10 Years After Sandy Hook, a Family Finds Bits of Joy Amid Shards of Pain

Ten years ago, Jen Hensel lost her daughter, Avielle Richman, in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty first graders and six adults were murdered. That shooting should have been a singular event: a transformative moment that should have led to stricter gun control laws and a national coming together to make schools safer. While some legislation has passed since then, it’s certainly not enough. For NPR, Tovia Smith tells Hensel’s story in the years after Avielle’s death: how she and her husband, Jeremy Richman, set up a foundation focused on neuroscience research and violence prevention; how she has coped with the death of Richman, who died by suicide in 2019; and how — despite it all — she has found some happiness with her two kids, Owen and Imogen. Smith’s portrait of Hensel is devastating and emotional; the piece forces you to imagine her family’s pain. “You have to imagine it,” Richman once said. To face the horror of gun violence — not turn away from it.

But embedded in every such joy is perpetual pain. It’s no longer the raw, relentless kind that made it hard to stand up 10 years ago, Hensel says. But it’s still sharp enough to blindside you and bring you to your knees.

Hensel’s dear friend Francine Wheeler, who also lost her 6-year-old, Ben, at Sandy Hook, agrees. They share an aversion to the word “closure” and bristle at the very idea of a “10th anniversary” — and the implied expectations around where they should be in the arc of their grief.

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Corner Club Cathedral Cocoon

Sasha Frere-Jones is best known as a critic, but he’s a music lover at heart, as is clear in this reported essay about the maddening, seductive world of audiophilia. On one side, the many of us who are satisfied with cheap earbuds; on the other, the seeming fetishism of what he calls the “triode horn mafia.” Triangulating between those extremes isn’t a given, but he does so with aplomb.

I am heartbroken that the masters of John Coltrane’s Impulse! recordings were lost in a 2008 fire at Universal Studios. But I still think the existing analog and digital copies of those recordings are good enough to spread the message. An obsession with the quality of recordings is, on some level, antithetical to the spirit of mindful listening. The constant, beautiful, churning production of music in the present moment reminds us that fetishizing the past, rather than simply learning from it, is a non-musical obsession. You can love the texture and living power of recordings—I absolutely do—without losing your goddamn mind. In their back-and-forth manner, all technologies have been improving, even if the peristalsis of history is hard to follow. The necessary gear will be there, somewhere, and even bad gear is good enough for great music.

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Secrets of the Christmas Trade

This eye-opening, entertaining story by Owen Long exposes the wild and ruthless business of selling Christmas trees in New York City. The industry is run by a few eccentric businessmen, called “tree men,” who spend most of the year preparing for the holiday season. There’s George Nash, an old hippie who sells trees to much of Harlem; Kevin Hammer, known as the “Keyser Söze of Christmas” and the man responsible for shaping NYC’s industry into what it is today; and Greg Walsh, who is Long’s boss (and looks exactly like Santa Claus). It’s a fascinating (and at times, very funny) read.

I’ve met several people who’ve sold Christmas trees for Hammer. Almost all of them asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. They said that to work for Hammer, there is no interview and there is no application. The only way to enter his network is to be referred by an insider. You and a partner — Hammer’s sellers always work in pairs — call a number around October, and a voice instructs you both to show up at a certain location (typically a sidewalk outside a bodega) around Thanksgiving. When you arrive, the two of you wait, possibly hours, potentially days, for another phone call from a different number. A new voice instructs you to construct a small shack out of pallets, plywood, even garbage, then continue waiting for the arrival of hundreds of Christmas trees, which will soon appear overnight along with clippers, chain saws, and plastic netting. You are instructed to sell each tree at the highest possible price.

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Human_Fallback

In this essay, Preston manages to make a mundane job sound fascinating. An astonishing feat. As a human helping out a chatbot, she observes the world of an AI bot named Brenda and the lives of the often desperate humans she is supposed to help.

“Hey Brenda,” wrote a prospect. “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you. You were so awesome and so willing to help me and I’m sorry for being a jerk and leaving you hanging. I haven’t been very productive as far as moving goes cuz I guess it just kinda sucks to move alone and no one to be excited with, ya know?”

 “We have 1BR and 2BR starting at $1645,” Brenda wrote. “Would you like to come in for an appointment?”

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There Is No Such Thing As Italian Food

Italy is home to a food tradition as rich as varied as the terrain itself; not one cuisine, but many. Yet, as John Last sets out in this Noema feature, it’s also home to a culinary purism that can verge on xenophobia — and considering the many-headed hydra of difficulties the nation is facing, it’s going to need to adapt or perish.

All across Italy, as Parasecoli tells me, food is used to identify who is Italian and who is not. But dig a little deeper into the history of Italian cuisine and you will discover that many of today’s iconic delicacies have their origins elsewhere. The corn used for polenta, unfortunately for Pezzutti, is not Italian. Neither is the jujube. In fact, none of the foods mentioned above are. All of them are immigrants, in their own way — lifted from distant shores and brought to this tiny peninsula to be transformed into a cornerstone of an ever-changing Italian cuisine.

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‘I’m the Operator’

Who is to blame when a self-driving car strikes and kills someone? That question animates Lauren Smiley’s feature about the first instance of such a tragedy. Smiley focuses on the aftermath, detailing the toll that the incident took on the Uber driver — or, rather, “operator” — behind the wheel of the car, and how powerful interests shaped her fate:

For years, researchers and self-driving advocates had anxiously prognosticated about how the public and the legal system would react to the first pedestrian death caused by a self-driving car.

The crash in Tempe ripped those musings into reality — forcing police, prosecutors, Uber, and Vasquez into roles both unwanted and unprecedented in a matter of seconds. At the scene that night, Vasquez stood at the center of a tragedy and a conundrum. She couldn’t yet fathom the part she was about to play in sorting out where the duties of companies and states and engineers end, and the mandate of the person inside the car begins.

“I’m sick over what happened,” Vasquez confided to the police as her mind spun in the hours after the crash. She said she felt awful for the victim’s family. She also grieved the event in a different way — as a loyal foot soldier of the self-driving revolution. “Oh God, this is going to be a setback for the whole industry,” Vasquez told Loehr. “Which is not what I want.”

At the time, Vasquez was an Uber defender. She had come a long way to this job. Over the previous few years, she’d acquired a dizzying track record of doing hidden work for highly visible companies — moderating grisly posts on Facebook, she says; tweeting about Dancing With the Stars from ABC’s Twitter; policing social media for Wingstop and Walmart. But her position with Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group had offered new stability, and after years of turmoil as a transgender woman navigating a hostile society, she was careful not to jeopardize it. Vasquez had even removed the box braids of colorful yarn that had defined her look since she was young. At a new job, she had come to think, “the less attention I bring to myself, the better.” During her nine months of work as an operator, the viselike grip of everything she’d endured as a child and teen and adult had slackened just a bit. As she trudged into her forties, Vasquez had felt her life, finally, relaxing into a kind of equilibrium.

Now, as she and Loehr sat in a victim services van near the Tempe bridge after midnight, grappling with Herzberg’s death, the vise was tightening again. She found herself asking, “Do I need a lawyer?”

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The Safest Place

Reporter Noelle Crombie spent a year at an alternative high school in Gresham, Oregon, documenting the impact of skyrocketing gun violence on the students, teachers, and support staff. The result is a four-part series, of which this article, about the shooting death of Dante McFallo — one of eight male students of color who have died in the last two and a half years — is the first entry:

So many deaths in such a short time infused teachers and staff with a sense of desperation to protect the young people who come through the door each day. As the Portland area records another year of unprecedented gun deaths, the race to keep students in school and away from harm took on new urgency even as violence approached the school itself.

The campus serves students from communities east of Interstate 205, an area with among the highest concentrations of poverty in Oregon and where in some neighborhoods, residents on average die five to 10 years sooner than the rest of Multnomah County.

Powerful forces buffet many of the school’s families. Decades of racist planning scattered Portland’s small Black population. Rising housing costs put home ownership out of reach for many. Limited economic opportunities make it difficult to ascend to the middle class.

Pandemic-induced declines in enrollment also exacted a heavy toll, plunging the student body from a high of 150 before the COVID-19 outbreak to about 90 this year. Some days, only a few dozen show up.

For students, Rosemary Anderson High School represents stability and safety, a respite from dangerous streets and chaotic home lives, its teachers and staff often doubling as surrogate parents.

This was especially true for Dante.

In the end, the school and its teachers could not keep him safe.

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