpecker. Someone could pop it in their mouth and use it for a tooth implant. Your own heart — or one roughly the size of people like you — is midway up the spiral, just beneath “ostrich” and above “large dog.”
Near the spiral, an unassuming gray rubber bulb is at waist level. Shaped like a joystick, it invites you to take hold and squeeze. Above the rubber bulb, a fake heart sits in a Plexiglass box. Can you keep up with your heart? a screen beneath the fake heart asks. Can your hand mimic the heart’s pace for even a minute? Seventy-four squeezes of the bulb?
One, two, three … With each beat, the heart in the Plexiglass box glows pink at its base, illuminating raised coronary veins. The screen keeps tab: How well is your hand mimicking the cardiac rhythm? At 12, you’re a beat behind. At 37, you’re two beats off, and your forearm kind of aches. At 47, the bulb is so squeezed of air that it won’t re-inflate, but you get the point: Your heart is the muscle that never stops. It beats 100,000 times a day, says the display. While you fret about your bank account, your forehead wrinkles, or that person who hasn’t replied to your email, the heart — your heart — just keeps on keeping on in a way no other muscle could.
And this is what, if you are me, you might learn early on and can’t quite shake in the Heart Wing of Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute: The heart is an overworked organ. It’s the muscle that never unionized. You are in a daunting codependent relationship with an organ that, if it were a person, should file a lawsuit against you, should summon the ACLU. The heart needs a vacation, a chaise lounge by the sea, and a mai tai with an umbrella.
Nobody should be drinking mai tais though, at least not according to the section of the Heart Wing that I’ll call The Corner of Guilt and Doom. At its center, a clear column pushes plastic discs through water. They’re meant to be platelets but they resemble cinnamon red-hots or valentine candies, swirling up and down several feet in the clear cylinder. Their cheeriness is misleading. Beneath them, at eye level, a pair of stony-gray wings stands to the left of a photo of similar wings, leathery pink. Except they’re not wings. Plastinated human lungs, reads the sign. Quit smoking, reads a larger one. Preemptive strike, I think, knowing the median target age of the museum visitor is 10.
Another station invites you to toss bean bags onto a scale. Are You at Risk for a Heart Attack? Do you drink alcohol? Have high cholesterol? A family history of heart disease? Yes? Then toss red bean bags onto the side of the scale marked “high-risk.” Watch the bean bags pile up like pillows at a dolls’ slumber party. (Here’s something the museum omits from its advertising: Glean your chances for the nation’s top cause of expiry!) Do you exercise? Maintain a low-to-average weight? Have no family history of heart disease? Toss green bean bags onto the low-risk side of the scale. Imagine, as I do, a Barbie doll lying upon them, her plastic life never sending her into cardiac arrest.
I’ve recently entered the age where I get screened for colon cancer. I’ve recently received a call from my doctor that my cholesterol is alarmingly high and I should go on medication, despite running and eating whole grains and having whatever body-size markers the medical industry deems “low-risk.” It’s the oldest story in the book: I’m mortal, and somehow surprised by it. Inching further into my 40s, the collagen-full curve of my chin has been replaced by what some might, accurately, call “jowls.” A cartoonish number 11 sits between my eyes in Zoom meetings whether I’m troubled by the budgetary changes or not.
While you fret about your bank account, your forehead wrinkles, or that person who hasn’t replied to your email, the heart — your heart — just keeps on keeping on in a way no other muscle could.
A few weeks ago, the heart of a friend stopped inexplicably in his sleep and didn’t restart. He was 42. A year younger than me.
In his essay, “Joyas Voladaros,” the late Brian Doyle tells us that each species gets roughly the same number of heartbeats in its lifetime. Both the hummingbird and the giant tortoise have an equal number of ticks. And tocks. Doyle says that number is about two billion. The heart-as-clock is a cliché the Heart Wing does not entertain.
My heart has beaten approximately one billion, 500 hundred million times in its lifetime, which happens to also be my lifetime. It beat 150 more times while I calculated that fact. Your heart has either beaten more or less than mine, depending on your age. If your heart has beaten less than mine, you are statistically less likely to meditate on the finitude of your heartbeats.
I can’t help myself: I throw the bean bags. I watch the little pillows pile onto both sides of the metal scale. Like nearly every human who plays the game, I have risk. The scale cannot reassure me that I will not die tomorrow. The surest way to live with zero risk is to not be alive. But then we couldn’t stand in a crowded room of ornate crown molding and toss bean bags foretelling our chances of death.
Left Ventricle
Blood is continuously moving through arteries and veins and capillaries that measure 60,000 miles long. Where do you mark the start of a daily circuitous trip that stretches the length of the globe twice over? Blood might symbolize life, but it’s not like life: It doesn’t have a clear entry point the way my kale salad entered my body hours ago in the courtyard, or the way the baby version of you entered this world slippery and wailing, at the start of your story.
But if you begin the life cycle of blood in the left atrium, the next room it visits is the thicker-walled, larger room below it, the left ventricle. It’s the most powerful room in the heart. And if you start the Heart Wing in the room that contains the heart-in-a-Plexiglass-box, the next room you flow into displays the museum’s most iconic feature: a walk-through replica of the human heart.
Two stories tall, 100 times the width of my heart and yours, the giant heart looks alien. It consumes half the room. Its bulbous red self is gripped claw-like by raised blue veins and red arteries. A red aorta emerges from its top. A blue vena cava hugs its right side like the trunk of a ghastly Seussian-blue tree. These vessels ascending from and extending into different parts of the Heart Wing suggest that the entire museum is somehow subsumed by the circulatory system of a giant. The museum says this heart befits someone 220 feet tall.
You can enter the giant heart. You can let proportion shrink you to the size of a blood molecule and traverse the four chambers, through tricuspid, pulmonary, mitral, and aortic valves. That is, you can do so if you aren’t in a wheelchair or don’t need handrails to manage steep steps. And you might do so if you aren’t yet menopausal like one of my museum guests and aren’t sent into raging hot flashes — because the giant heart is warm as blood and stuffy as a concert port-a-potty. Bipedal and of (albeit waning) reproductive years, I round the back of the 28-foot-wide organ, walk along a muddy-pink wall that’s lumpy and gently marbleized and meant, I’m assuming, to evoke the unsettling aliveness of human flesh. I duck beneath a big blue artery. The drumming gets louder.
I have not yet said this: The entire Heart Wing throbs with a nonstop lub-dub, lub-dub. Deep as a bass drum, pulsing about once per second, it’s the constant auditory reminder that the organ in your chest can’t stop, can’t stop, can’t stop. This means that, if you’re like me, the zone under your ribs — just slightly left of your sternum — starts to ache.
Brian Doyle titled a book about the heart The Wet Engine, but this giant non-ADA-compliant heart is dry, made of fiberglass and paint. When you step into it, you meet the glowing blue cave of the right atrium. You climb a few steps, then descend a few more into the right ventricle, where the wall’s white ridges evoke a whale’s palate. A kid shouts, Ew, gross, and you ascend uneven red steps. You arrive at a coverless bridge that serves as a brief reprieve from the cardiac claustrophobia, then reenter the heart through beigey-pink hallways, crawling with fake capillaries and fluffy white bronchi. You’re in the lungs, a sign says, and the lub-dub is louder. When you head into the left atrium, you might glisten with sweat. A sign says you’re fully oxygenated. You descend red steps into the left ventricle, head out the heart through another narrow stairway labeled aorta, and pour out of a flesh-painted wall and back onto the museum’s bluish carpet, your own heart now quickened.
“I remember rushing into it as a kid and then getting a queasy feeling … and bolting to the exit,” wrote journalist Greg Robb on Twitter, when the Philadelphia Inquirer asked for memories of the iconic giant heart. “Couldn’t wait to do it again and again,” he added. This afternoon, kids run into the vena cava entrance, pop out the flesh-walled exit, then round the bulbous veiny beast to enter it again, like the giant heart is a playground slide and they want another turn. They’re giddy and panting. They have all the time in the world and none of the patience for it. I ran around the same giant heart 30-some years ago. Studies prove it: The older you get, the faster the days and weeks seem to pass. Or, as another person responded about the heart, but could have easily written about time: “The older I got, the more it got tighter.” Because the stairways are narrow and the clearances are sometimes under five feet, the giant heart seems designed for children — people with zero face wrinkles and very few reminders that we’re not immortal. That we’re not permanent fixtures on this planet. That we have endpoints.
Two stories tall, 100 times the width of my heart and yours, the giant heart looks alien. It consumes half the room. Its bulbous red self is gripped claw-like by raised blue veins and red arteries.
The giant heart was never meant to be permanent. Originally constructed in 1953 of paper maché, chicken wire, and lumber, it was the brainchild of Dr. Mildred Pfeiffer, a physician who traveled Pennsylvania, lecturing on cardiovascular health. Popularity kept the heart alive, as have reconstructions and upgrades — “surgeries,” the museum calls them. The version I walked through had a distinct but unplaceable smell, built up from years of heat and sweat and the occasional puking kid. This heart does not smell. Its most recent upgrade involved a paint job and a brand-new beat.
The old pulse — the one I heard, the one that sent journalist Greg Robb bolting in panic — was synthetic. Now, the lub-dub is drawn from a database of real human hearts. Now, a bunch of heartbeats have been recorded and mish-mashed to stay alive long past their owners.
My friend whose heart stopped was a spiritual seeker and adventurer. He had what some would call a big heart, although not made of fiberglass, and probably not any bigger than yours or mine. His face held a bright-eyed wonder usually reserved for toddlers. His eyes lit in awe at the stick figures my children drew or the dandelions they plucked. He was mostly my husband’s friend, which is how he became my friend, too. They had been Trappist monks at the same monastery, at different times. They’d experienced the same tender wisdom, gentle correction, and odiferous flatulence from elder brothers in long robes who prayed the Psalms six times a day.
Each time he stayed with us, it felt like we were hosting a beloved brother who we rarely saw but wished lived closer. At night, he sat on our living room rug cross-legged, telling us stories of miracles he traveled to see: a monk who could walk through walls, another who could hide a candle behind his back and reveal the flame by turning his skin and organs transparent. He traveled widely, our friend, our citizen of the world, to places like Mexico and Ireland, and Bhutan. He interviewed Christian teachers and Buddhist masters with a tape recorder, searching for — for what? For the truth of things? For God? For who or what we really are? I can’t say for sure. If we, as he believed, can pass through walls, can render our skin and bones invisible — maybe we are more than flesh. Maybe we are citizens of a world even bigger than this one.
When he left, I said, “Come back anytime” and meant it, snapping a photo of him with my children. In the picture, he’s kneeling at their level on the grass, smiling the unassuming, simple, luminescent smile of a man who is alive, truly alive, and therefore looks like he’ll be alive forever.
Aorta
Blood exits the left ventricle through the aorta, and the only way to exit the giant heart is to climb up the staircase labeled aorta, hang a left, and walk down the steps into the museum again.
Just across from the giant heart is another reminder that, no matter how much you think you’re immortal, your body will meet its last moment. Heavy black rectangular slides sit inside a case taller than my body — and possibly yours. Grab a silver handle and you can yank a slide out of the case. I do. It shows the outline of a human body. The ovals and globules and blobs of someone’s innards float like islands inside a yellowy human-shaped ocean. The blobs are labeled: Brain, deltoid, lung. A plaque on the case explains what you’re looking at: razor-thin slices of a man who was frozen solid after he died. He donated his body to science. There are four more slides. I can’t draw them farther than a few inches before wanting to push them back with a thud.
Because he was so young, and his death so unexpected, an autopsy was performed on my friend’s body. Only his close friends and family know the answers, and if I knew them, I wouldn’t share them here. Some things should stay inside the body of a family.
Slicing apart dead bodies was forbidden in many cultures, like Ancient Rome and Medieval India. The body was seen as too sacred, and necessary to preserve for the afterlife. But in 16th-century Hispaniola, when conjoined twins Joana and Melchiora Ballestero died, the Catholic Church ordered an autopsy. Did they have one soul or two? When two hearts were found, the girls were declared to have two separate souls. The soul, it was believed, resided in the heart.
Only his close friends and family know the answers, and if I knew them, I wouldn’t share them here. Some things should stay inside the body of a family.
Here’s a miracle my friend would have liked: When 90-year-old Tibetan Chokpa Tenzin still felt warm several hours after her heart had stopped, her family postponed the funeral arrangements. Several days later, Chokpa’s skin was still supple. “She was no longer breathing,” wrote one journalist, “but she looked calm, her skin remained warm, as if she was in a deep, eternal sleep.” She stayed this way for seven days.
And when the Dalai Lama’s tutor Geshe Lhundub Sopa died, Tricycle Magazine described him as “lean[ing] upright against a wall, his odorless body perfectly poised, his skin fresh as baked bread. He looked like he was meditating.” His heart had stopped three days before. He too remained this way for seven days.
According to Tibetans, these people had entered a rare post-death state called thukdam, when the body is clinically dead but the person doesn’t decompose for days, sometimes weeks. Tibetans say it’s because the person’s consciousness is engaged in a deep form of meditation called “clear light” meditation. When Tibetan monk Geshe Jampa Gyatso was in thukdam, a physicist measured his blood-oxygen level at 86, even though his heart hadn’t beaten in 10 days.
Decades after Saint John Vianney of France died, he was exhumed and found to have a fully intact heart. Called the “incorrupt heart,” it now travels the world in a reliquary. The reliquary looks like a miniature castle, with glass walls, gold spires, and a gold-shingled roof. The heart sits on a red velvet cushion. It resembles a brown fossil or a stone valentine. Visitors say they can spot a bit of pink in its center.
If the Heart Wing displayed Vianney’s heart, it would be the opposite of the heart-in-a-Plexiglass-box. Where one ticks away your seconds, reminding you of the countdown in your chest, the other stoically suggests that it never quite died — not the way things normally do.
At secular-humanist funerals, people say the dead live on through our memories, which suggests that people really die not when their hearts stop beating but when ours do. This means that we don’t die until the people who remember us do. It’s meant to be comforting, but I find it a sad replacement for miracles or magic or actual immortality.
Septum
Between the left and right chambers of the heart is a muscular wall called the septum, and between the two major rooms of the Heart Wing are two giant severed arteries. If you’re a kid, you can crawl through them, as mine does. If you’re an adult, you’ll probably stand and watch, analyzing the layers of flesh in the arterial walls. Thanks to a layer of yellow clumps, one artery is significantly narrower than the other, crowding the kids with simulated fat until they can’t make it through. This artery probably warrants its owner to go on medication. There’s a hole at the top of both arteries, and if you’re a kid, you can poke your head out and wave to people, like your parents. You can wave to the people who gave you life, the people whose hearts — if you’re lucky — will stop beating before yours. Riley, look at Daddy, says a man to a toddler in the artery. She won’t quite put her face in the frame. Riley, stand up, look at Daddy. Smile, Riley. I snap a photo of my smiling daughter, her face framed by the fatty artery’s opening.
There’s a hole in my heart / That can only be filled by you. Those are the lyrics of a song I blasted when I was a ‘90s teen. Hole hearted, the large-mouthed, long-haired frontrunner sang over and over. This song is now played on oldies stations. The phrase, hole in my heart, suggests an emotional absence, a longing. A gaping need that begs to be filled.
Maybe that’s why it’s so dramatic to say my daughter once had a hole in her heart. This is what a cardiologist told me when she was a few months old. This hole was in her septum, the wall that separates the left chambers from the right ones. Because the oxygenated blood traveling from the lungs pours into the left chambers, and the deoxygenated blood flows into the right chambers, a hole in the septum means the two kinds of blood could get mixed — which is trouble. A hole in the heart speaks to the potentially unmet physical need for oxygen. “Look for blue lips,” a nurse told us on the phone.
Her lips did not, thankfully, ever go blue. The hole in her heart eventually closed on its own. Called an atrial septal defect, it’s the most common cardiac anomaly. But doctors don’t say anomaly. They say defect, which always conjures in my mind a factory line — hearts spaced evenly apart on a conveyor belt, traveling toward inspection. Some are deemed defective. Some don’t fit industry standards. They get sent back, called out of order, subtracted from the bottom line.
Because of my daughter’s heart condition, I spent a fair amount of time in the heart wings of children’s hospitals. They sometimes resemble art museums, with kid-created drawings of hearts, large heart sculptures, and even a lava-lamp-like installation with valentine-hearts floating inside. A painting in one exam room featured multicolored hearts in the sky, each with a set of wings. Hearts soaring to heaven. Hearts eternal.
I’ve reasoned that all this art is because the heart is a high-profile organ. It elicits an emotional response. Tiny hearts inside tiny children who need big surgeries — this makes us bite our lips and donate.
But once when I arrived at the room to consult with the cardiologist about my daughter’s abnormal echocardiogram, he said this: The heart is just a pump. We like to sentimentalize it. But really, it’s nothing more than a pump. I nodded with my infant in my lap, which meant I held not just my love but my love’s heart and the hole that heart contained.
I was being told: There is nothing magical about the heart. There is nothing mystical or meaningful. The heart is a machine in the factory of the body. The heart pumps, you live, it stops, you die, the end.
When my father died, I felt like I had a hole in my heart. Rather, I felt like the place where my heart was had become a hole. My chest ached. I thought it was a metaphorical ache. I called it the grief hole and imagined a cosmological black hole under my sternum, a thing made of nothing yet drawing absolutely everything into it. A gravity of grief.
Cardiologists now recognize a condition called takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome.” After a big breakup or the death of a loved one, the heart weakens for an acute time. “The grieving heart,” says cardiologist Dr. Sandeep Jauhar, “appears stunned and frequently balloons into the distinctive shape of the takotsubo, a Japanese pot with a wide base and a narrow neck.” Patients with hearts in the shape of this pot are at greater risk of a heart attack.
Two days after a teacher was killed in the Uvalde school shooting, her husband died of a heart attack.
The heart is just a pump. We like to sentimentalize it. But really, it’s nothing more than a pump. I nodded with my infant in my lap, which meant I held not just my love but my love’s heart and the hole that heart contained.
Although I’ve known plenty of people who’ve died, I’ve never experienced “the grief hole” other than 20 years ago, when my father died. I did not, for instance, experience it when my friend died.
But sometimes I think maybe I’ve just gotten used to living with something akin to it, because when I hear the highest note in Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” or when I remember I’ll someday pick up my child and put her down and never pick her up again — either because she’s too heavy or I’m not here or (unthinkably) she’s not here — the place I can most accurately call “my heart” throbs unmistakably, and it feels like it’s reaching back to a moment when I lay in a cot beside my father’s deathbed and reached my arm across the space between our mattresses so I could slip my hand inside his still-alive hand.
Before a man received the first heart transplant, his wife reportedly asked the doctor if he would still love her.
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Jauhar calls for a change in how medicine treats heart disease. He wants us to consider not just exercise and low-fat diets but love. He cites a study where two sets of rabbits are both fed high-cholesterol diets. Rabbits in one set are petted and held, talked to, and played with, while the other rabbits are left alone. The loved rabbits have 60% less aortic disease than the left-alone rabbits, even with similar blood pressure and cholesterol. “The heart may not originate our feelings,” Jauhar said, “but it is highly responsive to them. A record of our emotional lives is written on our hearts.”
Get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit, God tells the people of Israel.
Right Atrium
There are only two rooms in the Heart Wing, but four in the actual heart. Blood enters the right atrium oxygen-depleted, and I stroll back through the Heart Wing’s two rooms fatigued.
Heart valves are meant to be like one-way swinging doors — their closing is what makes the lub and dub. Tiny threads tether the flaps of the valves to the heart wall. If blood flows backward through the heart, the valves aren’t doing their job. You don’t want blood flowing in reverse. That’s called regurgitation.
Still, I keep reversing course in the Heart Wing, revisiting spots I’ve already seen. I pass the heart-in-a-Plexiglass-box. I pass the spiral of animal hearts. I pass a wall of plastic tubing meant to show me how hard my heart must work to pump the blood down my legs and up again. I look for beauty here, for the sense that I’m not doomed at any moment should a fist of muscle decide to stop. I look for an understanding that the heart is more than a belabored mechanism, that my body is more than a machine — one I need to try to keep alive forever, but never will.
The museum is not coy about the fact that it views the body as a machine. The original heart exhibit from 1954 was called “The Engine of Life.” Today, the museum has an article on its website called “How Your Body is Like a Factory.” In a car factory, the article says, “One team might make steering wheels. Another team might make seats…. They all share a common goal: to make cars. Your body operates in much the same way … [with] the common goal of keeping you alive.”
By equating staying alive with making cars, the museum echoes the priorities of late-stage capitalism. If you’re not making gadgets or deals or website content, who are you? Like a grinding factory of the Industrial Revolution, your worth is measured by your production — your bolted widgets or sent emails or new clients — which someone can then commoditize.
In the years we didn’t know were his last, our friend took small troupes of spiritual seekers to Bhutan and met with Tibetan Buddhist monks there. Bhutan measures its progress, not by emphasizing its GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, but by measuring its GNH: Gross National Happiness. In other words, Bhutan has attempted to rearrange the measurement of a nation around the well-being of its citizens rather than their economic output. If you’re a resident, the Gross National Happiness Commission surveys you every five years, asking things like, How many hours do you sleep? How many hours do you work? How often do you quarrel with your family? Do you trust your neighbors? And because Bhutan is a Buddhist nation, it asks, How often do you meditate? How often do you pray?
The survey takes several hours to complete. Participants receive a day’s wages. Their output for the day is a record of their well-being.
That the Heart Wing stresses me out is probably not good for my happiness index. But it’s also not good for my heart. “Fear … can cause profound cardiac injury,” says Jauhar. “Emotional stress … is often a matter of life and death.”
I look for an understanding that the heart is more than a belabored mechanism, that my body is more than a machine — one I need to try to keep alive forever, but never will.
In the days after our friend’s death, I overheard my husband talking to different people on the phone. He repeated certain phrases. Forty-two. Died in his sleep. Funeral in a week. I know, man. I know. Light laughter. Heavy sigh. The conversations almost always drifted to this: He had a condition. A rare respiratory ailment that conventional western medicine couldn’t explain.
This is what we do. We piece together the story of a death — and a life — the way we piece together a jigsaw puzzle. One picture that doesn’t make sense: dying at 42 in your sleep. Because a human heart has over two billion beats. And he didn’t get almost half of his. So the phrase, he had a condition, gets repeated into a receiver and changes the direction of the conversation, from shocked to somewhat pacified. As though any of our hearts couldn’t stop at any moment. As though all the beats are owed to us, not bestowed upon us, not graciously and mysteriously and troublingly given.
How can we all be machines, when the deaths of machines would never crush you the way the person you love most in this world will crush you when they leave it? Your heart might even balloon from the loss. Your heart might even stop.
Right Ventricle
It might not be until after you leave the Heart Wing, after you leave Philly entirely, once you’re settling into your home and yanking pots from cabinets for dinner, that you hash out to your beloved exactly why the museum made you feel drained. This is the person whose death — if it occurs before yours — would make your heart balloon into the shape of a Japanese pot. And that’s when your beloved could, as mine did, say to you: “Did you know the heart might not be a pump? Did you know they have no idea how blood actually moves through the body?”
And your eyebrows, as mine did, might lift past the ceiling and your chin might, as mine did, fall through the floor, and you’ll tell your beloved: “No way.” You might even shake your head. The heart is a pump. You’ve been told as much for eternity, or since third grade. Then you might, if you’re me, spiral like a tower of spinning plastic hearts into research, where you learn that the heart-as-pump is not actually a fact. It’s a theory.
What’s the history of the heart-as-pump theory? When did we turn the circulatory system into a machine? Many credit 17th-century physician William Harvey, who discovered that blood moves in a circuit, from the heart and back to it. But Harvey never believed the heart’s mechanical function was the primary source of blood’s movement. He believed in a divine vital heat called calor innatus. This idea came from Aristotle, who said our vital heat is connected to something called pneuma, “the primal stuff of heavenly bodies.” Pneuma is an ancient Greek word for breath, but also for soul or spirit.
In the fable that is the first book of Genesis, Adam comes to life when his Creator breathes into him.
“I found the task so truly arduous,” wrote Harvey of his attempt to map circulation, “that I was almost tempted to think … that the motion of the heart was only to be comprehended by God.”
The pump, gotta check the pump. My father-in-law repeats these words every summer when he aspires to a crystalline swimming pool. When I research how a pool pump works, in order to understand how people think the heart works, I land on a pool supply website. The first sentence reads: “The pump is essentially the heart of the swimming pool’s circulation system.” To try to understand the way an actual machine works, I’m pointed back to the body.
Vascular anesthesiologist and professor Dr. Branko Furst cites a number of instances in which the heart, when intervened with during surgery, doesn’t behave at all like we’d expect if it were a pump. He and others also point out the heart’s relatively small size compared to the task for which it’s being credited. Less than a pound in weight, the heart must, over the course of an average 75-year life span, push 400 million liters of very sticky fluid that is made of molecules sometimes larger than the vessels through which the heart supposedly “pumps.”
Admit it: You’ve made a fist and held it to your chest, just slightly to the left. You’ve marveled, maybe, as I have, at the size of the thing keeping you alive.
Furst says that as the field of cardiology advances, “the number of discrepancies between the observed phenomena and the constraints imposed by the existent circulation model is likely to increase.” In other words, as we intervene with circulation for treatment purposes, the heart will continue to behave in ways that make no sense if we think of it as a pump.
Years ago, I sat in a large meditation hall and listened to a teacher say over and over, “The heart is the organ of spiritual perception.” For the first two days of the five-day retreat, I thought she meant metaphorically. But after listening to her for a few days, I realized she meant literally. The heart is the organ of spiritual perception, she said, like the eyes are the instruments of sight, and the ears are the instruments of hearing. She was an Episcopal priest and meditation teacher, as well as a friend of our friend who died. The heart, she was saying, contains its own intelligence.
In an experiment, participants were hooked up to a number of brain, skin, and heart monitors and shown 45 images on a screen. Two-thirds of the images were emotionally neutral: a tree, a cup. A third of the images were emotionally charged: a bloody corpse, a snake ready to strike. The images were shown at random — the participant had no way of predicting what kind of image would appear next. But approximately four-and-a-half seconds before an emotionally charged image appeared, the participants showed signs that their bodies somehow knew. Their reactions were physiologically detectable not in their brains, but in their hearts.
Admit it: You’ve made a fist and held it to your chest, just slightly to the left. You’ve marveled, maybe, as I have, at the size of the thing keeping you alive.
If, as Furst believes, the heart is not primarily responsible for the movement of the blood, then what is? He proposes that the heart interrupts the blood already in motion and that the blood possesses its own kinetic energy — a theory that harkens back to Harvey and Aristotle. In other words, maybe it’s not the heart that moves the blood. Maybe it’s the blood that moves the heart.
Maybe the heart, weighing less than a pound, is not an overworked organ meeting an unthinkable quota of labor. Maybe it simply supports something already in motion. Maybe we’re not walking around with doomed-to-stop clocks in our chests. Maybe we’ve just erroneously applied our Industrial Revolution work ethic to the organ that gives us our beat. Maybe we’re walking around with a miraculous, mysterious life force autonomously moving through us.
What makes your heart beat? asks a text box from the editor-in-chief of Pumps Magazine, a periodical put out by a technology company that makes pumps and motors. I expect a scientific answer involving electrical pulses and closing valves. But employees reply in their own text boxes: Old Hindi songs. Reaching high goals. Wild white horses. Travel. Pistachio ice cream.
Sometimes I’m comforted when we don’t fully understand things, when mysteries remain unsolved, and explanations are beyond our minds’ capacity to grasp them. Maybe that’s because when the mind releases a hard question — like why I’ll one day set my daughter down and never pick her up again, like why a 42-year-old friend died in his sleep — it drops that question down, finding answers in a place deeper than our minds, where a steady pulse still beats.
The heart, said the meditation teacher, is capable of living in spontaneous connection with something called the divine heart. And this intelligence of the divine heart, she said, is what lives beyond our death. “You begin to discover,” she said on day three of the retreat, “that the heart knows no death, and nothing is ever lost that has been held in love, if you know how to find it.”
I think of the grown children of Chokpa Tenzin, placing a hand on their dead mother’s chest on a Wednesday, and still feeling heat on Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Thukdam, translated literally, means the mind in a deep meditative state. To date, no discernible brainwave activity has been detected from a person in thukdam. Mind in this case can’t mean the organ located inside the skull. It must point to a consciousness that exists somewhere else in our bodies.
For a body in thukdam, the skin above the heart is what stays warmest.
Pericardium
The pericardium is the sac in which the heart sits. It’s a fibrous membrane around the outside of the heart, providing protection. Without it, the heart could over-expand. The pericardium is the heart’s edge, its limit, its reminder to not go beyond its size.
The risk, of course, with an essay about the heart, is that it could go on forever. Expand to include every scientific fact, every mythic association.
I haven’t, for instance, said that the heart of a blue whale weighs 1,000 pounds and beats just a few times per minute.
I haven’t said that in 1673, a French nun reported that Jesus appeared to her with his heart on fire, visible outside of his chest. The sister said he spoke these words: My Sacred Heart is so intense in its love for humanity, and for you in particular, that not being able to contain within it the flames of its ardent charity, they must be transmitted through all means. Jesus’s heart, in other words, couldn’t be contained by his pericardium.
Maybe we think of ourselves as machines because it’s been so long since we’ve seen miracles. Or maybe it’s hard to believe in miracles because we’ve thought so long of ourselves as machines. I want another night with my friend, telling stories of monks walking through walls and turning their intestines translucent.
Here’s something that borders on miraculous but that scientists in California confirm: The heart emits a magnetic field expanding outward in all directions and returning to the chest in a donut shape. One hundred times greater than the magnetic field emitted by the brain, it changes depending on our emotions. Anger, for instance, produces a markedly different magnetic field than appreciation. The field itself can be measured three feet from the body. Some believe the distance of three feet indicates, not the limits of the heart’s emissions, but the limits of the technology used to measure it. In other words, some suspect the heart might emit a magnetic field that extends much farther — possibly, however faintly, for infinity.
Here’s what I’d like to see in the Heart Wing. Here’s what — as the editors of PumpsMagazine say — would make my heart beat:
A heart-shaped bag of fluid you can touch, heated to the precise temperature of Chokpa Tenzin’s chest a week after she stopped breathing.
The cells of Saint John Vianney’s “incorrupt” heart under a microscope. A graph revealing its chemical composition.
The heartbeat of the man who received the first heart transplant. His wife’s heartbeat when, after the operation, they reunited. A slideshow revealing all the things he enjoyed in the 112 more days that he lived.
A visual representation of my friend’s heart’s magnetic field, arcing like a donut around his body.
And a platform that, when you stand on it, displays your own heart’s magnetic field. It would display whether you’re feeling anger or gratitude, grief or joy. Your heart’s magnetic field would project on the wall beside my friend’s, radiating three feet to touch his, radiating five feet past museum visitors, radiating twenty feet through the giant heart — radiating maybe even infinitely.
Heather Lanier is an assistant professor of creative writing at Rowan University. Her memoir, Raising a Rare Girl, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Her poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing, is forthcoming from Monkfish Publishingnext year. You can find her on Instagram at @heatherklanier or at her newsletter, The Slow Take.
