Sidney McIntyre-Starko collapsed after ingesting fentanyl in a University of Victoria dorm room. Lori Culbert reports on the contradictions in the University of Victoria’s version of the timeline of events and the series of errors made that cost the student her life.
UVic insisted “naloxone was administered within seven minutes” of student witnesses calling for help, even though the 911 recording clearly shows it was 13 minutes. UVic said chest compressions were started three minutes after the naloxone, or about 10 minutes after students called for help, when the 911 call shows it was more than 15 minutes.
The university said it based its timeline on campus security tapes and information from the Saanich fire department, which arrived on school grounds at 6:43 p.m.
Campus security started chest compressions just as firefighters walked into the room, so UVic calculated the time of CPR starting at 6:43 p.m., roughly 10 minutes after the students called for help. UVic then deducted three minutes to determine that naloxone would have been administered about seven minutes after the phone call.
UVic’s chronology, though, didn’t account for the delay between fire trucks pulling into campus at 6:43 and arriving in the dorm room: A student who waited for the firefighters in the parking lot told Postmedia it took them several minutes to remove their gear from the truck and then they had to walk up three flights of stairs to reach the dorm room.
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The city has violated a court order and its own policies by discarding the personal property of thousands of homeless people, who have lost medications, birth certificates, IDs, treasured family photos and the ashes of loved ones. Pro Publica and New Mexico In Depth distributed cards to unhoused people, asking what the losses meant to them:
On a recent morning, Christian Smith ran an errand, leaving a shopping cart carrying everything she owned near the Albuquerque, New Mexico, underpass where she’d been sleeping.
When she returned, the cart was nowhere to be found.
Most of the belongings, such as clothing, makeup and blankets, could be replaced in time. But she panicked when she realized that her dentures, acquired after months of dental appointments, were also gone. Without them, Smith believed, it would be more difficult to find a job, prolonging her time sleeping on the street.
“It’s hard to eat, it’s hard to talk—I sound like a little kid,” said the 42-year-old native New Mexican. “It’s embarrassing.”
…
On a recent afternoon, Gabriel Rodriguez left a black duffel bag outside an Albuquerque shelter while he grabbed lunch. It contained a sleeping bag and clothing, as well as handwritten letters from his grandmother, who has since died.
When Rodriguez returned, it was gone and city workers said it had already been hauled away. Rodriguez said he had carried the letters from his grandmother as a reminder that even when he was going through a rough period, she had continued to check up on him.
“Everyone else in my life had forgotten about me,” he said.
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Admittedly, the timing of this is weird: Hanif Abdurraqib and André 3000 talking about the flute album 3 Stacks dropped six months ago? But at the same time: Hanif Abdurraqib and André 3000 talking, period. As lyrical and loopy (respectively, and respectfully) as you’d hope for, with Abdurraqib making a compelling case that New Blue Sun isn’t just a flute album—it’s the exact kind of thing an artist needs to do to keep moving.
Pharoah Sanders never stayed in the same place too long. Neither did Nina Simone. Zev Love X walked out of KMD, found a mask, and MF DOOM was born. The distance between these sonic and aesthetic leaps, throughout Black music making, sometimes comes at a cost, but is the cost so much that an artist might sacrifice their own evolution, that is the question worth asking. As Don Cherry told us, “When people believe in boundaries, they become them.”
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• Uncovering a century-old love triangle.
• Missteps and mystery in a high-profile legal case.
• A coming-out story for the (advanced) ages.
• How a gaming juggernaut lost its way.
• The cat who tore a neighborhood apart.
Tim Prudente and Stokely Baksh | The Baltimore Banner | May 8, 2024 | 2,467 words
I read a lot this week, but not many pieces spoke to me. Frankly, I think I craved something different. So it was easy to get swept away by this Baltimore Banner story: a tale of “lust and scandal and fortune” and, ultimately, a love triangle between a woman and two men. Tim Prudente and Stokely Baksh recount how Joanna Meade, a resident of Baltimore’s Roland Park neighborhood, discovered a black tin full of juicy love letters inside the wall of her house during a bathroom renovation. All 67 letters were addressed to a woman named “Mrs. R.A. Spaeth,” and all except one were postmarked in 1920 or 1921. Reading the cursive penmanship and old-fashioned language was difficult, but Meade was quickly hooked; “It was like eavesdropping,” she tells the authors. She enlists the help of her neighbors, as well as the Banner’s staff, to decipher the correspondence and gather clues from across city archives and the internet to piece together the mystery: Why were these letters stashed away inside her house? Who was Mrs. Spaeth? Who is “R,” the man writing to her? The scans of envelopes, letters, photographs, and newspaper articles enhance the read, like we’re discovering each detail as it’s uncovered in the newsroom. While the story’s premise is not new—it reminds me, in fact, of a piece in our sister publication called “Castles in the Sky”—there’s so much here to like: Secrets hidden in an old house, waiting to be found. A community working together to uncover information (through Nextdoor, of all places). And the power and sway of writing, of these words handwritten on delicate paper, more than a century later. —CLR
Rachel Aviv | The New Yorker | May 13, 2024 | 13,339 words
The day a Rachel Aviv story drops is basically Christmas for me—everything she writes feels like a gift. With the latest entry in her unparalleled catalog of features, Aviv delves into the investigation of Lucy Letby, a British nurse who last year was convicted of killing seven infants and attempting to kill six others at the hospital where she worked. Demonized by the press and reviled by the public, Letby is only the fourth woman in UK history to receive a life sentence. When the verdict came down, the judge accused her of a “calculated and cynical campaign of child murder.” The problem, as Aviv shows in exacting detail, is that there is no evidence of such a campaign. I’m not exaggerating. There is no proof of malicious intent or action on Letby’s part. The prosecution’s case rested almost entirely on the fact that Letby was on duty when the babies died, but it’s not even clear that they were murdered—their deaths might have been a result of natural causes or medical mistakes (and not necessarily Letby’s). Aviv’s piece is a brilliant analysis of failures within systems: the UK’s revered but overburdened National Health Service; a law enforcement apparatus eager for scapegoats; and a media sector practically salivating for content about a so-called “angel of death.” (I urge you to spend time on social media looking at side-by-side comparisons of Aviv’s story and previous reporting about Letby. The differences are shocking.) Ultimately, Aviv does what the systems she examines never did: she musters clear and convincing evidence to make her case. To read more about how she did this, check out this excellent interview she did with Nieman Lab. —SD
Abby Tickel | Maclean’s | May 6, 2024 | 1,846 words
When I read Abby Tickel’s essay for Maclean’s, I found joy in an unexpected place. Tickel, who was assigned male at birth, first attempted to come out to her parents at age 10, in 1964. Shamed by her father for her so-called shortcomings as a male, she resigned herself to learning how to live life as a man. She married twice and had children. Keeping her true self hidden, she never dared to Google “transgender” for fear of being outed by her search history until one day, at age 66, she typed it into her Facebook search bar. Stunned and inspired by the community of people she discovered online, she came out to her wife. (If you have tissues handy, now would be the time to grab one.) “But for me, telling her the truth lifted a weight off my shoulders,” she writes. “It took tremendous energy to spend my whole life acting. The day I came out to her, it was like the sun shone for the first time.” Tickel’s wife was shocked after 18 years of marriage, yet it wasn’t long before surprise turned into loving support. Reading the piece, you get to share in Tickel’s joy at finally feeling truly seen for the first time in her life—and revel in the power she feels in paying it forward, by doing LGBTQI+ advocacy and education. I wiped away tears reading about how her life and outlook have changed: “I used to be a quiet person who rarely smiled and barely had friends. Now, I wake up every day looking forward to what’s ahead. . . . I’m finally the person I always was.” There are many beautiful things about Tickel’s piece, but the most beautiful of all is getting to hear her story in her own words. —KS
Nick Zarzycki | Defector | May 13, 2024 | 4,965 words
I’ve never played Magic: The Gathering. That’s not a nerd-doth-protest-too-much thing; I’ve got enough 20-sided dice in my house to know better. But it still feels like an important thing to point out, if only to assure you that you don’t need to know anything about the card game in order to enjoy Nick Zarzycki’s story. No matter how little you know about Magic, you know of it. It’s huge, and it’s been huge for 30 years. Pokémon wouldn’t exist without Magic. It single-handedly invented an entire genre of tabletop games in which players build decks of cards for battle, with each card having a different effect. But this is much more than the story of a man named Richard Garfield and his era-defining creation. (Though that story is fascinating in its own right.) It’s also the story of how Magic—or, more precisely, Magic’s publisher—strayed from Garfield’s intentions almost immediately. See, Magic decks aren’t fixed; new cards are released all the time. Garfield didn’t want this to be a game that rewarded those who spent more money to get more powerful cards, but over time, that’s exactly what happened. By one count, there are more than 27,000 unique cards that can be played in the game; meanwhile, the game’s publisher continuously tries to push players to use an online platform that prioritizes microtransactions and robs the game of its human element. Enshittification is all too common these days, but we’re accustomed to it happening online; with solid reporting and an accessible tone, Zarzycki’s piece winds up as a stunning indictment of how Magic’s publisher managed to do the same IRL. —PR
Andrea Sachs | The Washington Post | May 9, 2024 | 2,882 words
Welcome to the story of Kitty Snows, who lived in Foggy Bottom. While this may sound like the start of a fairy tale, it contains considerably more lawyers and strongly worded letters than Hans Christian Andersen tended to include. Kitty Snows is a cat who participated in the Blue Collar Cat program, a scheme to rehome strays that cannot be domesticated (having witnessed too much on the streets). Kitty gets adopted by the community of Snows Court in Foggy Bottom, belonging to “everyone and no one.” She lives in a box on a lawn until two locals—Tom Curtis and Barbara Rohde—find her with sores on her nose and take her to the vet. With the vet deeming her unfit for outside life, they move her to Rohde’s fancy apartment. As Andrea Sachs points out, no one knows how Kitty felt about her relocation from a box to a 14th-floor condo with “impressionistic paintings of a Russian forest . . . [and a] baby grand piano backed up against soaring windows.” (When two detectives turn up at the door, they are informed that Kitty is “unavailable.”) What we do know: the Foggy Bottom Association is not pleased, and the fight boils down to whether Kitty was stolen or rescued. The legal ramifications of this neighborhood dispute could have made for a dry read, but Sachs maintains a wry tone and delivers every detail delightfully. I am sure that, if available for comment, Kitty Snows—no longer of Foggy Bottom but of Watergate West—would agree. (Don’t worry, the “Kittygate” reference is there.) —CW
Audience Award
What recommendation attracted the most readers? The envelope, please:
Lakeidra Chavis, Daphne Duret, and Joseph Neff | The Marshall Project | May 1, 2024 | 3,122 words
Explorer programs, overseen by the Boy Scouts, are supposed to foster an interest in policing. As this investigation reveals, based on thousands of pages of documents and extensive interviews, the programs have faced nearly 200 allegations of misconduct. The Marshall Project uncovers what appears to be rampant abuse of power and influence, with profound consequences. —SD
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For Maclean’s Abby Tickel shares her emotional journey of coming out as transgender at age 66, and the joy and efficacy she’s found in making new friends, LGBTQI+ education and advocacy, and most importantly, finally getting the chance to be herself.
Recently, I led a bird-watching event at the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary in the heart of the city. I invited a friend of mine who brought a few other younger trans men with him, plus a group of Rainbow Elders. It was a cold and blustery day, but we saw some great birds and shared good conversation. Halfway through the event, one of the young men told me that he hadn’t left his apartment much, and he was thrilled to be outside, getting sunshine and fresh air. He said it meant a lot to be talking to real people, rather than texting or speaking on Zoom. Afterwards, we went for brunch at a coffee shop. The friend I’d invited later told me that the sandwich he ate there was the first decent meal he’d had in a long time. It was just a bird-watching event, but it helped people in ways I didn’t expect.
After coming out, you begin to change in quite a big way. Everything can shift: who your friends are, who you can partner with, how society sees you. Many Rainbow Elders came out later in life too, and they understand what it’s like to have played the role of another gender for decades, and the difficulty of trying to shake that. In our generation, there are so many people who have gone through trauma, especially at the hands of our postwar parents and a bigoted society. Each Rainbow Elder has their own story, but we all share a similar vulnerability.
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Brendan Koerner has a long, storied career reporting on stories and characters who feel almost too vivid to be true. For his latest at Wired, though, he turns that formula inside out—and becomes one of the army of hidden support workers who assume the identity of an OnlyFans creator in order to maintain chats with paying subscribers. Hilarious and deeply depressing in nearly equal measure, but never without the empathy that Koerner brings to all his work.
I found it quite easy at first to write the sort of run-of-the-mill smut the Serbs expected. (I’ll spare you the gory details, except to say I cribbed some color from Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 sci-fi film Strange Days.) For the less explicit chats, I imagined Miko offering to cook the subscriber a pasta dinner and feigning appreciation for his TV recommendations. I did make one glaring error that could have led to an entire chat being voided as unusable: Due to my hasty misreading of Miko’s bio, I characterized her as a fan of spicy ramen when she actually prefers her food mild. “I have to ask you to pay attention to these little facts,” Daniel wrote in his assessment. “In this case, these lines mentioning the food could have been rejected, and that could have led to the dialog’s rejection.”
But despite that mistake and a few other hiccups—my punctuation seemed unnatural because it was too accurate—Daniel offered me the job. I was to be paid 7 cents per line of dialog, with each dialog running for a minimum of 40 lines. For my first assignment, I had to compose 20 dialogs involving sex in public places—10 at the beach, five inside a car, and five in a forest or garden. There was a list of particular sex acts I had to include, as well as a stricture that I refrain from using emoji in more than 30 percent of lines. I had only 48 hours to complete the task.
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Joanna Meade moved into an old house in Baltimore’s Roland Park neighborhood. When they removed a wall during a bathroom renovation, they discovered a black tin box hidden among the plumbing. Inside, she found 67 “juicy turn-of-the-century love letters,” all except one postmarked 1920 or 1921. Tim Prudente and Stokely Baksh recount what Meade, her neighbors, and Baltimore Banner staff pieced together from the correspondence.
A woman in Waverly sent a newspaper article on Dr. Reynold Albrecht Spaeth. The zoologist and Johns Hopkins public health professor was ahead of his time, giving lectures on the merits of birth control and education for women factory workers. By 1920, he was 34 and already renowned in the field of immunology.
The love letters were to his wife, Edith.
What a sweet romance: an esteemed Hopkins scientist, whose research took him away from home, writing love letters back to his wife in Baltimore. Or so it seemed.
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A fabric store owner, a surgeon, a TV-news traffic anchor, a Latin-dance-music D.J., a church organist, a letter carrier, and a firefighter share career highlights and their very last day of work before retirement.
There has always been a certain feeling of euphoria that comes to Tony Pabón as he looks out at the dance floor from his D.J. table at Salsannati Dance Company. “To play music and have people start to clap or move their body or dance — that’s powerful,” he says. “I have to pinch myself sometimes.” So when his job started to feel more like a chore than a joy, Pabón knew it was time to retire. (He will continue working a day job at a bank.) “Lately, I’m not having the passion,” he says. “I’m doing it because it’s my duty.” Besides, standing for four-hour sets was taking a toll on his knees.
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Timothy Reif is one the legal heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, an Austrian cabaret performer and art collector who died in the Dachau concentration camp in 1941. Since the 1990s, Reif and his family have been searching for Grünbaum’s collection—more than 400 pieces that had been scattered after the war, including Egon Schiele’s Russian War Prisoner, a drawing that’s worth $1.25 million. For Chicago Magazine, Kelley Engelbrecht writes an important story about contested ownership and the restitution of Nazi-confiscated art.
The meticulous documentation of forced sales of art by Jewish owners to the Nazis created a confusing veneer of legality after the war. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws had been established to strip Jewish people of basic rights; by 1937, the Nazis had started requiring Jews to declare and register their property. Ultimately, this led to the confiscation and seizure of art, often masked by forced sales and empty promises: “Give us your art and” — in the case of the Gutmanns — “we’ll give you a train ticket out of Nazi Europe.” But, of course, it never went like that. And all that remained was a record that implied decision-making autonomy by the sellers, when in reality their lives had been at stake. In many cases, the proceeds from a sale were put into a bank account that would, in the end, be frozen.
The question I keep returning to, the one that I can’t shake, is if any of this truly matters. I know the answer is yes. That it matters if the collection was stolen or if it was lawfully sold to Kornfeld by Lukacs or if too much time has passed to do anything about it. But I can’t stop thinking about the simple truth that precedes all this complexity: that a terrible, tragic thing happened to innocent people. And if that terrible, tragic thing hadn’t happened, Grünbaum would have retained the agency to do what he’d like with his art.
The simple truths are often the hardest to acknowledge, and perhaps that’s why we make them complex. But what I know is that this story, as it seeks truth, is itself built on a series of simple truths: Art went missing. The people who know how Russian War Prisoner ended up in Chicago are now all dead. And the man who first loved the portrait, who hung it on his wall, was murdered. We don’t know definitively what happened between 1938 and 1956, and we may never know.
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Colleagues reportedly called Lucy Letby an “angel of death,” and the prime minister condemned her. But in the rush to judgment, serious questions about the evidence against her were ignored. The incomparable Rachel Aviv on a case that shocked the United Kingdom—but perhaps for the wrong reasons:
The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time, with X’s next to each suspicious event that occurred when they were on shift. Letby was the only nurse with an uninterrupted line of X’s below her name. She was the “one common denominator,” the “constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse,” one of the prosecutors, Nick Johnson, told the jury in his opening statement. “If you look at the table overall the picture is, we suggest, self-evidently obvious. It’s a process of elimination.”
But the chart didn’t account for any other factors influencing the mortality rate on the unit. Letby had become the country’s most reviled woman—“the unexpected face of evil,” as the British magazine Prospect put it—largely because of that unbroken line. It gave an impression of mathematical clarity and coherence, distracting from another possibility: that there had never been any crimes at all.
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When LSD first hit the counterculture in the 1960, it was ingested via sugar cube or colored tablet. It wasn’t until a decade later that tiny perforated paper squares known as “blotter” became the preferred way to deliver the powerful psychedelic. In this fascinating excerpt from Erik Davis’ book Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium, the journalist theorizes about why blotter proved the ideal carrier for LSD—part communion wafer, part pop-culture collectible, and part stamp granting passage to new realms. Mind-bending in its own right.
One of the most celebrated blotters of the era featured Mickey Mouse in his Fantasia guise as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. These sharply designed four-colour sheets came perfed into 100 units, each featuring their own budding rodent wizard. This was charming enough, but if you bought a gram, you’d get a red lacquered box that was also affixed with an image of Mickey, now surrounded by 17 gold stars. Inside lay a bundle of 40 sheets wrapped in a container of gold foil affixed with another image of the mouse, this time accompanied by the word ‘Sandoz’ – alerting the discerning buyer that the batch was most likely made from LSD synthesised by the original Swiss sorcerers.
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More than 30 years after its introduction, Magic: The Gathering continues to have a stranglehold on tabletop gamers’ attention and wallets. Nick Zarzycki’s fascinating feature doesn’t just chronicle Magic‘s history and development in a way outsiders (like yours truly) can understand, or explain the economics behind its continuing evolution. Most interestingly of all, it does so through the eyes of Richard Garfield, the man who designed the game to begin with—and watched it become a juggernaut only tenuously connected to his original brainchild.*
Convinced that Magic couldn’t survive by relying on its collectibility alone, Garfield thought the metagame of sports, which made it socially acceptable to spend tens of thousands of hours on a game, might save it from becoming a fad. He and Elias ended up using professional tennis—with its glitzy tournaments, rankings horserace, big fat winnings and transcendent star system—as a template for the Magic Pro Tour, which launched in 1996.
It’s easy to understand why Garfield left Wizards of the Coast a few years later: The entire history of the game sounds like a series of unending crises and social engineering experiments. But it goes even deeper than that: The more you look, the more you realize that there was never a time when Garfield wasn’t struggling to tame his creation.
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Ayla Samli | Longreads | May 14, 2024 | 4,420 words (16 minutes)
Sometimes the past comes up in unexpected ways, like roots turning up the sidewalk, refusing to stay flat beneath the concrete. The roots insinuate themselves into the present, compelling you to walk carefully and mindfully; you must step through them to move forward.
A Latinate root had gotten under my feet. I studied Latin from middle school through college, and sometimes its familiar yet surprising tendrils show up on my path. A new acquaintance came into my life, the first person I had ever met with a cognate name, Dulce. A local Italian bakery of the same root, Dolci, opened near my neighborhood. Then an instrument filled my ears with memories and hope for belonging: the mountain dulcimer. The open vowel topped off with the “l” rolls around in the mouth like a light, creamy confection. Sweetness is at the center of these delectable words.
The mountain dulcimer began to call to me when my family and I were at a local folk festival. The air that day was flooded with new and comforting scents—and sounds. We walked from stage to stage, passing food trucks with acrid-sweet smells of North Carolina barbeque and starchy Indian samosas. And then a sound caught my attention: a rhythmic, friendly brightness that rang out from a stall, each note knitted to the previous one. The instrument was familiar but not stale or readily identifiable; it was not the painted piano installed at the Creative Arts Center down the street, or a folksy guitar. Its sound carried like a mountain dulcimer, like the ones I’ve heard at old-time concerts. But when I walked up to the stall, the instruments looked and played more like small ornate guitars, delicate and cherry-topped with laser-cut sound holes, in a variety of Celtic-looking designs. Although their train-like pulsing was familiar, they were not hourglass-shaped and played parallel to the ground as Appalachian, or mountain, dulcimers are. These were held across the body, played like guitars.
At the time, I did not know that the instruments for sale were pricey dulcimers on a stick. They looked simple, like cigar boxes glued to a fretboard. My 11-year-old daughter was immediately in love with them. Of course she was; they were adorable and pricey. Although I do not really believe in genetic gifts, music came naturally to her. Both sides of my family played music skillfully: instrumentalists of the banjo, piano, and organ existed on my mother’s side, while my father’s relatives had played the piano, violin, and other stringed instruments. Channeling everything my daughter had learned from a few years of laidback violin lessons, and perhaps some epigenetic flair as well, she easily located the notes she needed to play some tunes.
People paused and listened as she transposed, plucked, and strummed songs from the lessons she had at her former elementary music teacher’s house. Her Suzuki violin songbook came to life in a folksy way; the song “Perpetual Motion” hung in the air in contrast to her violin version’s crisp notes. I was floored by how adeptly she found the right sounds on an unfamiliar instrument, impressed that she was able to transpose the songs, and, truthfully, a little smug about paying for all those violin lessons that had at the time felt like a total waste of money. My hope had been that she would be able to play something when she went to college, something to give her a little cred, like the shirtless boys at the beach who find themselves surrounded by barely clad admirers when they play Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” on their guitars. I had given up on the idea that she was benefiting from the lessons, but here, she proved me wrong. Sometimes musician-hobbyists stopped to play another stick dulcimer on display. A young scruffy man proceeded to tinkle out some classical and Flamenco-style songs as he smiled charmingly between two beautiful onlookers. More confident musicians listened to my daughter’s playing and improvised in deferential accompaniment. The dulcimer’s self-assured sound resonated with me for days.
The sound of the dulcimer has resonated with me for most of my life, the frets of its fretboard like notches in my own timeline.
I called my father, who was in an assisted living facility at the time, to tell him about the stick dulcimer. Since he was hard of hearing and could not comprehend the pitch of my voice any longer, most of my words floated straight into the ether. He complained when I didn’t have a lot to say to him, but I stopped talking because I was exhausted by repeating the same inane things over and over. “Nevermind” became my refrain, not because I didn’t want to be heard but because being heard became almost impossible.
But in this particular conversation, my father was lucid and listening. He loved music and enjoyed knowing that my daughter has an affinity for it. His own parents had forbidden him from taking music lessons in Turkey because they wanted him to focus on his academics, and I think he knew he would have been good. I remember him humming and singing throughout my childhood, and he loved to listen to music, even when his hearing started to fail him. In his late 80s, after writing marketing books and teaching college became too difficult, he refashioned himself as a lounge singer who would regularly break into song in the assisted living café. Not everyone enjoyed his spontaneous singing, but he did have a few fans in his dining room.
While speaking about string instruments, he told me that his grandmother had been a virtuoso on the kanun, a plucked string instrument in the zither family, an old-world auntie to the Appalachian dulcimer. Just as I wished my grandmothers had been able to see my daughter play the stick dulcimer, he said that he wished I had been around to hear his grandmother play because it was impressive. I imagined my Turkish great-grandmother—whose photograph I’ve never seen because she believed that photography would tarnish her soul—who memorized the entire Koran when she was a little girl but refused to recite it until she was given a little lamb. Consigned to an arranged marriage in Istanbul, she was subject to the hard domestic roles of wife and mother of six children. I imagine the pleasure and power she felt when she exerted her virtuosity into her music, bringing grace and control to her sounds. Playing music, like cooking, was a process in which she had agency—and through which she made beauty. Given my father’s stinginess with accolades, my great-grandmother must have been quite an adept musician.
There have been many piano players in my family—my paternal grandmother, with a fourth-grade education, could play any song on the piano by ear, like many of my father’s relatives. He said when she heard a song on the radio she would sit down and play it herself. But since I only met her twice and never heard her play, celebrating her cooking is the next best thing.
Just as my daughter had begun to develop a knack for transposition, playing the J. Geils hit “Centerfold” on the violin after hearing the song in the car, making sense of my grandmother’s virtuosity requires a kind of transposition on my part. I met my grandmother once when I was a baby and again when I was nearly 5, so I did not have many chances to savor her meals, but the memory of her sweet, fragrant lemonade stirred in me powerful feelings and life-changing desires, so strong that I traveled to Turkey to learn about women’s wedding traditions. My paternal aunt, who married into my family when she was a teenager, learned to cook from my grandmother over the decades, standing side by side with her in their Istanbul kitchen. Her cooking stirs me like no other cuisine. Having grown up on fried bologna sandwiches, creamed spinach, and Steak-umms, I have never tasted anything as perfect and comforting—her lemony artichokes are a culinary homecoming. My father told me that his mother was the best cook of all, and when she visited him while he was in graduate school at Michigan State University, he suddenly had more friends than ever before, who all lined up to sample her delicious dolmas and meatballs. If her piano playing was anything as good as her culinary skills, she must have been a delight to listen to.
For years, I have imagined connecting to my family’s heritage and traditions by playing music, but the choice of instruments has confounded me.
My mother’s mother, a preacher’s daughter, born in North Carolina in the early 1900s, washed dishes to pay for her room and board to attend college for a couple of years. She and her older sister both majored in piano but my grandmother dropped out to provide for her nine younger siblings.
My mother, raised in North Carolina, had played the organ at church in her youth. She was also the relief organist during her graduate school years at Chapel Hill. She did not continue playing the organ as an adult, but she kept a small, upright piano, and atop it sat a tiny bust of Beethoven glued to a mayonnaise jar lid, a prize my grandmother had apparently won in a contest during college. My mother played occasionally when I was growing up. I recall somber hits like “One Tin Soldier” and “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?” being played at home, leaving me—a sensitive child—pondering violence, morality, and my life’s purpose at too-young an age. During holiday visits with her friends, with the help of some libations, my mother would play and belt out church hymns at the piano, especially “Whispering Hope.” But the piano always seemed too large and looming for me. My mother eventually passed it onto my older sister, who now keeps it in her living room.
Although I believe that the women who came before me would have made music professionally if it had been possible, they worked hard their whole lives under difficult conditions. My mother’s mother cared for her siblings as a young adult before marrying and having four children of her own. Her life entailed relentless farm chores and constant worries about money and food. My father’s mother had to learn to cook, crochet, and entertain, also caring for her younger brothers and sisters and, later, two children. She would wake up at three in the morning to quiz my father and make him breakfast before his high school exams. My own mother played the organ in part to give her some time away from a tense household. I imagine the pressures and constraints my foremothers experienced in their daily lives, and I can see how playing music gave them some measure of agency, beauty, pleasure, and freedom. Music made space for them—and sparked joy—where reality would not.
For years, I have imagined connecting to my family’s heritage and traditions by playing music, but the choice of instruments has confounded me. My own musical upbringing consisted of piano lessons given by the next-door neighbor, several excruciatingly slow months of learning “Hot Cross Buns” on the recorder in elementary school, and voice lessons, youth chorus, and choral camp. I won the “most musical” award in middle school chorus, where I annihilated my peer playing Name That Tune. In a conversation about instruments, my mother confided that, like me, she had not wanted to play the piano as a child; she had wanted to play the viola but her mother had insisted she play the piano and organ. Growing up during the ’80s, Liberace was the pianist I at once admired and could never emulate: I had no confident flair, no flashy jacket, no candelabra. The piano was heavy, imposing, and commanded too much attention. Choral music turned out to be easier for me since it required no hand-eye coordination or stage presence. I could harmonize and the whole point was to blend in with the group.
Considering the musical roots of my ancestors, the Istanbulites and North Carolinians, I reasoned that picking up the Appalachian dulcimer was a good bridge between old and new world heritage, a portable instrument I could play—to explore my own identity and to create new family memories.
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The Appalachian dulcimer touched on another significant branch of my identity formation: the hippies. Although I was born well after Woodstock, hippies had always felt like my people. Their openness to androgyny, earthy foods, and global outlook has always appealed to me. As a teen, I preferred the acoustic sound and conviction of ’60s folk music to the boy-band music of my contemporaries, and I would listen to Woodstock recordings on repeat in my cluttered, peace-sign-filled bedroom. During my teen years I attended a summer camp in the Virginia mountains, where all the meals were vegetarian and campers were barred from having exclusive romantic relationships, and where I’m sure the mountain dulcimer was played during our evening gatherings. After completing our communal daily chores, like scrubbing the shared bathrooms, quiet time in the cabin included listening to the camp-sanctioned tapes on the cabin tape player, including Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird” and Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” Although this was also the era of Whitney Houston and Poison, our camp-approved cassettes were filled with carefully chosen protest music and folk songs.
The camp influenced me for years. I did not eat meat for nearly a decade. Later, in college, Joni Mitchell’s Blue evoked everything worth feeling: loss, playfulness, frustration, love. (Mitchell wrote most of the album in Greece on an Appalachian dulcimer, but I did not know this until I began to investigate the instrument’s history.) The sound of the dulcimer has resonated with me for most of my life, the frets of its fretboard like notches in my own timeline.
What could have fizzled out as a weekend infatuation turned into a full-blown obsession, an online epic quest. After the festival, I decided that a dulcimer was something I really needed, but I never just need things; I also crave learning about them deeply from the people who already know. When the late-summer threat of hurricanes confined me to home after the folk festival, I started researching dulcimers and dulcimer makers.
I am a person for whom learning is specialized and obsessive. My grad school dissertation explored hope chests and wedding traditions among Turkish women. Writing on a topic few scholars (or even many everyday people) purported to care about—and discovering some very beautiful, overlooked stories in the process—sweetened my sense of relentless curiosity. Reaching out to both obvious and unlikely experts, I discovered that most people love to talk about their passions. Sitting at my red kitchen table in my Houston studio apartment, I was surrounded by library books decked out in a cascade of neon bookmark tabs; flush with even more information on my laptop and my interview notes, I felt a kind of informational splendor. In trying to understand my personal interests from many angles, I’ve interviewed museum curators, jewelers, hobbyists, authors, and primary investigators on clinical trials and researched all corners of the internet. I’ve even ended up writing about subjects I never planned to, like redwood burls and bone broth. There is a pleasure in assessing the magnitude of what can be known and in having the tenacity of trying to know it, a geeky thrill of the hunt.
In pursuing the dulcimer, I learned about a musicologist who traveled to Appalachia to gather stories and songs, dulcimer makers whose awkward instruments evolved into art, and how dulcimers pervaded the West Coast music scene in the ’70s. I read the biographies of luthiers—people who make and repair stringed instruments—and dulcimer makers in Appalachia who crafted them over decades. After knowing nothing about the dulcimer, respected dulcimer brands and popular songs became etched into my consciousness over that long, quiet, stormy weekend.
Just as a line connects two points, the mountain dulcimer’s strings link people through time and space.
I was looking for the origin story of the dulcimer in the same way that I had tried to make sense of my own mixed identity. As an American instrument, the mountain dulcimer’s legend is ripe for embellishment. It’s boxy and stringy, like a lot of primitive instruments from all over the world. Who brought over the dulcimer’s shapes and sounds to the US? And who could claim it? Asking these questions brought me to new possibilities and rabbit holes. I veered into mythmaking about the dulcimer’s origins to try to bring together my North Carolinian and Middle Eastern roots. My research was not systematic: it was guided by dreams and hunches. I will forever be the kid hopeful that the shiny glint on the ground is something worth looking at.
My investigation into the instrument’s Appalachian history brought me to claims that the early colonies in North Carolina had included Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, who mixed with Indigenous tribes living in the area. Drawing both sides of my family heritage closely together, I was excited about the mountain dulcimer’s possible Middle Eastern origins. When I skimmed a book that suggested that the mountain dulcimer came from this heritage, I had to reach out to the author. As it turned out, she was a professor of marketing, like my father had been, and had attended many academic conferences with him. In looking for ties between the mountain dulcimer and my heritage, I found a connection I had not been looking for, one between my father and a colleague. Just as a line connects two points, the mountain dulcimer’s strings link people through time and space.
After the storm cleared, I called a man I had discovered in an old newspaper article online. I was surprised and glad he answered my phone call. He lived in my town, and we discussed dulcimer lessons in the future as well as his experience in holding dulcimer clinics and repairing instruments. An object that had been an abstraction was suddenly becoming real.
Soon after my phone call, the shopping started. I hunted for dulcimers on eBay, Craigslist, and Elderly Instruments, casting my net beyond North Carolina, dulcimer country. I reasoned that California would be a good location to search because that’s where the hippies had flocked. I was not disappointed in my hunch—there were many West Coast dulcimers. Mountain dulcimers are relatively simple to make compared to more complex instruments, like guitars and violins, which is why they became popular to play in Appalachia. Unlike the banjo, which was created in the New World by enslaved Africans and their descendants, the dulcimer has fuzzy beginnings. Origin stories of the dulcimer often cite Germany and France as the home of its prototypes; it was made and played regionally in Appalachia from the 1800s on, and after gaining popularity, was mass produced during the folk revival. Eventually, by the ’60s, they became very popular in California.
I discovered a dulcimer for sale in Northern California, a brand my soon-to-be teacher recommended. I corresponded with its owner, our identities hidden by a string of anonymous numbers through Craigslist. She was looking for a “good home” for her instrument, someone who could “make it sing again.” I hesitated: I did not know if I could be a good home for an instrument I had never played.
But I did not reveal that to the owner. I had just decided a dulcimer was something I needed, suddenly and with great fervor. She told me that the instrument had belonged to a loved one, who had stored it for decades after losing a limb to disease. It had been sitting in the closet, pristinely kept as if waiting to be unshelved. I wanted to own that dulcimer; I respected its stories and wanted to make it play again.
The next day, I called my local dulcimer expert, whom I still had not met in person. “Solid walnut? I cannot recommend that for you,” he said. Although the brand was respected, the wood was not amenable to a sweet sound. He told me that solid walnut dulcimers have a solemn, dampened tone. I thought of the sad walnut dulcimer, whose owner could not play it in the 30 years before her death; its purported melancholic sound seemed just right for that instrument’s history. I wanted to play it, to care for it, but my teacher convinced me otherwise. I dreaded telling the seller that I would not be the new owner of her dulcimer. When I apologized for not buying it, she told me she was disappointed, but she knew that it would eventually go to the right place.
Before the transaction had been canceled, a series of dulcimer stories and photographs had come my way through our online correspondence. My admiration for the instrument had made the owner cry and remember her loved one. Alongside family stories, she had sent me scanned photos and tales of her relatives: yellowed photos of Daniel Boone-dressed strangers outdoors, aging loved ones in black dinner gowns on memorable vacations, and campsite dulcimer jam sessions. This dulcimer had transported me to another person’s world: one of divorce, illness, grief, renewal, and, finally, peace. I was grateful for the tenderness the instrument had given me already, even before I had the chance to play it. Her loving stories lingered around me like the dulcimer’s notes.
She was looking for a “good home” for her instrument, someone who could “make it sing again.” I hesitated: I did not know if I could be a good home for an instrument I had never played.
I found another dulcimer for sale in Southern California. In the listing’s photo it laid in an open case on a park bench, world-weary but compelling, like it had been busking for a lifetime. I tried to research its label barely visible through the sound holes, where makers often sign or label their instruments, peering at the blurry photo, guessing possible makers. I entered a combination of names and initials into my keyboard, not sure what I hoped to find or why I stalked an instrument I had never even heard. I forwarded the ad to the dulcimer teacher, hoping that he could assess this instrument. He never followed up; maybe it too was made of walnut and not worth his time. I dreamed of finding something special for a good price, but I did not know about dulcimer quality.
Possessed of a big imagination, I’ve often imposed value where it did not exist. When I was 4, we lived in an old house with Victorian-era faceted crystal doorknobs. Thinking that translucent, hard, and shiny meant precious, like diamonds, I believed we were living among jewels. The doorknobs had a certain romance, but romance does not translate to treasure. In the dulcimer world, I could not distinguish a storied, quality instrument from a kit-built one.
When I found another dulcimer on eBay, I called the teacher, still a stranger, to convince me that I was crazy to waste my money on something I had not yet played. In a calm voice, he instructed me to come to his house to “disabuse” myself of this idea. I got in the car, not really sure what I was doing driving to a stranger’s house in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Walking up the front steps, I felt nervous. Was I really doing this? Better to meet internet-vetted musicians than completely unknown people, I supposed.
An old man with a kind smile invited me through his front door. He had wild hair and identical clogs to my own, except his were exactly my age. I stepped on aged Oriental rugs as I walked through his home, surrounded by colored glass and a band’s worth of instruments. A pair of antique performance violins cuddled like identical twins in their crushed velvet, mint-colored case.
We sat down in his small living room. He began to play a few chords, and then invited me to choose my own plastic pick and play his dulcimer. He showed me how to strum and set me free to play. Three strings—past, present, and future—unified in one connective strum. I inhaled deeply to keep from crying. Yes, this is beautiful.
I stayed at my teacher’s house for two hours, practicing “You are My Sunshine” and watching his fingers slow-dancing on the frets with quiet skill. He told me stories about his velvet-lined vintage violin cases and other treasures, and I went home happy.
He showed me how to strum and set me free to play. Three strings—past, present, and future—unified in one connective strum. I inhaled deeply to keep from crying. Yes, this is beautiful.
After I played the dulcimer for the first time, my daughter had her first youth orchestra rehearsal. I watched as her teacher tuned the instruments. She asked all the violins to play one note as she knelt down to scan their sounds. When she heard a renegade tone, she turned to and tuned the outlier with the attention of a cat stalking its prey. Slowly, she made her way through the instruments—honing their tones, bringing their sounds in line with each other. These children have vastly different interests, but they come together for the music. In this age of extreme solipsism, playing one note as a group felt like a powerful achievement.
I think about their harmony as I think of my friendship with my new dulcimer teacher and the common friends we share from other parts of our lives. A different kind of tuning is taking place for me: I was becoming attuned to a community of musicians.
On eBay, I found a dulcimer that was the same make as my teacher’s. The top was spruce, which would produce a good sound. An online auction was closing in a couple of hours and I had to decide whether to bid on it. After one free short lesson, did it make sense to bid? Would I win? My husband Mark teased me through my frenzy of worry. I knelt on the floor between stints of jumping around and screeching with anticipation after I made my bid, and we watched the seconds turn over. The uncertainty hung in the air like the last chord of an interrupted song, a minor note waiting for a strong finish. What had just happened?
At the end of the most exciting 10 minutes of my life, I was a new dulcimer owner.
I exchanged emails with the seller for a week. I learned about his profession, his marriage, his long-term habit of collecting, and his other instruments—prized dulcimers that had grazed, however lightly, the lives of luthiers and famous musicians. Our correspondence became a collection of its own, a meditation on value and shared interests, on lasting relationships and beloved objects.
I remember, while I waited for my dulcimer to arrive, how I could not sleep. I stayed up late that first night, the adrenaline from the auction too high for me to downregulate. I couldn’t stop thinking about my instrument on the way and all its possibilities: who had played this dulcimer before me, who I would meet because of it, and how joyful and sweet our music would one day sound.
Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Ayla Samli writes with particular attention to what makes us human, including our social, inner, and material worlds. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she is working on an essay collection. Her writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, The Rumpus, Entropy, So It Goes, and elsewhere.
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In this open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Matt Zoller Seitz explains why the company’s recent “Crush” ad—which promotes the new iPad Pro—is disturbing, destructive, and a slap in the face to all artists, musicians, and people who (try to) create for a living.
Sonny and Cher sing “All I Ever Need is You” as the device destroys some of the most beautiful objects a creative person could ever hope to have, or see: a trumpet, camera lenses, an upright piano, paints, a metronome, a clay maquette, a wooden anatomical reference model, vinyl albums, a framed photo, and most disturbingly (because they suggest destructive violence against children’s toys, and against the child in all of us) a ceramic Angry Birds figure and a stack of rubber emoji balls.
We now have a world in which actors or musicians go on social media and display the twenty or fifty dollar residuals checks they received for work that aired dozens or even hundreds of times on a streaming platform or got millions of plays on Spotify, and that, in the eras of broadcast networks and vinyl records, or cable TV and compact discs, could have paid for a child’s braces, or a semester of college.
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In this piece for The New York Review of Books, Mike Jay reports on the shifting science and cultural attitudes around MDMA, and how today’s research is overwhelmingly positive. The once-demonized designer club drug of the ’80s and ’90s has shown so much psychotherapy potential in the past few decades, as well as social benefits at the individual and group levels—and beyond.
The most eye-catching animal experiment of recent years has been the neuroscientist Gül Dölen’s work, also at Johns Hopkins, on the behavior of octopuses under MDMA’s influence. Prior to the experiment the creatures were solitary, but as the drug took hold Dölen observed them unfurling their arms and embracing their fellows. Her conclusion that “at least one otherwise tightly wound octopus” appeared to be “really just having a good time” achieved the kind of breakthrough media coverage that Ricaurte’s deadly monkey trials had gotten sixteen years earlier.
We might also ask what science will tell us about MDMA in twenty-five years, and how the effusive positivity of the current moment will have aged. Doblin’s keynote speech at the MAPS conference predicted not simply medically licensed MDMA but a wholesale transformation of society by the drug: from conflict resolution to a world of “spiritualized humanity” and “net-zero trauma by 2070.” Whatever the likelihood of its fulfillment—and however “net-zero trauma” might be measured—this expansive vision suggests that MDMA’s future applications are unlikely to be entirely medical.
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