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In this week’s edition:
- Remembering an AIDS activist
- Keeping the secrets hidden in blood
- The missing “chacmool” women from Carlos Castaneda’s cult
- An international stolen bike organization
- The chef who makes cooking pork a party
1. The Cousin I Never Knew
Sophie Vershbow | Esquire | June 18, 2024 | 7,436 words
When the storytelling is this compelling in a 7,500-word profile, time evaporates in an instant. Reporter Sophie Vershbow was 4 days old when she attended a funeral for her cousin, Jeffrey Bomser, who died on Monday, August 14, 1989, at age 38; he’d fallen into a coma after surgery to treat an AIDS complication. For Esquire, Vershbow mined diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings, and spoke to many people in Jeff’s circle to tell his story: he and his brother Larry contracted HIV and died within six months of each other in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Vershbow learns that Jeff was bisexual. He never knew whether he contracted the virus from sex or by sharing needles with his brother. Jeff became a staunch, outspoken support for others navigating HIV infection. He fought stigma and advocated for clinical trials to find promising treatment. Above all, he helped people live out their remaining days with peace and grace, at a time when an HIV diagnosis often meant fear, shame, and isolation. “Jeff believed that the more people who knew about AIDS and people who had it, the better chance there would be of finding a cure,” she writes. “He was aware of his privilege as a charismatic, straight-passing, sober, middle-class white man dealing with a diagnosis mostly shared at the time by gay men and disadvantaged IV drug users who were being systematically ignored.” Vershbow excels at helping readers remember the stigma society imposed on those living with HIV and AIDS, highlighting exactly why Jeff and his contributions were extraordinary. What Vershbow makes clear in this riveting profile is that it’s not about the dysfunctional and dangerous path you once walked or what befalls you as a result. It doesn’t matter where purpose originates, it’s what you do with it that counts. —KS
2. How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe
Sharon Lerner | ProPublica | May 20, 2024 | 8,018 words
This is a story about dangerous secrets. It’s also about complicity and how it manifests, not only in the keeping of dangerous secrets but also in the decision—the failure—to ask questions or to take a stand. In the 1990s, Kris Hansen, a chemist at 3M, tested human blood from the Red Cross for the presence of the company’s fluorochemicals. She found it everywhere because fluorochemicals, as we now know, are “forever chemicals,” contaminating our water supplies, soil, animal products, and bodies; they can even be passed from mother to child. When Hansen presented her research, the company shut down her work. Her bosses also told her that fluorochemicals were safe, and she believed them. The headline of this piece says that 3M “convinced” Hansen, but in truth she wanted to be convinced. She respected the company. Her father had worked there and helped to develop some of its most important products. Even after her research was shuttered, Hansen continued to work for 3M. “Perhaps, I wondered aloud, she hadn’t really wanted to know whether her company was poisoning the public,” Sharon Lerner writes at one point. “To my surprise, Hansen readily agreed. ‘It almost would have been too much to bear at the time,’ she told me.” This isn’t a profile of a hero. It’s a profile of someone more familiar than many people might like to admit: someone who knows or at least senses the truth, but chooses to look away from it. These people are crucial to the functioning of corporate America, which prioritizes profit over well-being. You know these people, and I know them. Perhaps we are them. —SD
3. The Case of the Missing Chacmools
Geoffrey Gray | Alta | June 20, 2024 | 20,487 words
Chances are you’ve encountered a dog-eared copy of a Carlos Castaneda book sometime, somewhere in your life: a hostel bookshelf, a Little Free Library, a random park bench. At least, that’s how I’ve stumbled on one, but I’ve never actually read any of them. For me, “Carlos Castaneda” has simply floated in the ether all these years, a name synonymous with New Age. He became a top-selling author in the late ’60s, best known for his titles on the spiritual teachings of Don Juan. But these encounters with a Yaqui shaman were fabricated, and his body of work, originating from his anthropology thesis at UCLA, was discredited and has been extensively debunked. Still, decades later, he remains a New Age icon. The lesser-known details about his life, which Geoffrey Gray resurrects for this Alta story, are that he disappeared from public life in the ’70s, bought a compound in Los Angeles, and formed a cult, which consisted of mostly young women who identified as witches. These chacmools—a term from ancient Mexico for warrior statues—were “gatekeepers between the mundane and the sublime.” After Castaneda’s death in 1998, six chacmools mysteriously vanished, with the remains of one woman discovered in Death Valley. Did they carry out a suicide pact? But where were the bodies of the others? And why was Castaneda’s will changed days before he died, with his chacmools designated as the primary beneficiaries? With encouragement from a friend, Gray decides to investigate. He acts as a guide into a bizarre world, weaving a twisted tale that spans Los Angeles—a place where people can remake themselves, and where Castaneda spun up his own reality—and the surreal, consciousness-expanding landscape of the California desert. Things get weird, but Gray keeps us grounded. He delivers a fascinating story that feels stuck in time but also very of-the-moment given the current resurgence of interest in psychedelics and our fraught post-truth era. —CLR
4. The West Coast’s Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico
Christopher Solomon | WIRED | June 12, 2024 | 5,759 words
The journalist who shared this piece with me, Peter Flax, said, “I’m a sucker for good detective stories.” Same, Peter, same. And when I started reading this one, I couldn’t stop. It’s exceedingly fun, which doesn’t mean it’s free of consequence—quite the opposite, in fact. Christopher Solomon tells the tale of Bryan Hance, who runs a website called Bike Index, where cyclists can report stolen equipment. Hance is “tall, genial, and floridly profane,” with hair that “falls away from his face in dark wings that call to mind a mid-’80s yearbook photo.” A few years ago, he got an anonymous tip about a Facebook page run by a company in Mexico, which appeared to be selling bikes recently stolen from California. “Not so long ago, bike theft was a crime of opportunity—a snatch-and-grab, or someone applying a screwdriver to a flimsy lock. Those quaint days are over,” Solomon writes. “Thieves now are more talented and brazen and prolific. They wield portable angle grinders and high-powered cordless screwdrivers. They scope neighborhoods in trucks equipped with ladders, to pluck fine bikes from second-story balconies. They’ll use your Strava feed to shadow you and your nice bike back to your home.” Hance dug and dug until he managed to unmask the man behind an international criminal operation responsible for the theft of hundreds, if not thousands, of bikes. (As someone who loves to go down an internet rabbit hole in search of an answer to a question, I aspire to Hance’s prowess as a citizen sleuth.) Solomon himself takes the reins of the detective work at a certain point, contacting the criminal mastermind in Mexico, for a bizarre conversation. This feature is a ride. —SD
5. Pork, Love, and Money: Life According to La Piraña Lechonera
Abe Beame | TASTE | June 17, 2024 | 4,262 words
There is only a loose attempt to profile chef Angel Jimenez here: He grew up in Puerto Rico. He cut sugarcane at 14. His father ran a side hustle grilling on the beach. That’s about it. This isn’t a piece about Jimenez’s journey to get to America; it’s about the experience he created once he got there. From a converted trailer in the South Bronx, Jimenez runs La Piraña Lechonera, a restaurant slash weekly block party where, on Saturdays and Sundays, he roasts and sells two pigs. I don’t eat meat anymore, so I did not expect a pork-focused essay to keep my attention. I hadn’t accounted for the wizardry of Abe Beame’s descriptive powers. I could hear Jimenez’s salsa music blasting over the roar of weekend commuters on the overhead intersection. Feel the atmosphere exuding from the eclectic collection of characters gathered, from tourists to local drunks, all lorded over by the effervescent Jimenez. Smell the hot fat as pork is pulled from the oven. Taste the meat itself—although things become a bit too visceral when Beame bites into flesh “glossed with fat and pig liquor, shredded without any shredding necessary, in a liminal state between solid and liquid.” Neither Jimenez nor Beame take themselves too seriously and there is a lightness to this piece, which is graced with incredulity and humor. I particularly enjoyed the bullet points on why it takes two hours to get served at La Piraña. (A key factor is the trips to check on the cooking trays of pork, “leaving the trailer unattended, which often coincide with breaks to smoke a joint.”) Jimenez could be more efficient. He could be making more money. That’s just not his style, and it’s wonderful. At one point, Beame muses, “[H]ow the fuck I could possibly describe all of the insanity I was tasting and experiencing in writing.” He nailed it, with words that ooze fun and grease. —CW
Audience Award
Which piece takes the crown this week?
When My Father Talked About Larry Bird
Jeremy Collins | Esquire | June 16, 2024 | 4,570 words
Jeremy Collins grew up in Atlanta, but his Indiana-reared father made sure his Hoosier love for Larry Bird lived on through his son. (As a Hoosier with a father from Boston, I arrived at the same outcome through different variables.) In 1991, though, after almost 15 years of soaring NBA excellence*, Bird came crashing back down to earth—as did Collin’s adolescence. A beautiful, thrumming piece about basketball, family, and vulnerability. —PR
*This soaring was figurative only, even though Bird could, against all odds, manage a reverse dunk from time to time.
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