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In this week’s edition:
- Heart-warming tales of missed connections—found again.
- The Army veteran who ended a mass shooting.
- Nine perspectives on the prescription drug, Adderall.
- The keepers of the eider duck.
- A Moby Dick pilgrimage.
1. “To the Train Lady with Dark Brown Hair …”: Extraordinary Stories of Four Couples who Found Love via Small Ads
Amelia Tait | The Guardian | March 16, 2024 | 3,828 words
Imagine an encounter that changes your life, a random meeting in which you find your person. Amelia Tait’s fun piece highlighting four couples who met by chance was exactly what I needed. Tait’s story surprises as much as it entertains. Did you know that placing ads to find that missed connection goes back at least 300 years? “Though he may not have been the first, Samuel Reeves did it in 1709,” writes Tait. “Writing in the British periodical Tatler, Reeves sought the attention of a woman he had helped out of a boat. He ‘desire[d] to know where he may wait on her to disclose a matter of concern,’ he said, and provided an address where he could be reached.” Tait profiles four couples who—despite missteps, redirections, and the randomness of life—managed to reconnect and begin a long-term relationship. Each is worthy of a Hallmark movie but together, these stories are much more than just a series of meet-cutes. This piece is about the thrill of possibility as it is about the couples themselves; it’s about taking a risk in striking up a conversation, something that happens less and less often as we hide in plain sight behind our mobile devices. After all, you can’t lock eyes with your special-someone-to-be if they’re locked on your phone. —KS
2. The Hero
Dan Zak | The Washington Post | March 16, 2024 | 13,358 words
On November 19, 2022, a shooter entered a queer nightclub in Colorado Springs and fired approximately 60 bullets in 38 seconds. Five people were killed. If not for Richard Fierro, an Army veteran who helped to subdue the shooter, there might have been more victims—hence the headline of Dan Zak’s profile. But Zak troubles the notion of “hero,” and rightly so. Fierro doesn’t wear the mantle comfortably: he channeled his adrenaline, his training, and even his personal trauma when he threw himself onto the shooter and pummeled his head over and over with a handgun. “The fight was endless, graceless—like nothing out of a movie,” Zak writes. I held my breath while reading this sequence. It is all sound, instinct, and movement, and it is raw, brutal, and disturbing. In Zak’s telling, praising Fierro for what he did, saying thank goodness you were there, misses the point: No one should ever be in Fierro’s position. No one should have to risk their life to stop a mass shooting. And no one should struggle to cope with that experience, which Fierro is now doing, alongside his whole family. His loved ones were in the club during the massacre; his future son-in-law was killed. At a gala in New York, while strangers toasted him Fierro asks, “How about a whole family with PTSD?” Zak puts a sharper point on the question: “How do you survive that?” —SD
3. Club Med
Various writers | Pioneer Works Broadcast | March 21, 2024 | 11,738 words
I’ve never taken Adderall. Some of my friends in college, years ago, took it to help them study. Better that than the speed and meth that passed through our social circles, I thought. But recent stories on the drug’s shortage reminded me that millions of people depend on it to function and focus. This Pioneer Works Broadcast series is a kaleidoscope: nine writers sharing their perspectives and experiences on the prescription drug. Some are sobering, some are funny. All of them are intense in their own way. In “Tweaking on Main,” Danielle Carr writes about our internet addictions and digital behaviors and how Adderall and Silicon Valley go hand in hand. In “Adderall House Style,” Amber A’Lee Frost explains how you can identify prose written on Adderall. In “Tapering,” Kendall Waldman muses on how the drug was almost perfect, which was precisely the problem. It’s tough to highlight only a few here, and I recommend you read them all in one sitting. Taken together, the voices in the collection are a prism that reflects, distorts, and ultimately illuminates the complicated relationship people have with Adderall. —CLR
4. The Eider Keepers
Devon Fredericksen | bioGraphic| March 21, 2024 | 4,248 words
Reading this essay, I realized I never made the glaring connection that eiderdown comes from a duck called an eider. After forgiving myself for my anatine ignorance, I thoroughly enjoyed Devon Fredericksen’s education on the matter, alongside Pål Hermansen’s beautiful photography to show me their appearance (boy eiders look cool, girls are brown). Spending time with the eiders of the Vega Archipelago, Fredericksen details their relationship with the 50-odd people who take up temporary residence as “bird keepers” during nesting season, watching over the ducks and collecting their oh-so-soft down once they leave. Fredericksen conjures some gorgeous images: The little houses that the keepers make for the ducks that turn the shore into “a Liliputian coastal village.” The six-foot-tall, Viking-lookalike keeper, who coos over the brooding mothers and tells them “how lovely they look.” This duck stewardship has been going on for 400 years, and despite some worrying statistics on duck decline, it’s a refreshingly positive relationship between humans and nature. The key, perhaps, is that it stopped being about money—the Viking, for example, only collects enough down for one duvet a year. There is no factory farming in these Liliputian duck houses (and some mansions, in case a duck prefers communal living). As Fredericksen writes, for these guardians, “love may be the most genuine reason to explain their continued engagement.” —CW
5. With Melville in Pittsfield
J.D. Daniels | The Paris Review | March 26, 2024 | 2,155 words
I’ve never read Moby Dick. I know that’s considered a grievous sin in certain circles. However, to those people, I say: well, how familiar are you with Pittsfield, Massachusetts? That’s what I thought! Not to brag, but I saw Dumb and Dumber in a mall there. Anyway. J.D. Daniels has read Moby Dick. Many times, apparently. Which is why he drove to Pittsfield to tour Herman Melville’s one-time home. Thankfully, you don’t need to have read Moby Dick to appreciate Daniels’ short but transportive piece. It would help if you like driving on back roads, or fried chicken, or art’s ability to influence your life. Or passages like “You want to be careful what you wish for. Inspiration means breathing. Fish breathe by drowning.” There’s plenty of Melville in here, sure, but you’ll absorb everything you need by dint of Daniels’ own fervor. A heartbeat thrums behind every knowing recitation, every memory, every word. And when you actually arrive at the tour, surrounded by people who, like me, haven’t read Moby Dick, you’ll fully understand Daniels’ numb disbelief. How can the world be full of people who have yet to experience such all-consuming beauty? —PR
Audience Award
What story got our readers clicking this week?
The Hotel Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave
Matthew Haag | The New York Times | March 24, 2024 | 3,004 words
Mickey Barreto, a man who’d checked into room 2565 of the New Yorker Hotel for one night, was able to claim ownership of the entire building using an obscure New York housing law. How did he do it? Matthew Haag explains in this bonkers story. —CLR
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