I dove into this piece knowing exactly what I was in for—loss, heartache, animal pain—but I read it anyway. Because a story like this—about the beautiful, unique bond between a human and a dog—ultimately uplifts. Dave Wedge’s story about officer Bill Cushing and a one-in-a-million German Shepherd/Belgian Malinois tracker named Kitt is an intimate look at the partnership and love between an officer and a K-9.
About halfway through Kitt and Cushing’s training, just before Labor Day weekend 2011, Cushing and Kitt went to the prison complex for a long, challenging tracking test to determine if the dog was taking to his instruction. A trainer, posing as a human decoy—clad in a protective bite suit—hid hundreds of yards away from the prison. Kitt picked up the scent and aggressively pursued, staying on the trail across concrete, grassy fields, thick brush, and a dirt path. When he spotted the trainer posing as a suspect, Kitt leaped at him, flying 10 feet through the air before latching onto the human decoy and nearly knocking him to the ground. Holy shit, Cushing thought. This dog actually works.
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How two incarcerated men bonded over Dungeons & Dragons. The wonders of parasitic fungus. Greenwashing egg yolks, the Arctic search for Sir John Franklin’s tomb, and the hunks of hip-hop.
Keri Blakinger | The Marshall Project | August 31, 2023 | 4,584 words
A great longread educates, and in doing so, offers an unexpected poignancy. Keri Blakinger’s profile of Tony Ford and Billy Wardlow, two men who bonded over games of Dungeons & Dragons while incarcerated in Texas, does just that. She gives us a glimpse into death row, where there are no educational or social programs because the men will never return to society, where the isolation is so extreme that the United Nations has condemned these conditions as torture. For Ford and Wardlow, Dungeons & Dragons gave them purpose. The men were incarcerated as teens, well before they had to earn a paycheck or pay rent, and D&D helped them learn to manage money. But most of all, as Blakinger so deftly reveals, Dungeons & Dragons gave them something to look forward to, a simple yet necessary form of hope. Ford and Wardlow built not just a friendship, but a deep connection in a place where the only human contact comes when the guards handcuff you. In a stroke of journalistic brilliance, Blakinger uses details from Wardlow’s D&D character Arthaxx d’Cannith, a magical prodigy, to deepen our understanding of Wardlow and his true character. “Every day, Arthaxx used his gifts to help the higher-ups of House Cannith perfect the invention they hoped would end a century of war. At night, he came home to his wife, his childhood sweetheart,” she writes. If only this Dungeons & Dragons dream could have come true. —KS
Zhengyang Wang | Nautilus | August 30, 2023 | 4,497 words
Molecular phylogenies and caterpillar fungus are not topics I expected to find riveting until I read Zhengyang Wang’s essay. His story bounces along like a thriller: Mountaintop expeditions, dodgy deals, and even death are part of this fungal world. However, the most gripping thread is Wang’s PhD. Yes, that’s right: He makes his PhD research project on parasitic fungus sound fascinating. The parasite in question is reminiscent of Alien, invading ghost moth caterpillars and taking over their brains until stroma blasts out of their heads and sticks up from the soil. (Wang describes this much more eerily and beautifully.) In China, this stroma is celebrated for helping with a different kind of protrusion and is known as “Himalayan Viagra.” The attributed medical and aphrodisiacal powers (by no means proven) mean the sale of this fungus equates to a massive tenth of Tibet’s gross domestic product. Inevitably, people are attempting industrial farming, and mountain vistas are being devastated as caterpillars are collected to sell to fungus breeders. But it isn’t working. Spraying caterpillars with spores of the parasite O. sinensis does not infect them. Wang’s PhD explains why these centers are failing: The complicated, intricate ecosystems where these hosts and parasites evolve together are impossible to replicate. His research proves the decimation of delicate montane habitats is pointless, but not enough people are reading it. You can. —CW
Marian Bull | Eater | August 17, 2023 | 5,025 words
Free-range! Cage-free! Pasture-raised! Certified humane! I’ve felt a slight sense of relief in buying eggs with any of these promises stamped on the carton. But what do these terms really mean when it comes to living conditions for laying hens? For Eater, Marian Bull examines our current food fetish, an ongoing quest for “shockingly orange yolks” that denote hen health and somehow help us to feel better about the food we’re eating. Bull isn’t chicken about pecking into the truth, scratching well beyond the surface to help us lay readers understand what these terms mean and how our love-and-sometimes-hate relationship with egg yolks has brought us to this quest for the perfect egg, both in color and cooked consistency. What’s more, Bull does it with style and a sharp wit. “We want it over easy, its yolk sploojing across the plate,” she writes. “And we want its color to convince us that it was not hatched in some animal welfare hellscape.” You didn’t know you needed 5,000-plus words on the state of egg farming in America, but with Bull, you get a much-needed education, and that’s no yolk. —KS
Mark Synnott | National Geographic | July 25, 2023 | 5,835 words
Do you love stories about historical mysteries, extreme adventures, or scientific expeditions? Or do you, like me, love all those things as well as season one of the AMC show The Terror? If you answered yes—and honestly, even if you didn’t—this feature is for you. In 1847, Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 men disappeared while searching for the fabled Northwest Passage. In the decades since, there have been rumors and ghost stories but no conclusive evidence about their fate. Recently, a National Geographic team sought to find that evidence, namely Franklin’s tomb. But as the headline of this story states, “the Arctic doesn’t give up its secrets easily.” That isn’t merely a reference to the terrain, which at one point threatens to lock the team’s sailboat in winter ice—which, as it happens, is the last thing that we know for sure happened to Franklin’s ships. Superstition also hangs heavy in this compelling narrative. “I’m convinced that the Inuit may have once known where Franklin’s tomb is located,” one of the story’s main subjects says, “but they didn’t want it to be found because it was cursed.” —SD
Clover Hope | Pitchfork | September 6, 2023 | 2,781 words
My wife’s in love with Method Man. Why shouldn’t she be? Dude is … very attractive. I mean, that’s just science. Besides, we’re all afforded celebrity crushes, especially those that took root in our younger years. Clover Hope was in love with Method Man too, but she was also in love with LL Cool J, DMX, Ja Rule, and Nelly, just to name a few—and in plotting her own life of crushes against the arc of hip-hop’s evolution, she elucidates how sexuality became an indispensable marketing ploy for male artists. Sometimes that entered problematic waters, as when Tupac grew into sex symbol. But times change, and when Hope surveys the present landscape, she sees little that gets her heart racing. Some of that is age, maybe, but much of it is archetype: When you’re the dominant cultural aesthetic on Planet Earth, the commercial behemoths need to flatten and trope-ify you any way possible. So we don’t have Andre 3000s anymore; instead, we have Drakes and Jack Harlows. Besides, female artists have come along and cornered the market on sexual fantasy, and queer artists have spun and subverted the the gaze as well. (“A single second of a Megan Thee Stallion Instagram workout video is worth a million and one Drake gym mirror selfies,” she writes.) This piece trades on looking backward, but Hope’s genius is in nudging our expectations—and our appetites—forward. —PR
Audience Award
And with no further ado, here’s the story our audience loved this week:
Matthew Loh | Insider | August 21, 2023 | 6,472 words
What price would you pay to summit K2, a mountain far more technical and challenging than Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain? Could you literally walk past a dying man in order to get there? This past July 27th, 100 people bypassed Pakistani porter Mohammed Hassan on their way to the summit as he lay dying after a fall. For Insider, Matthew Loh tries to understand. —KS
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Critics are everywhere; great critics, not so much. But all of them have seen their influence wane over the past 15 years, as the Mitchells and Dargises of the world have been subsumed by Rotten Tomatoes and its nuance-flattening Tomatometer score. Why? It’s gameable. (Also, as filmmaker Paul Schrader points out, “audiences are dumber.” No argument there.) Lane Brown digs into the rottenness, aided by one of the grossest lede images you’ll ever see at the top of a magazine feature.
But despite Rotten Tomatoes’ reputed importance, it’s worth a reminder: Its math stinks. Scores are calculated by classifying each review as either positive or negative and then dividing the number of positives by the total. That’s the whole formula. Every review carries the same weight whether it runs in a major newspaper or a Substack with a dozen subscribers.
If a review straddles positive and negative, too bad. “I read some reviews of my own films where the writer might say that he doesn’t think that I pull something off, but, boy, is it interesting in the way that I don’t pull it off,” says Schrader, a former critic. “To me, that’s a good review, but it would count as negative on Rotten Tomatoes.”
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Sports gambling is a global phenomenon—but I’m guessing you can’t name the world’s most-manipulated sport. Soccer? Basketball? Try tennis. This sprawling, two-part feature from Kevin Sieff unpacks the story of Grigor Sargsyan, the man behind the biggest match-fixing scandal in the sport’s history. Known as “The Maestro,” Sargsyan went from a poor neighborhood in Brussels to a puppetmaster pulling the strings on thousands of low-level tennis matches across world. You won’t be able to tear yourself away.
They walked outside. Sargsyan made his offer. He would pay the player to lose the second set of the match 6-0. The man accepted instantly, Sargsyan recalls.
The odds on the match were 11 to 1. The player tanked, just as he said he would, missing even easy returns, double-faulting, performatively slapping balls into the net. Sargsyan walked away with nearly $4,000. He paid the player, whom he would not identify, about $600.
“It was an incredible feeling,” he said.
If there was something about the rush of competition that had almost broken him in his chess career, filling him with an overwhelming sense of losing control, fixing tennis matches felt like a renewed source of power.
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N’Kosi Barber, a glassblowing teacher at a studio on the West Side of Chicago, understands that glass is at once fragile and powerful. Barber has been blowing glass for 10 years, practicing the art with patience. “Your 11th year of blowing glass is actually your first,” Barber tells Justin Agrelo. “It takes a full decade to memorize its steps and to perfect your groove.” In the studio’s safe and supportive space, young victims of gun violence come to learn how to blow glass in a trauma recovery program called Project Fire. They practice a new—and delicate and challenging—skill, work with and learn to trust others, and learn to regulate their emotions. Agrelo offers an uplifting piece on Barber and this program’s efforts in a city plagued by gun violence.
The act of blowing glass, too, offers important lessons of its own. The risk of getting burned while working with molten glass requires participants to rely on each other for safety. That can mean using a wooden panel to shield your partner from the heat of a glowing orb of lava. Or it can be a simple spoken warning of “behind you” while carrying something hot across the studio floor. Glassblowing is a team effort, says Karen Benita Reyes, executive director of Firebird Community Arts. The technique fosters trust among survivors who may be struggling with that after they’ve been injured. It also teaches survivors how to cope with loss and disappointment. Sometimes students will spend hours on a piece, and in an instant, their hard work is lying across the ground in a thousand shards.
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Wilson M. Sims| Longreads | September 7, 2023 | 16 minutes (4,665 words)
My watch vibrates, my cell phone chimes, and my computer monitor signals a new notification. It’s the quarantine phase of the pandemic and I fidget with a highlighter; I pop the top and recap it. Pop and recap again. There’s a brief message in the body of the email and a six-digit figure in the subject line. I can hear the microwave venting in the kitchen. I can smell frozen taquitos defrosting. The number in the subject line is a client ID and the message informs me this client would like a callback, “ASAP.” I stretch my neck from side to side, open a file that corresponds with the client ID, and promise myself a cigarette after two more calls … or maybe just one.
Officially, I’m a Senior Admissions Specialist, employed by a behavioral health company, and my professional objective is to assess the mental health needs of prospective patients and connect them with appropriate forms of care. Unofficially, I’m an addict who stopped doing drugs and started taking these calls. I’m at a desk I bought for a dollar at an estate sale, in a house with roommates I met in rehab, beside a dog who’s rescuing me as much as I am her. I like to think my work is a personal debt being paid down, a labor of love that reimburses in personal worth—and sometimes it is—but more often it seems like I’m an obstruction enforcer or the embodiment of a taunt; a recovering alcoholic who explains to callers and their families why they can’t access or afford their chance to recover.
According to the most recent Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) survey, more than 43 million Americans need treatment. Ideally, whenever one of those people or one of their family members calls someone like me, their call would accomplish any necessary crisis diversion, then insurance verification, estimation of treatment costs, approval of medical and psychiatric eligibility for treatment, transportation arrangements, and admission scheduling. Ideally, there would be no need for us to save each other’s contact info on our personal phones. No need for callers to know what days and times I’m in A.A. meetings, and no need for me to know when callers are watching Survivor. Ideally, callers would get what they call for when they first call, and, ideally, callers would be ready to be helped when their calls are answered. “Ideally” is infrequent, though.
An infrequent call is one that leads to someone finding and accessing the treatment they need, and that treatment producing an outcome the patient desires. Infrequent calls become memoirs, movies, or the basis for future treatment models, but fail to speak for the majority. What’s common is one call becoming many; a series of conversations on the subject of obstructions; a pattern of apparent progress always interrupted by an abrupt “but.” The numbers show only around 7% of Americans in need of substance abuse treatment receive it. That’s over 40 million substance abuse sufferers with no inpatient or outpatient treatment from a hospital, rehabilitation facility, or mental health center. I’m not a public policy expert, but that seems like a problem.
I’m an obstruction enforcer or the embodiment of a taunt; a recovering alcoholic who explains to callers and their families why they can’t access or afford their chance to recover.
Personal absolution might be an oasis in the desert, but in the bleak landscape of addiction treatment, it can be helpful to have a reason to walk. I want to serve and save lives to justify my own, and I’m aware of how wounded this thinking is, but I was born into privilege and then spent most of my life expecting others to serve or save me. Before my story is over I need there to be more evidence of my social contributions than my crimes of action and inaction, and by my count, I won’t get there by going one call at a time. Not while 93% of the people who need what I got aren’t getting it.
So I take call after call and I disregard the sensationally infrequent successes. Instead, I inventory obstacles and categorize them based on cost: What barrier prevents the most substance use sufferers from being admitted to treatment?
Ambient acoustics play from my computer speakers. I keep the bedroom door closed while I’m working, but I can still hear my roommates. One opening and closing the microwave, then clapping a plate onto the countertop. The other, a musician, ad-libbing a song about the first roommate’s penis. Laughter, applause, and synonyms for the word “small” bounce against my bedroom door.
Our neighborhood is cookie-cutter suburbia. White trim, matching mailboxes, and a whole lotta suspicion about the house on the corner where all those men live. We keep the yard tidy and we wave whenever we’re walking to the mailbox, but our shitty cars spill from the driveway to the curb and moms cough performatively if they walk by while we’re smoking cigarettes on the porch. I don’t like it, but I understand it. We’ve got a lot of tattoos, we all work out like we’re missing some crucial endorphins (probably are), and our sponsees come over sometimes—and are usually in worse shape than we are. It probably looks like our sober house is actually a crack house. The neighborhood’s nervous about all of us adult men, but what we’re afraid of is their opinions.
Shame haunts all addicts. Should our struggles with substances become known, we might be hurt by professional, personal, or social consequences. It’s why the identities of my callers and what we say to each other on the phone is protected by patient privacy laws. And thank goodness! Nobody would talk to me if there was a chance I’d tell their boss about their addiction or use their story as a public address apparatus. Individual anonymity is essential for safety and dignity, but protecting personal privacy can come at the cost of potentially helpful public awareness. If all my work calls were broadcast I suspect there’d be little mystery as to why 93% of people who need treatment aren’t getting it.
So what follows is a conversation that never happened but is also always happening, a composite-made fiction of a father, mother, and daughter, who I’ll call “Emma.” A reflection of the thousands of calls I’ve answered in my career. A story that can belong to everyone because it doesn’t belong to anyone.
Let’s say Emma’s a woman; she’s a daughter and an adult, and she’s not doing well. Maybe it was nature or maybe it was nurture or maybe it was both, but for years she’s had issues with feelings and substances. Her family is worried, and a few days ago Emma’s father started calling phone numbers. Maybe he found the numbers online or maybe an old hunting friend who “has a brother with problems” texted him a contact card. Maybe the father of this sick daughter called one phone number or maybe he called half a dozen—but however it happened, let’s say it’s me that answered.
He wanted to make sure he and his wife could afford the cost of sending their daughter to rehab. He told me his daughter couldn’t handle another setback. I told him I’d do my best and verified that his health insurance covers Emma and that the policy is in network with the facility she wants to go to. He said they’d find a way to pay the deductible, that he’d talk things over with Emma, tell her the good news, and call me right back.
Normally the next thing that happens is—nothing. For days I make follow-up calls and send texts, but for days I don’t hear anything back. Someone like Emma still has a chance, though. The first conversation with her father cleared a major stumbling block.
A reflection of the thousands of calls I’ve answered in my career. A story that can belong to everyone because it doesn’t belong to anyone.
The average price for residential treatment is $57,000, and though the idea is that insurance mitigates these costs, around half of the nation’s insurance is tethered to employment (working is difficult when living seems impossible). So, for uninsured callers, the equation for mental health treatment can read like this:
no health = no job = no insurance = no treatment =
no health = no job = no insurance =
no treatment =
no health
Emma is lucky, though. She’s spared this equation not by her parents’ love, nor by some past foresight or wise decision-making, nor by trying really, really hard. Emma is lucky because she happens to be young enough to be covered by her father’s insurance. She’s lucky she has a father. She’s lucky she wasn’t born earlier or addicted later, lucky legislation determined she should be so lucky, and lucky the American word for “systemic benefit” is “luck.”
But even though Emma is lucky to be covered, lack of insurance isn’t the biggest barrier between need and treatment.
Emma may be covered by her father’s policy, but “covered” belies the financial exposure she or her family might face. Almost all insurance policies include a deductible, and the insurance policy will not contribute toward residential health services until the deductible has been paid by the individual or family—a modest average of $1,700 for individual coverage and much more for family policies. Each plan also harbors potential carve-outs and co-insurance, obscure fees, and inexplicable coverage gaps.
When a family or individual calls someone like me and asks, “How much will it cost?” there’s no answer that’s both precise and honest. If I call the policyholder’s insurance company, they won’t have an honest and precise answer, either. Only questions: Will the treatment seeker be diagnosed with an illness that requires expensive or inexpensive medication? Will treatment therapists find it clinically appropriate to recommend an outpatient program as a follow-up to residential treatment? And how frequently does the policyholder plan on catching a cold or spraining their ankle while on the property?
Luckily for Emma, her father can cover the extra costs. But out-of-pocket expenses aren’t the biggest problem, either.
She’s lucky she wasn’t born earlier or addicted later, lucky legislation determined she should be so lucky, and lucky the American word for “systemic benefit” is “luck.”
There’s also “insufficient criteria.” A client may have insurance, financial resources, and wish to go to a residential program that happens to be in-network with their policy, but still be denied coverage because an insurance company does not deem it required. Treatment seekers might report being severely anxious, lonely, or depressed, but feelings carry little weight. Feelings not accompanied by material or physical consequences (arrests, job loss, etc.) are not, according to many insurance policies, justification for residential treatment. Insurers want proof rather than professing—and the same is true for residential substance abuse treatment.
If a policyholder drinks a bottle of vodka every day and as a result of their drinking is arrested, then that policyholder will likely remain sober for as many days as they are incarcerated. The irony is that after 14 days of being in jail, they’ve likely been sober too long for their insurance company to deem residential treatment necessary. Similarly, if someone who mainlines heroin somehow detoxes on their own and seeks to enter residential treatment 20 days after they last shot up, they too will likely be denied coverage because they haven’t used heroin recently enough. Addicts and alcoholics cannot prove their need for treatment by requesting it. They’ve gotta bleed and pee for it. And even that might not be enough.
Substance abuse is Russian Roulette and coverage criteria lengthens the game. Each illicit drug substance (cocaine, meth, heroin) is more and more likely to be laced with fentanyl, and fentanyl kills. Each drink is one too many for the already beleaguered liver, that much more fuel for the automobile driver. And each use of meth or crack is a dice roll with the irreplaceable faculties of the brain. But despite the stakes, you must use the right amount of the right type of drug frequently enough for treatment to be covered. The person with a mental health disorder must prove that they have a history of wanting to die and that their desire to die manifests in the correct thoughts and behaviors, but, of course, they must not yet be dead. We must have evidence of financial losses, arrests, and medical deterioration, but we must also pay the deductible, have court approval, and pass an admission assessment. Substance abuse disorders and mental illnesses are identified by the very symptoms that preclude their sufferers from escaping them.
Addicts and alcoholics cannot prove their need for treatment by requesting it. They’ve gotta bleed and pee for it. And even that might not be enough.
While these issues prevent some callers from being admitted to the programs that are covered by their insurance, we’re frying bigger fish, so Emma gets lucky again. She’ll be considered clinically appropriate for treatment, so long as she’ll talk to me on the phone. If she’ll speak with me, then she’ll get to live in a bungalow with other women who have similar diagnoses. In addition to meeting with a psychiatrist and regularly receiving Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical Behavior Therapy, she’ll get programmed activities that offer supplemental social and expressive therapies. One such modality is equine therapy, and while it sucks to go to rehab, it sucks a whole lot less if there are horses. Horses are awesome.
But even though Emma is lucky enough to be the right amount of drunk recently enough, there are more substantial impediments than strict coverage criteria.
Statistically speaking, me and the other guys living in the house are miracles. The guy eating taquitos went from being the golf pro at a prestigious country club in Miami to stealing copper from abandoned homes in Kentucky. The musician grew up without parents, in a trailer that had holes in the floor. (He says it’s better to have no floor at all.) The third roommate plummeted from a D-1 track scholarship to a long tour of rehab row; four rehab stints the year he got sober. And now all of us have valid driver’s licenses and employers who report their earnings. I’ve kept a dog and two plants alive for two years, the musician is making money with music, the track star is engaged to be married, and the former golf pro is scaling the ladder in the local comedy scene.
Being a miracle doesn’t always feel like being a miracle, though. Taquito guy never refills the water compartment of the Keurig, I swear the musician thinks there’s some automatic mechanism attached to the dishwasher that returns silverware and plates to the cupboards, and transitioning from penis songs to client calls is like being in an emotional trainwreck. But mundane annoyances and balancing work and relationships is the miracle. We get to feel every single pain in the ass life has to offer; sometimes we’re even grateful for them. I rub a hand up and down my face, increase the volume of the “ambient acoustics” playlist to a level beyond ambient, and punch numbers into the work phone.
Let’s give Emma her chance to heal with horses and say Emma’s dad eventually answers my call. Emma’s mother joins the line, and in 20 minutes they try to explain every second of their daughter’s life: She was a lovely little girl; the apple of their eye. She cooed and giggled and had a nose like her grandma. It was no surprise that she grew into a straight-A student. Not a shock when she became a peer-tutor or junior lifeguard. But the lifeguard director was a problem. Or maybe it was a teacher? They aren’t sure. All they know is what Emma has told them: There were some texts. Some drinks and pills and questions of consent. The definite consequences of rape.
It’s a common story among callers, but each person is speaking of their own distinct tragedy. The information is relayed in sobs and sighs, and then the speakers gather themselves and continue in stops, starts, and contradictions. Like Emma’s parents. That friend of hers, Cheryl, is a problem, says the father. No, Cheryl isn’t a problem, corrects the mother, she’s Emma’s sponsee. The pharmacy keeps messin’ up her medicine, says the mother. The boss at her work got rid of her just for speaking her mind, says the father. The rehab in Florida she went to wasn’t helpful at all, they both agree, all it did was treat her like an animal. Now she’s saying she’d like to turn her brain off, says her father. Not suicidal, says her mother, but our trashcans are full of bottles and she’s said she wishes “it would all just stop.” She’s worth helping, they both say.
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And when they ask how I got healthy, I know what they want to hear: I was sick and addicted until my parents made me go to rehab, then I went to treatment and joined A.A. and now I’m sober and happy. It’s the story of a promise. A suggestion made by the hashtag #RecoveryIsPossible. The premise is I was once in Emma’s position and now I’m not. The promise is that this means the same can be true of Emma, too. My story happened. I was jobless, estranged from family, financially bankrupt, chemically addicted, and suicidal. Now, I’m none of those things. Now, my life makes the lives around mine better. But this job has taught me I’m no promise. I’m an exception, aided to stability by systems that point to my story as validation for their rule. To be well enough to tell a recovery story like mine is to be one of the very few who are made well by this system of care.
So I tell the parents I was lucky. That I caught some good breaks and some bad ones, that I’m grateful to be well enough to try and help people who are sick like I was. But when I ask if they’re willing to wake Emma from her nap so I can speak to her, they say they’re not. Sleep’s been a big issue, says the father. And we’re trying to treat her like she’s an adult, says the mother. We watch her pills and sneak sniffs of her breath and we appreciate you checking in with us, they say, but she’s finally asleep and we’ll have her give you a call first thing when she wakes up.
I have two new text messages and one new email. The first text is from a sponsee I’ve been working with for a year and a half, the second text is from an ex-girlfriend who I’m still sleeping with, and the email is from a coworker to one of our partner facilities, with me copied.
The sponsee says, “What’re you wearing?” the woman says, “I’m with Meg and we’re tequila-ing,” and the email says, “Anything available for female MH SAME DAY?”
The sponsee’s joke means, “Can you call me?” The ex’s text means, “In about an hour you’re gonna want to be in my apartment.” And the email means, “Is there an immediate admission spot available for a female Mental Health client?”
My story happened. I was jobless, estranged from family, financially bankrupt, chemically addicted, and suicidal. Now, I’m none of those things.
My dog’s head rests so close to my foot I can feel her breath through the mesh of my shoe. I keep my feet planted and arch my spine until the back of my head rests between my shoulders, mouth hanging open, the room upside down and the pressure in my vertebrae popping.
On the far wall gray curtains seem to rise like columns and a painted boy and horse nonchalantly fall headfirst towards the sky of their canvas. The painting’s frame is gold and ornate, inherited from a grandmother whose house made a more appropriate home for such grandeur. Here, though, the painting looks so conspicuous my roommates at first thought it was a joke, then asked who I stole it from. One of their girlfriends made a face and said, “That’s…a choice.” But I don’t care how wrong it looks. I’m trying to let go of the need to do everything right.
The frame is a square island of extravagance in a sea of efficiency. Beneath the bathroom sink sits backup shaving cream, deodorant, toothpaste, and shampoo. I pay rent seven to 10 days before it’s due and keep all my important papers in folders with tabs labeled, car, court, taxes, bankruptcy, or bills. In an Excel document, I make a schedule for each coming week, and in a Google Doc I inventory my daily conduct, all minutes planned and then accounted for, exactly. Addiction may have abducted me, but recovering from addiction made a machine of me. A machine whose oil and grease—things like meditation or the gym—are assignments I never skip. I spend every moment stocking and scheming against the small slip that might lead to wasting the life I’ve been gifted, but the painting and its gaudy frame are blessedly useless: a rebellion of frivolity. A reminder that I won’t survive the payment of my moral or financial debts unless I learn how to let my humming in the shower, or my drumming of the steering wheel, turn into something more. But moderation hasn’t seemed to be my strong suit and I’m afraid of the risks that can come with “fun,” “play,” “freedom,” and whatever other pleasant feelings the movies mean to communicate with shower singing. These are opportunities for errors, and for me, the cost of a mistake is, at best, re-becoming The Caller.
I text the sponsee, “Emergency?”
I text the woman, “Working [melting face emoji].”
I ignore the email.
It doesn’t matter if the last available admission spot is currently being reserved or if there’s a waitlist that’ll last a month. It doesn’t matter where there are or are not treatment beds available, because tonight is one of those shifts in which I’ve answered 40 phone calls but not one of them was from someone who could admit.
What I didn’t tell Emma’s parents is their daughter is probably lying when she tells them about being someone’s sponsor or going to an A.A. meeting. I didn’t tell them their daughter is absolutely abusing her meds and probably drunk on a daily basis. I didn’t tell them the rehab in Florida may not have been as bad as their daughter reported it to be, or that the friend who they think is a sponsee is probably a fellow in active addiction. I didn’t tell them their daughter’s path to sobriety, as a woman, would be marred by obstacles I’d never faced, or explain how I benefited from contemporary treatment modalities being a reflection of my white/western household culture. I also didn’t tell them I tried harder and more consistently than most people are willing to, or that recovering has, at times, brought more loneliness, pressure, and grief into my life than my illness ever did.
I didn’t tell Emma’s parents how few treatment alumni maintain sobriety, I didn’t tell them not to spend money they don’t have on an unlikely gamble, or that their daughter is coherent and awake, merely performing sleep from her bed. I didn’t tell them that she might be avoiding treatment because of recovery, and I definitely didn’t tell them that she could have a point. That recovering costs, too.
I also didn’t tell them I tried harder and more consistently than most people are willing to, or that recovering has, at times, brought more loneliness, pressure, and grief into my life than my illness ever did.
The cost of recovering is the pressure of the financial investments, multiplied by a lifetime of damages done and suffered. The cost of recovering is sleep, Super Bowl commercials, and the innocence of certain scents. The cost of recovering is safety after surgery. It’s losing the hour scheduled for “happy,” the self-prescribed solution to years of sad, and the pleasure of eating after an edible.
The cost is an exchange of wedding toasts for funeral juice, your name for your anonymity, your denial for your disorder. The cost is loving/missing/mourning those who didn’t recover, and the cost is wondering what you are and what will you do about it. The cost is culpability, responsibility, and a new duty. The cost is a gift that must be given.
And given.
And given.
But the costs of recovery aren’t the biggest barrier to treatment.
Emma and her parents are all aware of her financial ruin, her professional inability, social severance, substance abuse, and suicidal ideations, but Emma and her parents are all performing various forms of not-knowing.
Emma already went to a rehab in Florida. And some months after that attempt proved unsuccessful, her parents did call me for help. But if Emma is unemployed and cut off from all former relationships, spending days in a bed in her parents’ home, then what is it that prevented this family from seeking treatment sooner, from opening the door and giving her the phone?
Not-knowing.
Not-knowing is like puddle-water filling footprints the moment there are no feet present; it’s an inclination impervious to previous moments or days that were free from denial; it’s the most significant barrier between prospective patients and behavioral healthcare. Yep. More than a lack of insurance coverage, more than the costs or requirements of either insurance or recovery. The biggest problem is choosing not to see certain problems.
Ninety-six percent of Americans deemed to be “in need of treatment” are not receiving it because they “feel it is not needed.” And these 39 million people are not folks who got a little sloppy at the office Christmas party once. They aren’t your friend who smokes some weed. These 39 million people have—within the last year, as a direct result of substance abuse—suffered major health problems, physical disability, or major consequences at work, school, or home. For these 39 million, substance use has become abuse, and for most of them, this transition has occurred before the willfully blind eyes of familial observers who prefer comfort to confrontation.
Yes, they may have admitted, at some point, to someone, the presence of addiction. Yes, some may have attempted some form of treatment in the past. But not-knowing is an almost automatic practice that can’t be relegated to the past by a one-time acknowledgment; it’s as active and relentless as addiction itself, and only treatable with regular attention.
For these 39 million, substance use has become abuse, and for most of them, this transition has occurred before the willfully blind eyes of familial observers who prefer comfort to confrontation.
In 12-step recovery, we introduce ourselves by sharing our name and the name of our addiction. In a single meeting, I might say “I am Wilson and I am an alcoholic” five times within 30 minutes. The amount of repetition may seem absurd but experience has taught us that we have a disease that tells us we don’t have a disease; that the cure is knowing we haven’t been cured. So no matter how many days or years may have passed since our last drink or drug, and no matter how strongly we feel that we are fine, we stave off participation in addiction by admitting awareness of it into our presence.
Not-knowing protects all of us, addicts or not, from minute-by-minute second-guessing of our own answers to existential questions; it allows us to see a sunset without considering the smog, to worship without wondering if we’re wrong. Applications of ignorance can be essential for a little bliss, but our not-knowing isn’t intermittent. It’s highly consistent.
Are you able to answer questions like “What might I be wrong about?” or “Could they be right about…?” How frequently are you willing to do so? This is the sort of acknowledging an addict and their family has to undertake daily. This is the treatment for a sickness that says it isn’t.
Every barrier to healthcare matters. It’s easier to see a need when the solution is $6 than it is to see a problem that costs $60,000 to fix. National not-knowing doesn’t make addiction or mental illness. Genetic predispositions and traumas do. But nothing inhibits recovery from mental illness like not-knowing does. And when denial is socially pervasive and relentlessly practiced, it should be no surprise that people like Emma or her family find it hard to admit and admit and admit.
I pick up, uncap, then recap a highlighter. Red lights blink across my work phone. I have two new text messages, one from the sponsee and one from the ex. I have another email, a response from the treatment facility for me and my coworker. I need 100 simultaneous cigarettes.
Wilson M. Sims is a Behavioral Health Worker based in Nashville and South Florida. His work is forthcoming in Witness Magazine and he was recently published in The Florida Review. He is the winner of The Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction (2021) and his memoir is under construction.
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In 2021, Clover Hope wrote The Motherlode to chronicle women’s immeasurable contributions to hip-hop; now, she looks at the culture’s lady-baiting history through the hormone-fogged eyes of her teenage self. From Whodini’s leather-clad sweet nothings to Method Man’s wild-boy appeal (and now his 52-year-old gym selfies), rap has always seasoned its hypermasculinity with a heavy dash of sex, and Hope is the perfect guide through the recipe.
Truly inhabiting the sex symbol label in hip-hop can never just be about being the finest person alive—it’s the music that completes the allure. While I felt quietly emboldened by Lil’ Kim, Missy Elliott, and Trina as a teen in the ’90s, I also daydreamed of being Method Man’s ride-or-die. At 14, when hip-hop was shedding its sateen finish, I hung a giant poster of DMX’s stunningly shirtless and bloody cover of It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot on my bedroom wall. I mailed a handwritten letter to Ja Rule in the 2000s when fan clubs were in style. (Who knows if he ever got it.) In college, I drew a replica of another then-crush, Nelly, mean-mugging on the cover of XXL. I’m sure, in my young mind, there was danger in finding sex appeal in a hardcore hottie, and maybe part of the lust was a desire to be seen as the girl in the crew who was loved upon and seemingly protected.
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Like Dan McQuade, I’m a cat person, and this piece on all the cats he’s known and grown to love hit me in the heart. I’m reminded of my first cat, Striper, who we adopted when I was 10 and lived until I was in my early 20s, and think about our two current cats, Kaia and Ashira, who have also become lovable companions to my 5-year-old daughter. McQuade writes about the unique bonds formed with cats in our own household, but also the felines we encounter in our neighborhood; those connections, while more casual, also touch us deeply. McQuade also reflects on the influence of the comic strip Garfield, and a moving short from a 1988 special, Garfield: His 9 Lives, that beautifully captures the lifelong cat-human experience. This is a sweet little essay, and “Diana’s Piano,” the five-minute short McQuade recommends, is worth a watch.
I prefer cats to dogs. They’re smaller, you don’t have to walk them, and they generally like to be left alone. I also like that you seem to have to earn their attention. And once you make friends with a cat, it is a stream of cuteness. Detective now sleeps next to my chest or behind Jan’s legs, purring throughout the night. In the wild, cats only really meow to their mom when they’re kittens; it’s how they ask for food. But they do meow at humans, whenever the spirit moves them. The way I see it, the cats I meet are intentionally being cute in order to get me to do things for them—give them food, pet them nicely, the usual. I accept the terms of this agreement.
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Forty years ago, the Denver suburb of Thornton was trying to be forward-looking when it bought land and water rights 60 miles north of its location, near bucolic Fort Collins. But instead of being able to use that fairly and legally bought water, the city has run up against decades of small-town politics and NIMBYism—and now, Thornton really needs that water.
With business and residential development forced to slow, city officials are trying to change residents’ traditional American desire for a lush green lawn, which nearly triples the town’s water use in the summer months. Water reduction alone won’t solve the problem, though. The bigger question of who gets access to water—and how—is what David Gelles explores in this piece that’s part of the Times “Uncharted Water” series on the unfolding water crisis. It’s not just newsworthy, but prescient too: This type of municipal battle will become far too common across the American West in the years to come.
After years of legal rancor, most of Thornton’s neighbors grudgingly agree that the city has a legal right to the water from up north. But no one can agree on precisely how Thornton should access it, and a fight is raging over the city’s plans to move that water down to the Denver suburbs. With the pipeline stalled, Thornton is forced to limit its growth, with all kinds of negative fallout.
City officials recently told a fast-growing company that makes a meat alternative using mushrooms that it had to pause expansion plans for lack of water. A major affordable housing project is on hold for the same reason. In total, the city says 18,000 housing units, which could accommodate about 54,000 people, are not being built because the pipeline is tied up in red tape.
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Mountain habits in Tibet are being decimated to collect caterpillars that, when infected with a parasite, produce a particular fungus. However, trying to create this fungus in a factory setting is not working—and the fungus has never been proven to have any benefits anyway. An essay on ruining nature for a whole lot of pointless other than greed. Too often the case.
Over the course of seven years and thousands of rugged miles, I intermittently followed Tenzin and other treasure hunters on the fevered trail of the caterpillar fungus. Along the way, I worked on my Ph.D. in biology at Harvard University, probing the mysteries of the caterpillar fungus. I hoped to uncover a solution to avert the disaster I saw looming for the millions of rural Tibetans whose lives depended on it.
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For Wired‘s latest cover story, veteran journalist Steven Levy does what he’s done for so much of his career: profile a company that presents the possibility of a seismic technological shift. In this case, it’s the outfit that brought generative AI within reach for anyone with a web browser—and now is trying to convince the world that this isn’t humanity’s final Pandora’s Box.
The name that Radford and his collaborators gave the model they created was an acronym for “generatively pretrained transformer”—GPT-1. Eventually, this model came to be generically known as “generative AI.” To build it, they drew on a collection of 7,000 unpublished books, many in the genres of romance, fantasy, and adventure, and refined it on Quora questions and answers, as well as thousands of passages taken from middle school and high school exams. All in all, the model included 117 million parameters, or variables. And it outperformed everything that had come before in understanding language and generating answers. But the most dramatic result was that processing such a massive amount of data allowed the model to offer up results beyond its training, providing expertise in brand-new domains. These unplanned robot capabilities are called zero-shots. They still baffle researchers—and account for the queasiness that many in the field have about these so-called large language models.
Radford remembers one late night at OpenAI’s office. “I just kept saying over and over, ‘Well, that’s cool, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be able to do x.’ And then I would quickly code up an evaluation and, sure enough, it could kind of do x.”
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Marian Bull’s writing proves that you can make any topic fascinating just by how you write about it. For Eater, Bull surveys the history of our love-and-sometimes-hate relationship with egg yolks to arrive at the latest craze in eggs: “shockingly orange yolks” and how—sadly—this vibrancy is brought to us mostly by virtue signalling, meant to help us feel better about our egg-buying choices.
Last spring, my boyfriend brought a dozen of these eggs into my kitchen. They seemed harmless at first, but when he scrambled them, I found myself eating a plate of eggs closer in color to Bugs Bunny’s carrot than a simple French omelette. Later, I fried one next to my last CSA (community-supported agriculture) egg, laid in the Catskills by a pasture-raised hen. Once transferred to a bowl of rice, they looked like a clone experiment gone wrong. The CSA yolk was a deep goldenrod, fat and happy-looking. The Happy Egg yolk was such an aggressive reddish orange it looked like a pustule.
And as the last decade’s farm-to-table and locavore movements (and, importantly, their aesthetics) have gone mainstream, the “farm egg” has become ubiquitous, its yolk an object of our undivided attention. We want it jammy, that sludgy midway between soft- and medium-boiled. We want it over easy, its yolk sploojing across the plate. And we want its color to convince us that it was not hatched in some animal welfare hellscape.
Egg carton marketing, which is at best opaque and at worst a pernicious lie, would have us believe that the hens who imparted these eggs to the bourgeois grocery shopping class are twirling through pastoral fields like Maria in The Sound of Music.
If you walk the aisles of Mr. Mango or just about any feel-good grocery store, a binary narrative might appear in your brain. There are the bad farms — styrofoam carton, diseased hens shitting on each other — and then there are the good ones, whose hens are happy and free to roam, and lay eggs abundant with nutrients and vibrant color.
In reality, that binary is a spectrum, and a muddy one. Yes, factory farms wreak environmental and ethical havoc. And it is possible to buy eggs from hens who have lived a much more humane and carefree life than you have. (The easiest way to do this is to buy directly from a small farm whose practices you’ve researched or asked them about.) But the middle ground between those places is far wider, and more common, than egg labels would like us to think. And where the question of flavor is concerned, the equation becomes even jammier.
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This is an excerpt from issue no. 142, “Dead Reckoning.”
There is a noise that, for a Navy captain, may well be the worst sound imaginable—worse than the boom of cannon fire, the whistle of a missile, or the whoosh of a torpedo. That noise is the long, piercing scrape of metal against rock. It’s the sound, quite simply, of everything going wrong.
Edward Howe Watson heard that noise on September 8, 1923, at 9:05 p.m., while sitting in his ship’s quarters, directly beneath the bridge of the United States Navy destroyer Delphy. Watson was a 49-year-old naval commander—a privileged and pedigreed, blue-blooded son of an admiral, Kentucky born and Annapolis trained. A year earlier, he’d taken command of the Delphy’s entire squadron of 19 destroyers. This had been a promotion, a welcome sign of forward momentum in a long and varied Navy career. Privately, Watson told his wife that he’d have preferred a battleship. But he seemed just one promotion away from getting that too, and after that perhaps an admiralty, like his father before him.
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The Delphy had left San Francisco that morning and spent the day speeding south along the coast of California. Thirteen more ships in Watson’s squadron trailed behind. The destination was their home port in San Diego. This was a training exercise—a speed trial, the sort of thing the Navy, under considerable budget pressures, hadn’t tried since the war. All day the destroyers maintained top speeds in challenging conditions: bad weather, massive waves, a civilian vessel requiring rescue. By late afternoon, no one on any of the ships could make out the coastline through the haze. Watson wasn’t concerned; he had one of the Navy’s best navigators for the Delphy’s skipper, and he was using dead reckoning—the time-tested technique of calculating location from a ship’s compass direction, estimated speed, and the amount of time traveled—to ensure that they were where they needed to be. Best of all, a rival squadron of destroyers, part of the same training exercise, were making worse time. Watson was winning the race.
By nightfall, the Delphy was coming close to the Santa Barbara Channel, with San Diego in reach by dawn. A few minutes before 9 p.m., Watson ordered a turn east toward the coast for the final approach into the channel. The entrance was a risky place for a squadron traveling at 20 knots—littered with rocks, reefs, and shipwrecks just beneath the water’s surface—but it was the shortest route, and using it all but guaranteed that Watson would win. The other ships would follow, and they’d all be home in record time.
That was when Watson heard the noise—first the scrape, and then a thunderous boom. In that flash of a moment, Watson knew. They were running aground. Careers would be destroyed, reputations and legacies wiped away—and, worst of all, lives could be lost. But he could not have known that what happened next would become the greatest peacetime disaster in the history of the U.S. Navy. That it would prompt a court-martial of 11 officers, also the largest of its kind in history. And that, in the aftermath, he would be forced to rethink everything he believed about the price of honor and the true meaning of leadership.
And that, even now, 100 years later, there would be no end to the arguments over who exactly was to blame.
The destroyers under Watson’s command were known as four-stackers, marked by a quartet of tall, identical cylinders arrayed neatly in a line down the ship’s center, like the bristles of a toothbrush. Each ship was 314 feet long and 32 feet wide, nimble and powerful enough to target German submarines during the First World War. But by the time Watson took command of Squadron 11 in 1922, the war was over, fuel was being rationed, and military funding had been slashed across the board. While four-stackers could carry as many as 131 men, budget cuts reduced the number on board to roughly 100. It was an unfortunate time to be rising in the Navy. America may have just won a war, but the nation’s reputation was fragile. Washington was a hotbed of corruption; President Warren Harding’s Teapot Dome bribery scandal had implicated naval secretary Edwin Denby. Now more than ever, the Navy needed a demonstration of confidence, of authority. And Watson needed the Navy, too, in his own way.
Watson had grown up amid privilege, his only care, perhaps, the burden of expectation. He was the eldest son of a powerful Kentucky family, a member of America’s brand of aristocracy. One of his great-grandfathers had served as governor, was a five-term U.S. senator, and advised two presidents. The family superstar was his father, John Crittenden Watson, who earned his place in history as a Union Navy lieutenant during the Civil War battle of Mobile Bay. In 1864, Captain James Farragut of the battleship Hartford led a squadron of ships into Confederate waters and shocked everyone around him when he ordered his fleet into a mine-strewn waterway, crying out, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” Watson’s father was Farragut’s faithful aide-de-camp. He’d heard the captain say it, and quoted him for years afterward, codifying the legend.
Watson grew up with that story, which was also becoming the Navy’s story—the daring squadron commander defying all odds, cheating death, seizing his place in the world. He entered the Navy in his father’s shadow: The elder Watson went on to be an admiral, and often told the tale of how he’d been the one to lash Farragut to the Hartford’s rigging, so his body would be found if the ship went down. Between the younger Watson’s many postings—on the Amphitrite, the Maine the Brooklyn, the Baltimore, the Richmond, the Prairie, the West Virginia, the Detroit, the Iris—his father would step in and offer plum assignments; Watson even went along as his father’s aide to the coronation of King Edward in London. He married well—a St. Louis socialite named Hermine Gratz, whose sister married a Rockefeller—and a life of ease awaited once his time in the Navy ended. But during the Great War, Watson only managed to take command of a battleship late in the effort, and he never saw combat. So when the destroyers of his squadron were given a chance to prove their worth, the opportunity couldn’t have come soon enough.
On Friday, September 7, 1923, Watson summoned Squadron 11’s commanders to a meeting. The ships were docked in San Francisco, where the crews were on shore leave. Watson announced that he’d lead them to their home port in San Diego on a training exercise, coupled with gunnery and tactical drills. Their orders, Watson said, were to travel at 20 knots, faster than any ship had been permitted in years.
For the first time since the war, these destroyers would do what they’d been built to do, although it would come with some risk. There was no telling what toll such an extreme pace would take on the ships’ turbines when sustained for 453 nautical miles. Watson shrugged off such concerns; that was what the exercise was for. Besides, Squadron 11 wouldn’t be the only fleet of destroyers bound for San Diego that day. Squadron 12 was going, too. This would be a race, and Watson intended to win it.
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Tom Vanderbilt eloquently describes the joys of downhill biking, a sport that truly forces you to be present in the moment. Determined to push himself further, he seeks out how to get air and truly fly.
Perhaps that’s why, as small as my jumps were, they felt like magic. It reminded me of being a ten-year-old on Peter Pan’s Flight at Disney World in the 1970s, when the roller-coaster-like track you’re riding in your pirate ship comes to a visible end and then you somehow soar into the air.
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At The Marshall Project, journalist Keri Blakinger offers a sobering and poignant profile of Tony Ford and Billy Wardlow, two incarcerated men who found friendship and purpose by playing the role playing game Dungeons and Dragons together while on death row in Texas.
Death row didn’t offer any of the educational or mental-health programs available in regular prisons; rehabilitation isn’t the goal for those on death row, and special programming is not always logistically feasible for people held in solitary confinement. For these players, the games served as their life-skills course, anger-management class and drug counseling, too. Like Ford and Wardlow, a lot of the men on the row came to prison at a young age and never had a chance to be adults in the free world.
In 2013, Ford’s mother died, and he quit the game. But Wardlow kept talking to him, even when it was just a one-way conversation through the rec-cage fence. At first, Wardlow just mused aloud about whatever was on his mind, his voice calming and hypnotic. As he kept talking, Ford started to open up, too, crying as he recounted memories of his mother. He remembered the pride she took in her work as a police officer, and how much she taught him about computers when she worked in an Atari warehouse years later. He remembered how she showed him the basics of chess. At one point, Wardlow sent over some jelly beans — he knew Ford loved them, especially the black ones.
“Next thing you know, I’m not crying when I’m talking about my mother,” Ford told me two years ago during one of our first in-person interviews. “I’m just talking about her.” A few weeks later, he jumped back in the game.
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