This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
In this week’s edition*:
• A secretive organization’s questionable practices.
• The unknown truth behind a 35-year-old crime.
• Conspirituality’s long historical trajectory.
• Long COVID: overt costs and hidden tolls.
• Recovering a life of words after brain injury.
*Some of these stories may be paywalled.
1. The Opus Dei Diaries
Antonia Cundy | Financial Times | March 16, 2024 | 7,704 words
Teena, Anne Marie, Monica: the three former Opus Dei assistant numeraries at the heart of Antonia Cundy’s investigation are the first women to speak publicly about their treatment in the Western world. Their stories are not unique; Cundy interviewed 40 former and current Opus Dei members for this piece, just part of her meticulous research into the decades of exploitation carried out by this Catholic organization, a fictionally heightened version of which many learned first about through The Da Vinci Code. Her case studies are now in their 50s and 60s, but as girls, they gave their lives to Opus Dei as domestic workers, part of an army of free labor used to prop up the powerful institution. It may not be Dan Brown, but Cundy still hints at mysterious dealings (such as how Opus Dei’s massive London headquarters near Kensington Palace are owned by the Netherhall Educational Association, whose trustees are all Opus Dei members, despite no reference in the name). However, the primary focus here remains the women behind the scenes who have kept operations running through the mundane of cooking and cleaning, and woven among their narratives is Opus Dei’s history as young conscriptees learn it themselves—a well-honed piece of indoctrination. Domestic work may now be shared, but as Cundy writes, it was only in 2021 that “Monica and 42 other former assistant numeraries from Latin America accused Opus Dei of enslavement in Argentina.” The shield of mystery around Opus Dei still needs to be fully removed. May investigations like this one keep chipping away. —CW
2. Nightmare in Mission Hill
Adrian Walker, Evan Allen, Elizabeth Koh, Andrew Ryan, Kristin Nelson, and Brendan McCarthy | The Boston Globe | December 1, 2023 | 30,259 words
As the word count indicates, this project is an epic feat of storytelling. Told in nine parts, it examines one of the most notorious crimes in Boston history. In 1989, Charles Stuart claimed that a Black man had shot him and his pregnant wife, Carol, spurring a racist manhunt that terrorized and ensnared innocent people. Stuart himself was behind the crime, which took the lives of Carol and her baby. If you’ve heard of the case, you probably already know that. What you might not know is that there was evidence pointing to Stuart’s guilt that police ignored. “No one considered the simple fact that the leading cause of death for pregnant women in America is murder,” this story notes. “A pregnant woman is more likely to be killed by the father of her child than she is to die from anything related to her pregnancy.” Most galling of all, the story reveals that there were at least 33 people in a “sprawling whisper network” who knew Stuart was lying and said nothing, including two pallbearers at Carol’s funeral. “Chuck didn’t pull off his racist hoax alone,” the authors write. “He had everyone’s help.” There’s so much to admire about this project, from the pacing to the depth of research to the introspection about the role The Boston Globe played in the injustice. It integrates a stunning number of perspectives, including that of DonJuan Moses, who was 11 when the shooting happened. Through Moses’s eyes—indeed, through his whole body—readers experience the police bursting into his home to detain his cousin on suspicion that he was the shooter. You can feel the “low thunder” of the cops’ approaching footsteps and the sudden clang of discordant notes ringing out when Moses, backing away from the police, crashes into a piano. Thirty-five years later, Moses keeps a dashcam in his car in case he encounters cops. Trauma is one of the enduring legacies of the Stuart case, and Moses is one of the people who has “never managed to get free.” I’m grateful to know his story. —SD
3. Jacob’s Dream
Frederick Kaufman | Harper’s Magazine | March 18, 2024 | 5,928 words
The January 6 insurrection didn’t expose anything that hadn’t been simmering for years. QAnon had long ago turned the disaffected and gullible into a mob of self-exalting “patriots.” “Do your own research” had already been the mantra of people whose critical thinking skills crumbled in the face of a Facebook meme. And as Frederick Kaufman makes clear in his searching Harper’s profile, Jacob Angeli-Chansley was just the latest in a long line of people who confused magical thinking with a hidden truth. You remember Angeli-Chansley even if the name doesn’t ring a bell; he was “QAnon Shaman,” the shirtless guy in horns and fur walking through the US Capitol like a new-age Fabio that day in 2021. Connecting with Angeli-Chansley after his prison bid, Kaufman maps their conversations (and JAC’s conspiratorial worldview) against history and science in surprising and illuminating ways. Fascinations with Norse mythology and Carl Jung sparks parallels with German volkisch movements and the history of JAC’s home state of Arizona; tossed-off references to “quantum particles” lead to a fascinating section on Wolfgang Pauli, a quantum pioneer but also one of Jung’s most famous patients. Even Isaac Newton makes an appearance—not for his laws of motion, but for his obsessions with alchemy and numerology. The occult has fascinated people for centuries because it’s intrinsically fascinating, regardless of how rational a society’s intellectual temperature or identity might be. As Kaufman writes, “The age of Locke and Voltaire is littered with victims of poison, electrocution, and asphyxiation.” Anyone writing about a man like Jacob Angeli-Chansley may be tempted by ridicule, but that’s not Kaufman’s tack. Instead, he delivers an analysis of conspirituality that’s as well-reasoned as it is memorable, and serves a valuable reminder: you don’t profile to condemn, nor to forgive. You profile to understand. —PR
4. The Long Haul
Lygia Navarro | Switchyard | January 8, 2024 | 6,110 words
Lygia Navarro’s essay on long-hauler life was published in January, which was the first time I got COVID. I caught it from a relative who went to our Christmas gathering knowing that their spouse—my uncle—was sick, but decided to go to the party anyway, mum and maskless. When I decided to isolate from my husband and daughter in a nearby Airbnb, some people found that odd and excessive. So here we are, entering year four of the After Times. People have long moved on. “In 2020, we heard that the pandemic’s silver lining would be all the inequalities it had highlighted; at the dawn of 2024, it’s clear those inequalities are just as entrenched, or worse, than before,” writes Navarro. At first, we were all bound by togetherness. We would protect the vulnerable among us. But “[w]hat long-haulers are now living through, social justice and disability-rights activists remind us, is the American landscape as it has always been.” I found myself immersed in Navarro’s recollections of 2020, her quiet lockdown experience similar to my own family’s quarantine at our former wine-country home, where I spent the days chasing my toddler in our half-acre garden. But our paths quickly diverge from there. Likely asymptomatic when her child had a probable COVID infection that first spring, Navarro started to experience symptoms eight months later, including fatigue and brain fog, and was eventually diagnosed with POTS, a heart condition that can dramatically change the way people navigate day-to-day life. “I would remember 2022 as the summer when people stopped caring,” she writes, reflecting on others’ dismissal of her symptoms and the lack of help, and the realization that she was now disabled. Navarro mourns for things that once were, like her body and ability to participate fully in her offspring’s childhood, but makes clear that what she grieves the most is her lost faith in humanity. “Bodies like mine, lives like mine are the future,” she writes. But this is a truth that most have chosen to ignore. —CLR
5. I Lost My Life in 2006
Judith Hannah Weiss | Salmagundi Magazine | June 5, 2023 | 5,936 words
Back in 2006, Judith Hannah Weiss suffered a serious brain injury after a drunk driver crushed her parked car. Before the accident, language had been her livelihood—clients paid her to create clarity. She wrote for big-name glossy magazines and was set to ghostwrite a book for a famous doctor. After it, plagued by aphasia and amnesia, she had to relearn to speak and write, tallying the accident’s toll in the words and memories it instantly obliterated and in relationships forever altered. In this cogent essay she does the impossible: convey what it’s like to live with a brain recovering from trauma. “Imagine you are trying to speak and no one can understand you. That’s what it’s like to live with aphasia. Imagine you are with other people and you can’t understand them. That’s what it’s like, too,” she writes. “Like twenty words are twenty kids playing twenty different sports at the same time, in the same space, in my skull.” Over time as she relearns to walk, speak, and write, Weiss becomes “we,” an amalgam of her pre- and post-accident selves. Once the writer who met with famous clients, she is also the woman who has worked hard to navigate life with brain damage—proving that we as humans are always far more than the sum total of what we have lost. —KS
Audience Award
What story did our readers love most this week?
DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest
Sarah Zhang | The Atlantic | March 18, 2024 | 2,827 words
At-home DNA test kits like AncestryDNA and 23andMe reveal that children through incest are more common than we think. Sarah Zhang writes about Steve Edsel, a man in his 40s who discovered that he is the child of two first-degree relatives: a sister and her older brother. The piece is an emotional and challenging read on a sensitive topic—”one of the most universal and most deeply held taboos” across cultures. Zhang blends her reporting and current statistics with a very personal human story of discovery, truth, and belonging. —CLR
from Longreads https://ift.tt/hN0sYeQ
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/DuSnLjs
