Sara Clemence is ruthless in this piece, questioning the privilege and indulgence of the people who travel to the one place on earth that still belongs to nature, just because they can. The self-important justifications of these tourists will leave you feeling even more frustrated with the human race. Clemence is right: Don’t go.
Overtourism isn’t a new story. But Antarctica, designated as a global commons, is different from any other place on Earth. It’s less like a too-crowded national park and more like the moon, or the geographical equivalent of an uncontacted people. It is singular, and in its relative wildness and silence, it is the last of its kind. And because Antarctica is different, we should treat it differently: Let the last relatively untouched landscape stay that way.
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Inspired to enlist in the U.S. Marines after 9/11, sniper Grady Kurpasi volunteered to fight for Ukraine after the Russians invaded the country. He disappeared on April 26th, 2022 after encountering enemy fire. Back in the United States, his wife Heeson refused to believe that Grady had been killed in action. But for nearly a year, the mystery remained: Where was Grady Kurpasi?
“That’s what sparked my interest,” Aces says. “Grady being Grady, [he] could easily look and sound like a North Korean if he was still alive. But the report didn’t make sense because it said the dude’s face was blasted off. He wouldn’t be able to talk. Did they mistake Grady for a North Korean soldier? And maybe they’re just trying to keep him alive. Which didn’t meet the narrative that we were reading, where they were just cutting people’s heads off. So, in the back of our minds, this [was] a long shot.”
And source after source confirmed the same story.
“It very, very quickly turned from a situation where we didn’t expect to do anything other than recover remains into a very real possibility that he was still alive somewhere,” Josh says. “We had three or four different sightings of him from different people that had no connection to one another.”
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American children who are ripped away from their families. The people who run for 24 hours. The dark side of an ancient city. A man who treats water like wine. A surprising response to a bad trip.
Shoshana Walter | The New York Times Magazine and Reveal | June 29, 2023 | 7,167 words
I’m not sure that there’s anything more American than making it difficult for a person to be a mother. I don’t mean physically giving birth—thanks to anti-abortion zealots and the Supreme Court, many states are now literally forcing people to do that, with horrific consequences. I mean being a person, with everything that alone entails in a country defined by inequality, precarity, and prejudice, who also has a child. Exhibit A: As Shoshana Walter found in a feat of investigative reporting, people swept up in the opioid crisis, who’ve done exactly what they’re supposed to do—who got clean and take prescription drugs to stay that way—are now having their babies seized by the government. “They don’t want you on illicit street drugs,” one of Walter’s subjects says, “so here, we’re going to give you this medicine. But then if you take this medicine, we are going to punish you for it and ruin your family.” The injustice doesn’t end there. “We also found women who were reported after taking antidepressants, anxiety and ADHD medications and even over-the-counter cold medicine during pregnancies,” Walter writes. “Some women were reported after testing positive for the fentanyl in their epidurals.” The emphasis is mine; my jaw dropped at the Helleresque insanity of that detail. —SD
Stephen Lurie | Slate | July 1, 2023 | 4,505 words
You might not think a 24-hour race run around a 400-meter track would make for a compelling longread. It sounds grueling and monotonous. Dangerous, even. Everyone runs at their own pace. How can you even tell who’s excelling? Enter reporter Stephen Lurie who crafts a fascinating story by describing the tiny details of the racer’s experience in Pennsylvania’s Dawn to Dusk to Dawn ultramarathon. He takes a sport most know nothing about and puts the reader on the track, alongside the runners. “Gagz had been running for 17 hours and 20 minutes when he made it to the southeast corner of the loop,” he writes. “He’d already chugged past this spot 370 times, but on his 371st lap, he started walking across the lanes. He reached the edge and laid down, propping his tattooed legs up against a waist-high chain-link fence, long gray beard falling toward the damp red track. He planned to sleep for exactly five minutes.” Before you read this story, you might question the point of this ultra-endurance experience. But as Lurie shows us, anyone who has pushed themselves hard to do something challenging—regardless of what that something is—understands the invaluable education the very act of endurance gives you about you: the important subject of all. —KS
Guy D. Middleton | Aeon | July 4, 2023 | 4,000 words
Although I have not been to Pompeii, I have visited Herculaneum—a city that fell to Mount Vesuvius on the same day almost 2,000 years ago. Wandering the miraculously preserved streets, I imagined the lives of its residents, whose footsteps would have echoed on the stone so long before my own. Guy D. Middleton does more than imagine in this piece; he pulls in research, clawing away any romanticism to paint a picture of the brutality of Pompeii, a place where slaves would have endured sexual assault and violence, “being owned and being used,” as Middleton puts it. A pithy piece of wall graffito advertising sex is his jumping-off point: “Eutychis, a Greek lass with sweet ways, 2 asses.” (Clearly, we share a penchant for drawing on walls—and sex—with ancient Pompeiians.) Middleton smartly uses this line to turn detective and, in trying to uncover who Eutychis was, displays Pompeii’s wider underbelly. It makes for a dark story, but one deftly told. —CW
Katherine LaGrave | AFAR | October 28, 2020 | 4,042 words
People who have fascinations tend to be the most fascinating people. For AFAR, Katherine LaGrave profiles Martin Riese, America’s first water sommelier, a man who has been obsessed with water since he was four years old. This piece could easily have devolved from profile into caricature, but it’s LaGrave’s restraint that keeps you reading. (Ok restraint and the wonderful water puns and wordplay sprinkled throughout.) “Riese is taking cues from the element he considers most beloved, going with the flow and flowing where he’s able, taking opportunities as they come, and sharing why we should care about water with anyone who cares to listen,” she writes. Take the plunge and read LaGrave’s piece. You’ll not only be awash in new knowledge of sustainably sourced high-end water, but you’ll also satisfy your thirst for a well-written piece on a little-known topic. And that’s something I can raise a glass to. —KS
Recent psychedelics coverage tends to focus on four primary categories. There are the drugs’ benefits and/or dangers, as well as stories focusing on their creators and wielders: those who use them to help people and those who seek to profit from their use. Chris Colin’s fascinating Wired feature skirts that tetrad, instead tracing the evolving norms around supporting a person when their inward journey goes to dark places. From the opening graf, you know it’s going to be a fun read: “Everything was insane and fine. The walls had begun to bend, the grain in the floorboards was starting to run. Jeff Greenberg’s body had blown apart into particles, pleasantly so. When he closed his eyes, chrysanthemums blossomed.” Using Greenberg’s trip, his own psilocybin experience, and a solid dose of cosmic-cowboy history, Colin shows how the way we respond to a person’s “psychic distress” speaks volumes about how we respond to one another in general. That we’re in the midst of a psychonautics surge is not surprising; that we’re responding to the moment with care and common sense is. —PR
Audience Award
Here’s the piece that bowled our readers away this week.
For GQ, Eric Wills profiles Jason Belmonte, the most successful 10-pin bowler in Pro Bowling Association history. With his controversial and unorthodox bowling style, Belmonte is a man who is changing the sport with his own two hands. —KS
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In this beautiful essay for Emergence Magazine, Diné poet Jake Skeets reflects on his role in butchering a sheep as part of celebrating Kinaałda, the Diné puberty ceremony for a young relative. Skeets finds inspiration in witnessing an elder teach his partner’s sister how to make a traditional recipe and uses the gentle, wise spirit of that educational moment to build his confidence in preparing the animal for the meal.
My role in these ceremonies has slowly begun to shift. I’m no longer a child who simply witnesses but an adult who must participate, and as such it’s important to enter the space with the proper mindset. We don’t think negatively or with anxiety during the next four days. We don’t hesitate or feel unsure about our roles and duties. We enter the space with a lean toward what is beautiful in the world, what is right and balanced. Even writing this essay, I feel compelled to focus on what is working rather than what is not working, because you don’t pair a ceremony like this with more negative assumptions. It is beauty way. It is hope. Some might call it a naïve optimistic hope, but I call it a critical hope.
Sheep represent so much more than food, so food sovereignty itself represents the inherent right of peoples to their own ways of living. “Sheep is life,” as the saying goes. Sheep offer nourishment, clothing, and tools. No part of the sheep is wasted. However, to get this harvest you must tend to the sheep, waking up early every day to ensure their survival. This shepherding gives way to a circle of care and attention that births a way of life. A way of life we have an inherent right to. This is food sovereignty.
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Before the novelist Victoria Amelina was killed in a missile attack in Ukraine on July 1, 2023, she wrote about what it was like to grow up in the shadow of Russia as a Ukrainian. In this piece, published posthumously by The Guardian, Amelina considers the true meaning of home and brotherhood as she recounts her transition from a wide-eyed child enthralled by Moscow to an activist who documented Russian war crimes against her homeland.
When I was 15, I won a local competition and was chosen to represent my home town, Lviv, at an international Russian language contest in Moscow. I was excited to visit the Russian capital. Moscow felt like the centre of what I considered home. My library was full of Russian classics, and even though the Soviet Union had collapsed almost a decade earlier, not much had changed in the Russian school I attended, or on Russian TV, which my family had the habit of watching. Additionally, while I didn’t even have the money to travel around Ukraine, Russia was happy to invest in my Russianisation.
At the contest in Moscow I met kids from all those countries Russia would later try to invade or assimilate: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldova. The Russian Federation invested a lot of money in raising children like us from the “former Soviet republics” as Russians. They probably invested more in us than they did in the education of children in rural Russia: those who were already conquered didn’t need to be tempted with summer camps and excursions to Red Square.
I remembered this story in 2022, watching an interview with an elderly man in Mariupol. He was desperate, disoriented and disarmingly honest. “But I believed in this Russian world, can you imagine? All my life I believed we were brothers!” the poor man exclaimed, surrounded by the ruins of his beloved city. The man’s apartment building was in ruins and the illusion of home, the space he perceived as his motherland, the former Soviet Union where he was born and lived his best years, had been crushed even more brutally. The propaganda stopped working on him only when the Russian bombs fell. The border between independent Ukraine and the Russian Federation arose in his mind as a crucial barrier, just like it did in mine when I realised I had only been brought to festive Moscow to lie about my home town in Ukraine, so that the Russian viewers could hate it even more.
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As more and more people board the USS Psilocybin and head into the depths of their consciousness, more and more of them will at some point find themselves in a precarious psychic situation. But riding out the eternal darkness of one’s soul doesn’t need to be a solo voyage—nor, as Chris Colin examines, does it need to be avoided. A new generation of organizations is helping people steer into the chaos, and come out the other side reborn.
A volunteer named Jasmine picked up the phone. Immediately she emitted a gentle, knowledgeable, and grounded vibe. She didn’t try to distract him from his anguish or minimize it. On the contrary, she validated what he was feeling and gave him permission to explore his pain further. “Very quickly she turned it into something I felt that I could go through,” he said.
Greenberg spoke with Jasmine for nearly an hour and a half, then called again later, as the crisis softened into something more like curiosity. With her help, his angst metabolized into a searing peek under the hood. Where before he’d felt abject terror, he now saw an invitation to make real changes in his life.
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Jade Dass thought she’d done the hard part: She’d kicked an opioid habit, thanks in part to a prescribed drug called Suboxone, which prevents withdrawal. When she got pregnant, it felt like the beginning of a new life. But then the very thing that was helping her stay sober overturned her life:
Around midnight on Jan. 31, 2021, Dass’s water broke. Bieniasz rushed them to Verde Valley Medical Center, and the baby was born 11 hours later, weighing almost seven pounds. She had her mother’s light brown skin, her father’s slightly drooping eyes and nearly perfect scores on her Apgar tests, a standard assessment of newborn health. Dass couldn’t stop staring at her daughter. “She was a part of me, like if someone took my heart and it was now separated from me and I could see it over there,” Dass told me.
Dass was still cradling her newborn an hour later when a nurse announced the baby might be transferred to another hospital if she showed signs of withdrawal. Dass was stunned. Her daughter, according to medical records, lacked any withdrawal symptoms. Both of them had been drug-tested, and the only substance in their urine was Suboxone. She was planning to breastfeed and begged the nurse not to take the baby: “She needs to be with her mother.” Dass was so upset that she barely registered what else the nurse said: They would be contacting the Department of Child Safety, Arizona’s child-welfare agency. Verde Valley, like many hospitals throughout the country, was required to report newborns exposed to substances in utero, including prescribed medications such as Suboxone.
A child-welfare report can result in little more than an assessment of a family’s circumstances and referrals to services. But other times, a report can lead to an extensive investigation. No agency tracks how many new mothers have been investigated for taking legally prescribed medications, but after sending 100 public-records requests to every state and the District of Columbia, I found thousands like Dass who have been referred to child-welfare authorities, their lives suddenly under scrutiny, their newborns sometimes placed into foster care for weeks, months or indefinitely.
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John Paul Scotto | Longreads | July 6, 2023 | 11 minutes (3,069 words)
Dad and I were tossing a football in my yard. I was pleasantly surprised that my arm muscles retained the memory of a flawless throwing motion. The ball practically leaped out of my hand.
“It’s a shame Coach Mike didn’t give you more playing time,” Dad said. “You had such power to the opposite field.”
He was referencing my final baseball season, freshman year of high school, two decades earlier.
“It’s all right,” I said, snagging his pass with one hand. “It was just JV baseball.”
“You could’ve started at third base, shortstop, or catcher.”
I remembered allowing five consecutive passed balls as catcher. Berating myself for striking out. Eating obscene amounts of sunflower seeds while warming the bench. A teammate saying, “What’s the point of you even being here?”
My face flushed. For God’s sake. How could these ancient events still make me emotional?
“Well, I hate competition,” I said, throwing a spiral. “I’m never going to compete again.”
Dad caught the football, tucked it under his arm, and said, “Fine.”
The sonic rhythm of our catch gone, we stood in a screaming silence. Would we fill that silence? Would we talk about the chasm between us? The thing we’d never really been able to discuss?
Hell no.
My senior year of high school, I was accepted into 11 colleges. My father was in consistent contact with the football coach at each school, talking to them on the phone, mailing them VHS footage of my games. Baseball hadn’t stuck, but playing quarterback had; Dad hoped I would continue doing so at a higher level. The summer before college officially began, I moved to campus for practice, intending to succeed at quarterback as a tuition-paying walk-on.
But sleeping in the dorms proved impossible. There was a strange dude snoring on the bunk under me. The room smelled of industrial cleaning solutions. The mattress was made of squeaky plastic. I was sore and tired from practice. My body needed to shut off and recuperate, but my awareness of this need heightened my anxiety and kept me awake.
After three nights, bleary from sleep deprivation, I called the team’s head coach from my cell phone. I was pacing in the dormitory’s common room, on the verge of hyperventilation.
“Why are you calling?” the coach said when he answered.
“I can’t play football anymore,” I said.
Then I began weeping uncontrollably. The coach said nothing as I offered half-coherent, slobbery apologies.
Finally, he said, “All right, all right. Just calm down. Jesus. It’s all right.”
Dad drove me home from campus later that day. I stared out the passenger side window nonstop: trees behind guardrails, green mile markers, the smell of Dad’s Arrid XX spray-on deodorant.
“I’m sorry I quit,” I said. “It was too hard.”
“You have nothing to apologize for,” he said. We never talked about why it was so hard for me.
That was our entire discussion of my college football career.
Freshman year of college, I loved my classes, since they introduced me to ideas I’d never encountered in my small, conservative town, but I was going mad from lonesomeness and insomnia. In the wee hours of the night, I’d aimlessly walk city streets, contemplating suicide and fantasizing—ludicrously—about transferring to another school, playing football, and going to the NFL. I’d often sit in a pew at a vacant Catholic church, begging for Jesus or Mary or God or anyone, really, to help me calm down and sleep.
This was unsustainable. After freshman year, I moved back home and commuted 75 minutes each way to campus. While my peers were attending college parties and discovering themselves, I was glued to a laptop in my parents’ basement, playing Texas Hold ’em, my money spread across six tables in an internet casino. I had rigid rules for how to play, and I was able to consistently win money.
In the wee hours of the night, I’d aimlessly walk city streets, contemplating suicide and fantasizing—ludicrously—about transferring to another school, playing football, and going to the NFL.
My goal was for internet poker to pay off my growing student debts and ensure I’d never need a real job. This didn’t seem ridiculous. My high school football teammates and I were enmeshed in the poker craze of the early 2000s, and one guy from our town was already making a living as a card player. To this day, two decades out of high school, he’s never had a proper job, and he’s rich. He sits at the high stakes table in a casino and waits for “donkeys”—tourists, rich people, degenerates—to give him their chips.
The difference between me and that guy was that he could control his emotions. I had meltdowns. I’d get heated about bad hands or I’d want to win faster. Then I’d break my betting rules, bluff hugely, and get called on it. I’d often spend weeks methodically earning thousands of dollars, and then, during a meltdown, I’d put all of my winnings on a single table and lose it in an instant. I couldn’t account for why I was doing this. Some nights—at the height of my addiction, which corresponded with periods of extreme social isolation—I’d try to stop gambling and sleep, but my arms and legs would flex and quake at the thought of playing cards, and I’d get out of bed and attach myself to the laptop until sunrise.
I was in a long-term relationship with a woman I’d started dating at the end of high school. She attended a college two hours away, where she partied regularly and made friends. I had her Facebook page memorized, and when she posted a new picture, I scrutinized every person in it. Part of me was a jealous boyfriend. But mostly I envied her. I wanted a Facebook page full of people and fun. I wanted to be invited to parties. I wanted to dance and be free. Why couldn’t I? I wasn’t sure. I just knew that foreign, unpredictable circumstances drove me into myself, rendered me silent. As a kid, I’d always thought this shyness was something I’d grow out of, but in adult life, things became less structured and predictable and my shyness intensified.
Eventually, my high school girlfriend and I broke up. We cried together and said that we had grown apart. I would struggle greatly with this loss, missing her for years after she’d moved on from me. But I knew our breakup was the right thing to happen. I was holding her back. I lived in a hole, and she lived above ground. I didn’t yet understand the nature of this pit I was in. It was too deep.
When my gambling problem got harmfully expensive, I admitted to myself that I was a donkey, and refocused my addictive energy onto movies that I loved. During one phase, I watched Pirates of the Caribbean multiple times per day, every day, and I’d annoy my family with my bad Jack Sparrow impression. I also got hooked on Just Like Heaven, a romantic comedy about a man falling in love with a woman’s ghost who lives in his apartment. I liked fantasizing about living with a ghost. I wanted a human spirit to witness my private, friendless life, and to fall in love with me.
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Because I tended to get obsessed with movies that weren’t very good, I often wondered if I was an idiot. The most pronounced example of suspected idiocy occurred after I wrote a letter to Keira Knightley and dropped it in the out-of-town mailbox at the post office. The moment the mailbox rattled shut, I got queasy, and I saw myself with a harsh and sudden clarity: I was a 21-year-old man who’d written a love letter to a celebrity, and the person who would ultimately read the letter—not Keira, of course, I realized in my new clarity—might think it had been written by a child.
I stopped rewatching Knightley’s movies after that. Even my beloved Pirates. It scared me that I could get sucked into a black hole of obsession. My brain perpetually wanted something to latch onto and compulsively think about, but I had no idea why.
I became obsessed with another movie: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I liked that critics considered the movie “good;” this made my compulsive rewatching feel slightly less idiotic than usual.
I was especially moved by the scene in which Kirsten Dunst speaks the movie’s title. She quotes a passage from Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard”:
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned.
The “vestal” is an ideal—forgotten, forgetting, innocent, safe—that the speaker wishes they could become, which of course they can’t. Because the speaker is not an ideal. The speaker is a human spirit cursed with a human memory. Like I am. Like you are. And no matter how much we try to erase our worst memories, they remain etched into us.
Toward the end of college, I’d go to bars alone, sit in a corner, and watch how people behaved. I took mental notes of the social techniques that would be useful to me: how to buy a beer, how to nod and smile while listening, how to rest your elbows on a bar, how to navigate a dance floor with apparent ease. Once I had a working knowledge of traversing nightlife, I’d go out with my younger brother (he had a fake ID) or my former football teammates, to practice having fun with others. By the time I was 22, I trusted that I could socialize with peers, as long as there was alcohol involved, the lights were dim, and the noise was loud. In other words, as long as many forces were drowning out my social anxiety.
The speaker is a human spirit cursed with a human memory. Like I am. Like you are. And no matter how much we try to erase our worst memories, they remain etched into us.
After undergrad, I bounced around. I did a master’s degree in New York City before becoming a well-intentioned, ineffectual high school teacher in Hartford, CT. Then I moved to Virginia to pursue an MFA. Each phase of life felt like a chance to finally become normal. My method of reinvention: lying. I tried to construct an image of myself that was socially competent, smart, and even charming. I talked as if I’d had friends in undergrad, as if I’d been to house parties and drunk beers from kegs. During my MFA, when I got invited to potlucks, I acted like they weren’t the first potlucks I’d ever attended. I talked about playing high school quarterback as if it were a purely positive experience, and I made no mention of the isolation and embarrassment of playing—as a shy and sensitive teenager—such a public role in a small town.
In Eternal Sunshine, Joel hires a company to erase his ex-girlfriend Clementine from his memory. Most of the movie takes place in Joel’s mind, while scientists pinpoint and remove memories of Clementine. Throughout this process, the backdrops of Joel’s memories crumble and deteriorate. A powerful example: A house collapses into rubble, as if being demolished.
I told lies about myself because I hoped that I could alter who I was to other people. I didn’t want to embarrass others—especially my dad—by being a strange man. Perhaps I could even alter who I was to myself, in my mind. It was like I was perpetually demolishing a house inside me. And sometimes that demolition became literal in its violence: I would punch myself in the head, attempting to knock my embarrassing memories and bad feelings out of my skull.
But the house inside me would always reconstruct itself.
It couldn’t be destroyed.
After repeatedly failing at reinventing myself, I’d always give up my elaborate fabrications. I’d avoid social gatherings, and cling to a romantic partner or one great friend. This shift back into hiding always followed an embarrassment, usually involving alcohol. I’d drink too much. Then I’d puke or cry in front of people.
Sometimes the embarrassment highlighted my dishonesty. For example, I frequently told my fellow high school teachers that I was friends with Snooki from The Jersey Shore. Snooki had grown up near me, and I played it as if I knew her before she was famous.
Then, one day, my sister visited, and we ran into one of my colleagues at a bar. The colleague asked if my sister knew Snooki, too. My sister responded: “Too?” My face reddened, and, in a panic, I said to my colleague: “I’ve never met Snooki. I just pretended I used to party with her because I wanted to seem interesting.” My colleague changed the subject quickly, choosing not to linger on my lie or make fun of me, not because my lie wasn’t ridiculous or worth laughing about, but because only a weirdo would tell such a lie, and it would’ve been mean to tease a weirdo.
Growing up, I knew I was different from other kids. Dad knew, too. But he didn’t want to think about it—perhaps because my obsessiveness and social problems were traits I’d inherited from him. I was taught not to whine about my insomnia or my emotional discomfort. One of the most common phrases I heard from my dad was “I don’t want to hear it.” He’d say this when I attempted to talk about an unpleasant feeling. So I kept my struggles to myself. Ground them up. Crushed them.
This resulted in a lifetime of compulsive behaviors. Compulsive movie viewing. Compulsive weightlifting. Compulsive eating. Compulsive gambling. Compulsive self-harm, porn watching, chess playing, fiction writing, sexting, weed smoking, lying. Most of all, compulsive drinking. Anything to distract my mind from what it contained.
For years, my wife encouraged me to see a doctor about my social, emotional, and addictive issues, making it clear that she loved me because I was weird, that I had nothing to be ashamed of. She stressed that I needed to explain everything, even the embarrassing stuff. Like the head punching. The strange obsessions. The rocking and humming when I was overstimulated at night. That this had all been going on since I was a little boy. Eventually, when I was 35, I told a psychiatrist everything and was diagnosed as autistic. This news, though difficult to deal with at first, has allowed me to forgive myself for the strangeness I’ve always wanted to erase.
Forgiveness has softened my writing style. Before I knew I was autistic, the tone of my writing was vicious. I explicitly hated myself, and it was unpleasant to read. It was also reductive, as hatred always is.
From this softer perspective, I’ve felt safe to explore things I’d spent years attempting to eradicate from my head. Toxic friendships. Repressed queerness. Severe social problems. My complex love for my father. These are the stories I was supposed to have been writing all along, and I no longer feel, while writing, like I’m grasping around in the dark. Instead, I’m sitting in a sunlit room and simply naming what I see.
Before I knew I was autistic, the tone of my writing was vicious. I explicitly hated myself, and it was unpleasant to read.
Finally bearing witness to my own life has been significantly more healing than medications or therapy. Every prescribed medication has had unendurable side effects. Therapy gives me brutal anxiety. But that’s okay. I’m finding peace just by envisioning myself through a forgiving lens.
At the beginning of Eternal Sunshine, the memories of Clementine being erased from Joel’s brain were the types of memories we’d all like to erase: toxic moments; fights; ugliness. But then—and here is where Joel realizes he wants to call the whole thing off—the memories become tender, sweet, warm, good. I’ve always taken comfort in this idea: that bad aspects of the past are intrinsically linked to good aspects, and that to erase one would be to erase the other. Eternal Sunshine suggests that the ugly and the beautiful are parts of a whole, and that love—for yourself, for your partner, for your friends, for your family—requires you to acknowledge and embrace the ugly, so that you might also acknowledge and embrace the beauty.
I used to be frustrated with how firmly difficult memories of my father remained implanted in my head. But now I’m glad they’ve stayed. If I had erased them, I would have erased Dad, and with that erasure, I would have lost memories I’d never want to forget. Like that time in high school when, mostly thanks to my talented teammates, I led our offense down the field and threw a game-winning touchdown with no time left on the clock, and Dad—along with the rest of the crowd—stormed the field, found me in the fray, punched me lovingly in the chest, and said, with tears streaming down his face, “You clutch mother son of a gun, you.” A combination of words I’ve never encountered elsewhere, which translate, in the world of my head, to this: I can’t believe you pulled this off even though it’s all so hard for you, John Paul.
Or the time in college when I’d gambled away all my money and racked up a few grand in credit card debt, and Dad cracked open my bedroom door and said: “Listen, John Paul. If you don’t quit gambling cold turkey I’m going to get you professional help.” I said, “Okay,” and he said, “Okay.” Thanks to that tiny exchange, I was able to stop playing cards. All because Dad said aloud for the first time—and one of the only times—that he knew I had problems, and he wanted to help me. In the past, I resented how infrequently Dad would acknowledge my struggles. But now, post-diagnosis, I don’t want a single thing to be different about Dad. His brain contains something ineradicable and restrictive that makes intimate conversations with me incredibly difficult for him. He cannot help this, just as I cannot help so many things about myself. And therefore I forgive him.
I’m also glad for the memories of being a socially stilted loner. An obsessive fan. A lying drunk. If I had erased these ugly things, I would have also erased what’s beautiful about me. Namely, this: I’m strong. I’ve managed colossal problems all by myself. I’ve stimmed through thousands of sleepless nights without understanding why my body was quaking. I’ve memorized how to carry myself through complex social situations so that my discomfort remains mostly hidden. I’ve learned to use my hyperactive mind to generate levity and happiness in others. I’ve developed the wherewithal to articulate my suffering in writing. And I’ve done all of this, until very recently, in the dark.
John Paul Scotto’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Sun Magazine, Gulf Coast, December, and elsewhere. You can contact him here.
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What the hell is going on in America? That’s the central question in this feature from Der Spiegel, which illuminates the right-wing extremism sweeping the country and introduces readers to some of the people fighting against the tide—or, at the very least, fighting not to drown:
The right to abortion long served as the largest slice of “red meat” in Missouri, a perfect windmill for Republicans to tilt at, particularly because there were no consequences for doing so. The right to abortion, after all, was protected by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling, which was applicable to the entire country. That changed in June 2022, when the court’s new, conservative majority overthrew the ruling almost 50 years after it was originally passed. Today, Missouri has one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the entire country, not even allowing for exceptions in cases of rape or incest. Republicans celebrated passage of the law like it was an epochal victory, but it proved to be a double-edged sword: Where was the red meat to come from now?
Their gaze fell on families like Daniel Bogard’s. He and his wife have twins, and Bogard realized early on that one of them wasn’t entirely comfortable with their biological gender. Ever since his child was able to choose what clothing to wear, they would always go into their older brother’s room to borrow his clothes, Bogard says. When he was taking his child to bed one evening, they asked: “Can God make me over again as a boy?”—at age four, maybe five Bogard recalls.
Bogard is rather progressive, but it took quite some time before he could accept his child’s new identity. He loved the long hair, but his child kept asking to have it cut shorter and shorter, first to the shoulders, then to the chin and then over the ears. At some point came the request for a new name, a boy’s name. It was a huge step, but Bogard was relieved. “It shook me when he said it because it was so much better.”
Bogard’s son is receiving medical care from doctors in Missouri, but the father says he doesn’t know what will happen now. The next step would likely be the prescription of puberty blockers to prevent female gender attributes from developing. But the therapy will be banned once the new law goes into effect in late August.
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No one knows for sure how many feral cats there are in New York City. The people who trap, neuter, and release them—a process known in the animal-rescue world as TNR—are a motley crew of passionate volunteers. This is the story of how whistleblowers and social media outrage dragged the work of Farhana Haq, a controversial TNR advocate and founder of the group Cats of Meow York, into the spotlight:
Sofia had only been part of Cats of Meow York for a few weeks before she found her first dead cat—a mother who grew sicker and sicker after her kittens were all adopted out. In the months since, she said, several more cats have died, including a pair of black kittens.
“I called Farhana and I asked her if she could come down and check up on them,” Sofia recalled of those kittens, shortly before they passed. “She said that she had a Zoom meeting, and she would come right after. Hours passed by and she never came.” Since then, she said she’s seen the way the cats are disposed of by Haq and other Cats of Meow York members—in black plastic trash bags, dumped with the rest of the garbage at the foot of Haq’s front porch stairs.
Bethenny told me she thought being a part of Cats of Meow York was a great career opportunity when she joined the team. Now, she told me that she worries her experience will “stain” her life forever. Bethenny also said that Haq was often difficult to reach, and that Haq often sent her children, ages 11 and 14, downstairs to administer medicine to the cats in her stead, which raised alarm bells.
Both Sofia and Bethenny were concerned about the cleanliness of the basement. “There’s no ventilation at all,” Sofia said. “It’s a biohazard. The cats—and even us—are getting sick.” She told me she regularly hears complaints from volunteers who spend extended periods of time in the holding space. When we spoke, she had a red, circular welt on her, which she suspected was ringworm. Bethenny, who has asthma, said she routinely had to use her inhaler after clearing out overflowing litter boxes. The first few weeks she worked at the rescue, she said she had migraines, her throat was sore, and her voice was so scratchy and strained she could barely speak. “It always felt like it was an allergy attack with an asthma attack on top of it,” she said.
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The tale of the murder of von Bredow and his daughter is a complicated one. Don’t expect a neat ending to this story—or any clear answers. Do expect some well-drawn characters and an interesting insight into the world of high-end violins.
Showmanship came easily to von Bredow. A natural raconteur, he could mesmerize strangers with his verve, comic voices and seemingly endless collection of esoteric facts. “He was one of the most authentic people I’ve ever met,” says Martin Schleske, a luthier who became one of von Bredow’s friends. “He didn’t care about any conventions. They were just not important for him.”
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For AFAR, Katherine LaGrave profiles Martin Riese, America’s first water sommelier, a man who overflows with infectious enthusiasm for the sheer volume of water varieties available on the planet.
A few days after I first speak with Riese, I collect a number of different waters with various TDS levels to taste with my family members. I share nothing with them ahead of time. Predictably, opinions vary: My mother, who lived in Germany for 17 years and who is accustomed to harsher mineral waters, notes the size and taste of the bubbles in Roi. My nine-year-old niece says confidently that FIJI Water has an “earth flavor.” My sister, who remembers childhood trips from our home in Germany to the Czech spa town of Mariánské Lázně, praises the Queen’s water as effervescent, with “gentle” bubbles on the back of the tongue. My six-year-old nephew, after sampling water from Australia with a TDS of 1,300, squints at me. “I’m used to swallowing pool water, and that’s what it tastes like,” he says. When I share this anecdote with Riese by email, he replies, as ever, with enthusiasm.
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Guy D. Middleton uses a single graffito to take us on a journey into the dark side of Pompeii in this fascinating essay. His eloquent prose manages to paint a vivid picture of life in an ancient brothel; proving that the allure of sex is something that never changes.
It is difficult to conjure these horrors while visiting the sun-baked town with its busloads of bright-shirted and good-natured tourists, or marvelling at the beautiful art and architecture in glossy books. We will never really know for sure about Eutychis, beyond the fact that there was a woman attached to the name. We may never know what life in the House of the Vettii was really like for its inhabitants, either. But we can keep trying to read the evidence to find the stories that bring the lives of Pompeii’s less fortunate into the light.
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For GQ, Eric Wills profiles Jason Belmonte, the most successful 10-pin bowler in Pro Bowling Association history. With his controversial and unorthodox bowling style, Belmonte is a man who is changing the sport with his own two hands.
When he first alighted on the scene, Belmo, as he’s known to his fans, resembled an alien species: one that bowled with two hands. And not some granny shot, to be clear, but a kickass power move in which he uses two fingers (and no thumb) on his right hand, palms the front of the ball with his left, and then, on his approach, which is marked by a distinctive shuffle step, rocks the ball back before launching it with a liquid, athletic whip, his delivery producing an eye-popping hook, his ball striking the pins like a mini mortar explosion.
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Bobby Alemán endures a challenging hike to explore a magical place called the Narrows. He recounts his experience in this beautiful ode to water.
We are the only ones there, which quickens my senses. I can hear everything. Every breeze. Every leaf fall and lap of water against the rocks. I feel like I often do when I’m deep in the woods and come across a deer that doesn’t know I’m there. I’m looking behind the curtains of our natural world. I see the oasis ahead. The cliffs look like islands, rock towers covered with ferns dipping and dripping into the river, hiding pools and coves at every bend. I think of Josephine and her feat of eventually walking around every one of the Great Lakes—one a year through 2007.
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Linda Button| Longreads | July 4, 2023 | 15 minutes (3,167 words)
Momo She filled our lives with good food, chutzpah, laughter, and love.
Enh. I could sense Momo looking over my shoulder as I typed, her head wrapped in a bright coral scarf. I was relieved she had put on weight since death. The final month her skin had hung on her, a size too big. She was back to her firm, long-legged self, her dark eyes bright with interest.
“Enh?!” I said.
I like where you’re going, but the words aren’t right.
This was what we had always done for each other—poked and questioned and haggled over art. Still, I felt the pressure of the deadline. “Your husband needs this in four days. I‘ve got to get the ball rolling.”
Momo shrugged. You’re the writer.
What did she know? Inside I harbored a delicious fantasy that my words would cause the audience—Momo’s friends and sisters, her husband, Marty, and their daughter—to ooooh at how I had captured her gusto on a tombstone.
For most of my career I have written ad copy. The work suits me. Constraints. The single page of paper. Brevity. Choose as few words as possible. Let the visuals tell the story. Conjure emotion in compressed space and time. Here, then, was the perfect writing assignment for me. A three- by two-foot billboard. Thirty words, max. My business partner’s epitaph.
But unlike advertising, lofted into the airwaves to evaporate, this project would be carved into granite for eternity. I yearned to create a gravestone that would sing through the ages, that would capture the joie de vivre that was my partner. One year later, Momo’s death still had me reeling. I had worked with her for two decades. I loved her. I considered Marty, her husband of only a few years, a latecomer to the Momo party. Now, for this assignment, he was also the client. He had final say, after all: When it comes to customs of death, spouses top all others. According to Jewish tradition, the time had come to inscribe the grave marker. A literal deadline.
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Marty had procrastinated for months. So, at the request of friends, I was pitching in. The final words were due by the end of the week. Could I deliver genius in five days?
Momo was right. The copy was “enh.” I emailed the lines to Marty anyway—She filled our lives with good food, chutzpah, laughter, and love—and hoped he would embrace it.
Momo and I had run an ad agency together. She was a seize-the-day daughter of Holocaust survivors; I was bred from stoic Yankee stock. When our agency dwindled to two, we embraced our differences and renamed the business Tooth and Nail. She, the smile. Me, driving home the point. We spread out giant sheets of paper on her dining room floor for brainstorms, plotted campaigns on her sofa, pilfered images off the internet, fought, competed, stepped over each other’s words, slashed ideas, fretted over stubborn, uninspired clients, and laughed about our men.
In the early days, on train rides home from New York to Boston, Momo would find a table for four and unfurl her coat onto the adjoining seat so no one would join us, while I tucked my backpack around my shoes, not wanting to take an inch more than I had paid for. The coastline scrolled by. She counseled me on my imploding marriage; I marveled over her athletic dating. “Who should I choose?” she asked. “The heart surgeon who’s analytical, or the brain expert who’s all heart?”
“Which one brings you joy?” I knew enough to ask that question. Momo chased pleasure, splurging on business class and nice hotels. She spent far more energy on my happiness than I did. She gifted me photographs of tulips exploding in red and orange, a painting of a woman treading a gray ocean, her nose barely above the surface, as if Momo saw beauty in me but also my struggles. She extended a life raft. She cooked homemade matzoh ball soup steaming with ginger and fennel, she listened deeply, as the best therapists do. I left our conversations feeling both filled and emptied, cleansed and heard.
Finally, she chose Marty, the psychiatrist who strummed classical guitar and wrote her love letters from his neglected house near the shore.
Then, the mammogram revealed a 2.2-centimeter lump. Cue the mastectomies, chemo and radiation, wigs and thinning eyebrows. Momo rejected that as her entire story. For seven years after her diagnosis, Momo made even cancer an adventure. She wrote a blog.
Am I upset over the possibility of losing a breast? Not really. I’ve had a terrific pair for 48 years. My girls have given me and many boys great pleasure.
She treated loss as a punch line, no topic too intimate.
On Monday I took a shower and quickly realized that I won’t be scheduling any bikini waxes in the near future.
In advertising we start with the audience and consider how we want to make them feel. Who would trudge the slope to visit Momo’s gravesite each year? Her loyal circle of friends, surely. Her three older sisters, each a variation of Momo: artistic, smart, empathetic. And, of course, her 13-year-old daughter and round-shouldered Marty, his AirPods filled with classical guitar. I imagined her quiet, sarcastic daughter cresting the hill and I wanted to reward her with a smile, to feel the warmth, sechel, and humor of her mom embracing her.
Amazingly, when I look back, I did not follow my own best practices. I did no research on tombstones, threw out no wide net. I suffered from tunnel vision—exactly what I warn young writers never to do—and got stuck on a single idea. Had I bothered, I would have discovered a wide field of possibilities; it turns out that epitaphs trace the arc of history with tales of society, legacies, and stories of power and love.
From traditional Jewish blessings . . .
“May her soul be bound in the binding of life.”
and Japanese poetry . . .
Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
. . . to good old sardonic American.
Here lies Butch, we planted him raw, he was quick on the trigger, but slow on the draw.
We could have honored Momo’s philosophy, She was bubbles in the champagne of life, or captured her perseverance: Grit and Grace, or something risqué, pulled from her own blog. “I won’t be schedulingany bikini waxes in the near future.”
I could have offered Marty an array of choices, mocked up what the stone would look like, handed him a scotch, and nudged him in the right direction. Instead, I worried and clung to one idea. Grief stuffed me into a small, hardened box.
I was thinking of something more inspiring.
Marty’s response waited for me the next morning. In advertising, where writing is a team sport, my ego had long ago shrunk to a chickpea. Still. Ouch. He sent examples of quotes he considered inspiring.
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” —Dr. Seuss
“In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” —Abraham Lincoln
“The pain passes. The beauty remains.” —Renoir
My stomach curdled with disappointment. I hated when clients reached for clichés. Also, I was pretty sure Old Abe never said that. Momo leaned across and squinted at the text. She turned to me with a look between constipation and impatience: What do these dead white guys have to do with a hot, middle-aged diva?
“Right?!” I nodded even though I got where Marty was coming from. When a star collapses and sucks up light and life you need big mother constellations like Abe Lincoln and Dr. Seuss on your side. Marty was crazy in love with Momo. He proposed in her throes of dying and adopted her daughter. Not so crazy.
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But he wasn’t there when Momo first brought her daughter home from China, the same year I gave birth to my youngest child. He hadn’t watched our kids grow up to be best friends. He wasn’t with us, looking down on giant sheets of paper, pulling ideas from the air, creating a company while taking turns with after-school pickup. Where was he when we got The History Channel clients snockered on vodka at a creative presentation on Russian tzars, or when Momo snored through a conference call, and we claimed it was a leaf blower?
My hand hovered over the keyboard. Momo was still making that face. I marshaled my diplomacy and shot a note back to Marty.
The Renoir quote is lovely—haven’t heard it before. How about this:
Momo
She filled our lives with chutzpah, laughter, and love.
“The pain passes. The beauty remains.” —Renoir
Marty didn’t respond. The day ticked by.
In her last month I had wheeled Momo around the block, past her front yard where a gardener friend had fashioned a river of smooth stones. Momo did not admire the curving white through her lawn, or the blaze of yellow leaves outside her windows. She curled inward with pain. Now that it was my turn to lavish her with support and comfort, I had no words. I spoke to her as if to a child. “Isn’t that tree beautiful!”
“Take me home,” she said.
Her office had been turned into a sickroom, a large bed and TV at one end. Her sisters had arrived from Israel, Dominica, and Maine and tightened around her. They filled the kitchen with music, took turns dressing her, served up platters of hummus and opinions. They, and her other friends, somehow understood the rituals of grief, care, and mitzvah. Their religion was seeped in loss and optimism. They practiced simple, concrete gestures. But I didn’t even know what to do with my hands. I felt useless, as if I had gone from insider to outsider. I’ve been here all along, I wanted to say to them. Momo and I, we helped each other. She offered me refuge from my unraveling marriage. I gave her purpose.
The night she passed, I left my phone in the living room. When I woke, messages from her friends and sisters spilled down my screen. Voice mails. Texts. “Come to the hospital!” “Hurry!” I had slept while my friend died.
Another day, nothing.
“He hates it,” I said.
Oh, you know Marty. Momo waved her hand. He’s a BFD at the hospital. He’s probably curing ADHD and seasonal depression.
“After years of pounding me on deadlines, you’re giving him a pass?”
Lists. The final refuge of the desperate, the last gasp of clients when they’d run out of ideas or lacked imagination. Marty had reduced Momo to a string of nouns, adjectives, and commas, as if that defined her. Plus, Wife was the second word?
Momo beamed. Stylish. Adventurer! Marty’s so good with words, isn’t he?
That’s what love does, I muttered to myself. It infuses mediocre writing with sentiment. “He left off sister. Friend!”
Momo frowned. Gotta include them. Maybe we need an extra tall slab. Fit everything in.
I pounded a response on the keyboard.
Oh, those 4am thoughts!
I would add friend, sister, businesswoman . . . and the list gets long. Maybe focus on how she made us feel? xoxo
How did Momo make me feel? She had taught me that moments live in the flickering gold light of a beech tree and a bowl of warm soup. That loss waits for all of us, so we’d better wring happiness from every second. Death had robbed me of my witness, my confidant, the most honest friend I ever had. She never lied to me about my situation. Or herself. How many lovers have you had? I had asked her when I started dating again. She looked off to the corner of the restaurant, counting. “Sixty? Eighty? I had fun.” Would I ever squeeze so much out of life? She left nothing on the table.
Momo, courtesy of the author.
What did I give her? My doggedness. My drive. My craving for partnership, as if I was born incomplete. I gave her my standing in the industry. My fierce competitiveness. My soundless, grateful love.
I went to make coffee. Marty’s response waited in my inbox.
It doesn’t work to say how she made us feel. We need to convey who she was. Funny, I left off sister and friend as her middle sister thought that it would be unnecessary, but it’s a key part of who Momo was. I was hoping that negotiator and artist would cover who she was as a businessperson.
Off to the eye doctor.
Ah, he was pulling in Momo’s sisters. A classic zone defense move by the client. I poured contempt onto the page.
New glasses? Hope you’re seeing more clearly now. Give me a call . . .
What do you think, Momo? I looked around the room and discovered her missing. Marty never responded either. But a tombstone deadline does not melt away like some canceled ad campaign.
The morning of the unveiling broke crisp and bright, the kind of April day we long for after the gray length of winter. A brightly colored square, rippling in the sunlight, waited for us. Someone had swathed the tombstone in scarves. The wind lifted the corners, flirting and winking, to reveal edges of letters. What was written there? When I had asked Marty the night before at a gathering in their home, he shrugged and said, “Something like in the email.”
Momo had handpicked her site. Even the year before, as we tipped clumps of earth onto her casket, weeping, we admired the location. It faced a protected edge of the graveyard.
Now, a year later, grass had grown over the mound. The trees plumped with buds and sunlight flickered through new green leaves. The rabbi, a short, bearded man, gestured for us to draw close. Marty stood with their daughter, his arm around her. I expected Momo to leap out from behind the stone and join us.
We each read something. I had to borrow a quote that morning, too overwhelmed to think. Words. All my life I have wrestled with, debated, and polished them. But how much had they ever mattered? Momo’s sisters approached the stone and unfastened the tape that secured the scarves. My shoulders tensed and my hand squeezed a damp Kleenex in my pocket. As the coral silks pulled away, the epitaph revealed itself from the bottom up. The words were indistinct, unreadable, and I cursed the stonecutter. Then I pushed the tears from my eyes and read the final, stubborn, unfixable inscription.
Momo Mother. Wife. Sister. Friend. Negotiator. Artist. Cook. Adventurer. Forever Bold, Stylish, and Brave. “The pain passes. The Beauty remains” —Renoir. November 4, 1958–October 25, 2013
Every word rang true, but they read like a catalog. Writing, I have realized, reflects the writer, not the subject. The tombstone embodied Marty: conflict-averse, hoping to placate everyone. The list did not add up to Momo. I had yearned for bolder art, and my failure said something about me too. I deferred to Marty instead of seizing the moment and creating art worthy of this woman, if that was even possible.
Loss had yawned over me the past year with daily reminders of my friend. The plants she had bequeathed to me, now gasping for water, hung from my ceiling; my phone became a minefield of photos and buried emails. I would rifle through contracts or sort through our old projects and feel fresh pinpricks of grief. I turned funny tales from our partnership over until they became smooth, comforting stones in my palm.
I had tried to find another business partner. I needed someone else, I knew that, to keep me from spinning tighter into self-criticism, to slow down and let my feelings catch up, to find happiness for myself, as she had taught me. I even met with a consultant who listened carefully over bad hotel coffee and said “You’re lucky if you get one or two partners like that in a lifetime. Don’t try to replace her—go out and seek many people.” So I found designers, producers, and accountants to help me run the business. I began a relationship with a kind man. Each person filled a hole in my life but, like the litany on the tombstone, couldn’t capture what I had lost. Death had rubbed its heel squarely on what vibrated and flourished between us, ending the world Momo lived in, of possibility, her quicksilver wit, the warmth that rose from her, her push to seek out new adventures.
I closed my eyes and imagined going home and calling Momo and telling her about this day, where we sang songs and prayed and grieved both privately and as a chorus. The group murmured on either side of me. The edge of a cold breeze snuck down my collar. I folded my arms and held myself tighter.
Ach!
“Momo?”
What’s with the waterworks? Life is waiting for you down the hill, my dear.
I never visit Momo’s gravesite, nor do I want to. She sits next to me when I labor over a script or edit a commercial, and even now, as I try to craft this memory of her. I did not have the right words to say to her in her final weeks. I could not conjure poetry for her at her service. My words failed me then, they fail me still, and I keep trying. I want to breathe life back into the shining energy that filled my days. I want to make Momo alive for you on this simple piece of paper.
Do words matter? I visit Momo’s blog and linger over her final post, written weeks before she died. The stamp of that last date floats farther away from me, but the words still leave fresh yearning.
Seven years of debilitating treatments, anxious scan results, and the occasional self-diagnosis. It’s a lot to go through to drop a few pounds. Seven very precious years spent with my magnificent husband, my daughter and stellar friends. Seven years going on eight years with nine years in reach and ten years hardly a stretch.
Knowing all that and still, I live like there is no tomorrow.
Linda Button is a storyteller and writer for a large non-profit. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Magazine, PBS, and elsewhere. Her memoir-in-progress, Fight Song, explores mental illness, martial arts and learning to let go, despite love.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy Editor: Peter Rubin
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For Slate, Stephen Lurie covers what’s known as Dawn to Dusk to Dawn, an ultramarathon in which participants run as many laps as they can around a 400 meter track in 24 hours. “D3,” as it’s known, takes place in Pennsylvania and is one of the oldest 24-hour races in the world. This past May, it attracted 36 participants aged 16-82.
Most people do not run. Most people who run do not run long distances. Most people who run long distances do not run extremely long distances. And most people who run extremely long distances do not decide to do so on a 400-meter track for 24 hours straight. But this year, at least 36 people did, enough to fill the high school track field in Sharon Hills where D3 was held in mid-May.
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