In this week’s Top 5:
• A woman who survived the unimaginable
• Whether a school shooter’s parents are legally liable
• A mother’s ordeal, a son’s journey
• The reality of an autism diagnosis in your 40s
• The massive, marvelous ecosystem living in the earth’s crust
1. Emma Carey: The Skydiver Who Survived a 14,000-foot Fall
Ryan Hockensmith | ESPN | June 26, 2024 | 5,538 words
Eleven years ago, Emma Carey plummeted 14,000 feet to the ground after a tandem jump with her skydiving instructor went horribly wrong. For ESPN, Ryan Hockensmith takes us through Carey’s life-altering fall. “Emma Carey is flying, and she is so happy,” he writes. “She is 14,000 feet above the earth, gripping the straps of her parachute pack like an excited kid on the way to her first day of school. Oh my god, I’m going to become a skydiver, she thinks, not knowing that just about the most terrifying thing a human being can experience is about to happen to her.” Her accident could have easily taken center stage in this piece. Hockensmith is a skilled reporter and writer who uses evocative detail to tell us so much more than the basic facts of Carey’s accident and the aftermath. He introduces us to Emma and her best friend, Jemma Mrdak. The duo is a “package deal” who did everything together, including skydiving. It’s unclear precisely what happened during Carey’s jump. All she knows is that the main and safety chutes became entangled and neither opened as expected; her instructor landed on top of her, unconscious. She does not blame him for what happened and has kept his name out of news reports in the aftermath. The premise of this story is compelling, but what I loved most is that Carey’s attitude is almost a full-fledged character in this piece. “She began toggling between moments of tremendous gratitude that she’s alive, and tremendous anger at the accident, at the world, at her body, at everything. Sometimes she had a good morning and a bad afternoon. Other times it was a bad 1:52 p.m. and a good 1:53, then a bad 1:54. She just tried to keep getting to 1:55,” Hockensmith writes. This is a gripping story of pure will and determination. While Emma may have lost feeling and partial use of her legs, she is here to tell you that as a person, she is absolutely whole. —KS
2. Guilty: Inside the High-Risk, Historic Prosecution of a School Shooter’s Parents
John Woodrow Cox | The Washington Post | July 8, 2024 | 8,641 words
This is the second story I’ve chosen for the Top 5 this summer that focuses on the parents of young people who committed mass shootings. The first, written by Mark Follman for Mother Jones, is about Chin Rodger, who is helping experts understand the psychology and behavior of mass shooters in an effort to prevent future crimes, based on her experience with her son, Elliot. The second, by the masterful John Woodrow Cox, is about James and Jennifer Crumbley, who were recently convicted of involuntary manslaughter because they failed to secure the gun that their son, Ethan, used to murder four people and wound seven others at his high school (a gun, it is worth noting, that his parents gave him as a gift). Together, these stories point to new fronts in the effort to combat America’s epidemic of gun violence, and the one Cox depicts is controversial. As the headline of the story notes, the case against the Crumbleys was historic—no parents had ever been held legally responsible for a mass shooting committed by a child—but it was also high-risk. Karen McDonald, the prosecutor who led the cases, faced death and rape threats, as well as doubt from some of her peers. The work consumed her life and that of her colleagues; the need for therapy is mentioned in the story more than once. Cox embedded with the prosecution over many months, which allows him to show in intimate narrative detail what it took to win in court and what was lost in the process. “Before the shooting,” Cox writes, “there was a lightness to McDonald, at least with family and friends, said her 26-year-old daughter, Maeve Stargardt, describing her as a ‘total goof’ who reveled in throwing surprise parties and giving quirky presents. She watched that part of her mom wither. But she’d accepted that’s what her mother needed to become, not just to support four grieving families, but also to overcome the persistent doubts about her decisions.” I found myself commending this sacrifice while also thinking that no one should have to make it. America’s toxic gun culture destroys lives in more ways than one. —SD
3. The Bullet in My Mother’s Head
Ryan Nourai | Esquire | July 24, 2024 | 4,757 words
It does little good to dance around the atrocity, so here goes. Four years before Ryan Nourai was born, his mother was carjacked, kidnapped, and repeatedly raped, then shot twice in the head and left for dead in an alley. She survived, albeit with fragments of a bullet lodged in her brain. Her son knew the bullet part, but little else; only after her death, decades later, did he begin to seek the full breadth of what had happened. “Why,” he writes, “now that she was gone, now that her body was in the next room, was the incident starting to feel closer than ever?” The assailants had long been captured and imprisoned for the attack, so Nourai’s ensuing investigation is more of a howdunit than a whodunit, an effort to fill the lacunae that existed between him and understanding. But as he gets closer, jumping across the years—scattering her ashes, riding with the retired homicide detective who investigated the crime, even speaking at one of the attackers’ parole hearing—you start to realize that closure isn’t the point. Something else is at play here, something shaped like grief but tinted like self-discovery. “I had been trying all along to find out whether her mettle and spark lived in me—and to do that, I thought I had to replicate her pain,” he writes. “Now I knew that wasn’t true.” In unadorned prose, Nourai sketches the boundless length and depth of a son’s love. —PR
4. What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained
Mary H.K. Choi | New York Magazine | July 3, 2024 | 5,906 words
My brother received his autism diagnosis in his late 40s—an important new framing for our family. At the time, I thought such a delayed diagnosis was unusual, but a few years later, I had the honor of editing John Paul Scotto’s Longreads piece about his own late diagnosis, “I Tried to Forget My Whole Life. I’m Glad I Failed.” After the essay was published, Scotto was overwhelmed by the number of people who contacted him to share their affinity with his story; it can be significant to shine a light. When autism was not as well understood, discovery was slower, and many grew up without the knowledge that could have helped to alleviate many difficulties. But it’s never too late to seek answers, as shown yet again by Mary H.K. Choi’s powerful piece for The Cut. Choi explains that even after being diagnosed at age 43, she still grappled with a form of imposter syndrome, writing, “And even if I was officially autistic, was I autistic enough for it to matter? And what did that mean?” She struggles to feel that her diagnosis of ASD level one, the mildest form of autism spectrum disorder, counts despite being able to see—and candidly write about—her anxiety, her awkward moments, and the pain she has caused those close to her. Gradually, Choi comes to terms with how “the disorder is not a spectrum but spectra, a solar system of sprawling constellations in 3-D that differs from one person to the next,” and that it intertwines with her cultural identity and other influences to make her who she is. After so many years of trying to fit a box, she is finally adapting the box to suit her. —CW
5. The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet
Ferris Jabr | The New York Times Magazine | June 24, 2024 | 5,966 words
Deep within the Earth’s crust, an ancient underworld teems with intraterrestrial microbes. They’re tiny but mighty, and different from their cousins above ground—breathing rock instead of oxygen, for one. They’re also extraordinary, having carved massive caverns over time, “engaged in a continuous alchemy of earth,” writes Ferris Jabr. They’ve survived the planet’s cataclysmic events over billions of years, possibly even helping to form the continents and lay the foundations for terrestrial life. I’m drawn to writing about Earth that frames its vast geological history in an accessible and beautiful way, and Jabr does exactly this, bringing inanimate rock, and these amazing microbes dwelling deep within it, to life. He explores some of the principles of Earth-system science, which studies Earth and life as a single self-regulating system, and the idea that living creatures—humans, animals, plants, microorganisms—aren’t just products of evolutionary processes, but participants in their own evolution. In other words, he writes, we are Earth. My favorite science writing informs as well as awes. Much like Jabr’s story on the social life of forests, this piece reminds me of the interconnectedness of all things, and challenges and shifts my understanding of this wondrous physical world we live in. —CLR
Audience Award
What was our readers’ favorite this week? The envelope, please.
Costco in Cancún
Simon Wu | The Paris Review | July 18, 2024 | 2,841 words
There’s little to be said about wholesale members’ club Costco that hasn’t been said already. (Including in our own pages.) Or so I thought. Simon Wu adds to that prodigious canon by organizing a family vacation to Costco Travel’s most popular and well-reviewed destination: the Mayan Riviera. The result: an essay as thoughtful and selective as a trip to Costco isn’t. —PR
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