What is awe? And can experiencing awe lead to a happier, healthier life? Henry Wismayer spends time with Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley psychology professor at the forefront of a scientific movement examining our least-understood emotional state. I’ve appreciated Wismayer’s contemplative essays on other subjects, especially travel and tourism, and this profile-reported essay hybrid is yet another thought-provoking read. It’s informative but not dense, and I came away from it fresh, open-minded, and ready to experience the day’s small wonders.
Out of this trove of 2,600 personal narratives, the team at Berkeley distilled a definitive catalogue of awe’s elicitors. Keltner dubbed them “the eight wonders of life.” The most common source of awe was the moral beauty of other people, such as witnessing instances of compassion or courage. Also prevalent was “collective effervescence,” the sense of transcendent unity we might feel at a sporting event or when dancing in unison with others. Then came two predictable ones: nature and music, to which was added a third aesthetic stimulus, visual design. The last three could be lumped together by those of a romantic disposition as matters of the soul: spiritual awe, life and death, and epiphanies, like Archimedes’ Eureka moment, or the Damascene conversion of St. Paul.
When flyers began appearing around the University of Colorado Boulder, announcing that an enrolled student with ties to the white nationalist group Patriot Front, the campus’s independent student newspaper took notice. It secured an interview with the student, Patryck Durham, who admitted to being affiliated with Patriot Front and to publishing social media posts encouraging the killing of immigrants and Black people, but said UC officials were aware of all this before he enrolled and that it was “in the past.” Within hours, the story had taken a turn:
Durham did not definitively say whether he still held the violent beliefs that appeared in his social media posts, which were published in 2021.
“I can’t put an exact date on it because a lot of this stuff is messy. But it’s been, I think, a year or more by now,” since he was last affiliated with Patriot Front, Durham said.
Early Thursday morning, Jan. 26, several hours after Durham spoke with reporters for this story, the University of Colorado Police Department (CUPD) responded to reports of suspicious activity in Durham’s residence hall.
According to police records, officers found Durham with two people that police described as “older friends from Longmont,” just before 2 a.m. Durham failed to clarify to law enforcement how he knew the two individuals in his room, and witnesses told police they felt uncomfortable with the presence of Durham and the other adults.
One of the witnesses told police the pair of older adults were part of the white nationalist group Durham has been affiliated with. The two individuals were “told to leave the building” and did, according to police records.
According to the police report, witnesses also saw Patriot Front messages and propaganda on Durham’s laptop. Witnesses told police Durham was communicating with members of the hate group through the messaging app Telegram.
Sources who described the encounter to the CU Independent and The Bold did so on the condition of anonymity, as they were worried they would be harmed for coming forward. People familiar with the incident said Durham returned to the dorms the next day, Jan. 27, to move out.
In 1976, Nanda Devi Unsoeld, the daughter of legendary mountaineer Willi Unsoeld, died on the mountain for which she was named. This is the story of Devi’s life and of the historic climb that killed her. A riveting adventure read, it doesn’t shy away from highlighting the history of misogyny, cultural appropriation, and selfishness in mountaineering culture:
In late September of 1975, at the Unsoeld home in Olympia, Willi met with 26-year-old John Roskelley, another very accomplished American alpinist, putting plans in motion. They were of different minds about leadership and climbing, and women, too—namely, whether they belonged on major expeditions with men. Roskelley tried to convince Willi not to invite a female climber named Marty Hoey to join the group. He believed that the presence of women could complicate things; he worried that emotions could get out of hand when the two sexes were put together in high-stakes, high-altitude situations.
It didn’t help that Hoey had been dating Peter Lev, another veteran of the Dhaulagiri expedition who they wanted on the team; Roskelley hated the idea of a couple’s quarrels bleeding into the team’s daily demands. He also assumed the climb would be a traditional, equipment-heavy effort, relying on multiple camps and fixed ropes, while Willi and Lev seemed intent on an alpine-style ascent, lighter on ropes and happening fast.
As they wrangled over the climb’s fundamentals, Devi herself burst in, glowing with sweat. She’d just biked seven miles home from a soccer game. Roskelley would later recall his first impression in his 1987 book, Nanda Devi: The Tragic Expedition, saying that Devi “swept in like a small tornado after an obviously brutal game of soccer.”
In public speaking engagements for the next few years, Willi would sometimes describe this moment, too, including an extra detail about some of the first words out of Devi’s mouth that evening: “You’re Roskelley,” she said. “I understand you have trouble with women.”
At Astra Magazine, Elif Batuman looks at what Charles Schultz’s had to say about American values and society with a deep dive on the Peanuts character, Pig-Pen.
Pig-Pen first appears in 1954. Violet’s judgmental friend, Patty, sees him playing in the sand and asks his name. Pig-Pen replies that he doesn’t have one; people just call him “insulting things.” Patty asks for specifics. “I’ll tell you if you won’t laugh,” Pig-Pen says. His name is a punch line. For a long time, Pig-Pen’s name consistently appears in quotation marks, reminding us that it isn’t really a name — that he has, presumably, another one that he doesn’t know. From 1980 to 1997, the quotation marks disappear, blurring the line between Pig-Pen’s “true self” and a reductive description directed at him by other people, which is in effect what a name comes down to.
We think of being in the hospital as enduring isolation in a clinical setting, cut off from normal life. But what if being hospitalized meant something different? What if you could be receive hospital-quality care in your own home? Helen Ouyang profiles a movement of health care providers who, propelled by a range of factors, not least among them the COVID-19 pandemic, are working to redefine what hospitalization in America might look like:
Other countries, including Australia, Canada and several in Europe, had already been experimenting with this practice, some of them extensively. In Australia, which has been running home-hospitals for decades, these services provided in Victoria alone are the equivalent of what a 500-bed facility could offer in one year. Overall, the patients treated in this way do just as well, if not better, in their homes.
The obstacles impeding Leff and other hospital-at-home advocates in the United States were bound up with America’s labyrinthine health care system and particular medical culture. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (C.M.S.), which is the largest payer of hospitalizations, has required that nurses must be on site 24 hours a day, seven days a week, effectively keeping patients within the hospital walls. This matches how American society has come to regard hospitalization, too — nurses at the bedside, doctors making their rounds, in elaborate facilities pulsating with machines.
But Americans didn’t always convalesce in hospitals. Before the 20th century, treatment at home was the norm. “Only the most crowded and filthy dwellings were inferior to the hospital’s impersonal ward,” the historian Charles E. Rosenberg writes in his 1987 book “The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System.” “Ordinarily, home atmosphere and the nursing of family members provided the ideal conditions for restoring health.” As Rosenberg puts it, “Much of household medicine was, in fact, identical with hospital treatment.” As health care became more specialized and high-tech, however, diagnosis and treatment gradually moved into hospitals, and they evolved into institutions of science and technology.
“They’re a little eccentric” is a phrase I suspect most of us have heard used to describe a certain kind of memorable person. For me, it evokes my childhood dentist — an elderly man who favored colorful bow ties and humming loudly as he worked, and who once wagged his finger in my face and gravely advised, “never marry a woman who makes you chop wood.” I still don’t quite know what he was getting at.
But what do we really mean when we call someone eccentric? The word renders a verdict of harmlessness: A person’s style, conduct, or mannerisms may be memorable, but not concerning. And truthfully, we need people who are a bit of a character (to use an equally common euphemism). Their difference reinforces our sense of stability, their peculiarity a necessary splash of color in a landscape of conformity. We love to hear about them, to speculate why they are as they are — the odder, the better. Whether in documentaries like Grey Gardens or the five stories collected here, well-reported tales of quirkiness always invoke a small thrill, vaulting their subjects out of the realm of local gossip and into a wider imagination.
However, it’s no accident that every entry here concerns individuals who are, to varying degrees, rich or famous. The sad truth is that the lives of the everyday working class are seldom celebrated, and least of all those whose habits and personalities fall outside of the bounds of “normal.” To quote a character in Ellen Raskin’s novel The Westing Game, “the poor are crazy, the rich just eccentric.” Wealth affords many privileges in life, among them the indulgence of oddity, and such indulgence is only magnified in the face of celebrity. Behavior that would be considered problematic becomes acceptable, even admired as a natural by-product of genius. (See: Andy Kaufman; Bjork; and, at least up to a certain point, Kanye West).
Whatever your take on the meaning of “eccentric,” these stories — sad, inspiring, tragic, and incredible as they are — provide a fascinating glimpse into the minds of those whose lives are anything but conventional.
Every sport has its enigmatic geniuses, players of supreme natural talent whose volatile nature as often as not trips them up. Remarkably often, a pattern repeats: The young upstart appears as if they had ridden down on a lightning bolt, shakes up the landscape and transcends the limits of the sport, yet somehow never quite reaches the heights they could have, and should have, achieved. In boxing, “Prince” Naseem Hamed shot to fame on the back of extraordinary talent mixed with equally extraordinary theatrics, only to fall frustratingly short of all-time greatness, abruptly walking away from a sport he no longer loved. In soccer, mercurial French footballer-cum-poet Eric Cantona, an eccentric genius if ever there was one, lost the captaincy of his national team thanks to a bizarre display of temper. Basketball, of course, has Dennis Rodman, a player who eternally walked a tightrope between outrageous skill and self-implosion. Pick any sport you like and there will always be numerous examples; in chess, however, Bobby Fischer stands alone.
The World Chess Championships of 1972 were memorable for several reasons. Russia had dominated the competition for 24 years prior, and no American had won since the 19th century. The world was in the middle of a Cold War. The man who held the crown, 25-year-old Russian Boris Spassky, had learned how to play on a train while escaping Leningrad during World War II. Yet, Spassky’s opponent might have been the most memorable element. Bobby Fischer was the definition of a prodigy: At 14, he had won the U.S. Championship with the only recorded perfect score in the history of the tournament. Fifteen years later, he carried the hopes of a nation upon his shoulders. But which Bobby Fischer would turn up — the confident, happy young man, or the paranoid, furious recluse? Would he, in fact, turn up at all? Chess aficionados will already know this story, but Darrach writes with such insight and elegance, transporting us to a world of fantastic intrigue and unbelievable pressure, that even if you know the outcome, this article is a thrill from start to finish.
I was 2600 miles northeast of the Yale Club when the crisis broke. I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, waiting for Bobby to fly up for the match. Spassky was waiting, too—he had arrived eight days before—and so were 140–150 newspaper, magazine and television reporters from at least 32 countries. They were getting damn tired of waiting, in fact, and the stories out of Reykjavik were reflecting their irritation.
Those of us who grew up in England during the ’80s and ’90s will surely remember Frank Sidebottom, a bizarre character who appeared seemingly out of nowhere, lighting up various children’s TV shows and briefly enjoying his own series before disappearing back to the strange realm from which he had emerged. What made Sidebottom so singular was the fact that he wasn’t human. Rather, he was human, but his head wasn’t: Atop his shoulders sat an inflatable plastic oval, which Sidebottom never removed.
At the heart of this fantastical story, here recounted by firsthand witness Jon Ronson, lies an astonishing quote from George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” What begins as a tale about an eccentric, imaginative musician soon becomes one of identity, acceptance, and the blurring of the line between fiction and reality.
I never understood why Chris sometimes kept Frank’s head on for hours, even when it was only us in the van. Under the head Chris would wear a swimmer’s nose clip. Chris would be Frank for such long periods the clip had deformed him slightly, flattened his nose out of shape. When he’d remove the peg after a long stint I’d see him wince in pain.
The tech zillionaire class is a modern phenomenon that tends to divide opinion. Depending on which side you listen to, the likes of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are either visionary gurus transforming our society into a better, more desirable model, or childlike narcissists who treat the world and everything in it as disposable playthings. As ever, the truth probably lies somewhere in between. The late John McAfee, who made a fortune from virus-protection software at a time when most had never even heard of the term, came to prominence in an era before the Tony Stark model of entrepreneur-as-hero entered the public imagination.
Again, we come to a crossroads. Was John McAfee a delusional paranoid or a tech-security messiah, hounded by government operatives and mysterious cartels desperate to protect their shadowy interests? Undeniably, he’s a fascinating figure, and the tales of guns, SWAT teams, wild flights, and deaths as recounted to journalist Stephen Rodrick are compelling, even as his readily apparent narcissism and deeply problematic trappings (such as his self-described “teenage harem”) are highly disturbing.
At dawn, we land in Atlanta, and the six-hour drive to Lexington passes in a haze. The Blazer fills up with cigarette smoke as Pool and McAfee check their arsenal: a Smith & Wesson .40, a .380 Ruger, and another three or four handguns in the front seat. “I like to have a small one in my waistband,” says McAfee. “Sitting on the toilet is a real vulnerable position.”
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Singer and dancer Josephine Baker would have been just as big a star, if not bigger, in the modern age of social media. Her talent, unconventionality, lifestyle, and beauty brought her fame and fortune at a time when few Black women could even dream of such a thing. She was the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, became a celebrated performer at the Folies Bergère in Paris, received a medal for her work assisting the French Resistance during World War II, and was rewarded by the NAACP for her activism.
Baker was also temperamental, unhappy, and the instigator of a bizarre and unethical plan to combat racism that almost defies belief. In this absorbing piece, we learn of a side to Baker’s character that is little known to many. It is, if we needed one, a sharp reminder that celebrities are just as flawed as the rest of us, that good intentions don’t always lead to good results, and that a life led with all limits removed rarely, if ever, turns out well.
In photos taken at the time, the chateau looks more like an orphanage than a real home. The children slept in a room in the attic, in eight small beds lined up in a row. Whenever Baker returned home, even if it happened to be at 3 a.m., she would wake the children and demand affection.
I suspect all parents find tales of unhappy childhoods difficult, even disturbing, to read. We want nothing but the best for our offspring, especially if we have not enjoyed a peaceful and stable upbringing ourselves. The saving grace of this piece is the beautiful prose with which poet Edith Sitwell recalls her formative years growing up in a famously eccentric and almost casually cruel household. The various characters and events as described by Sitwell resemble appalling fictions, their grotesquerie landing somewhere between Charles Dickens and H. P. Lovecraft.
During her adult life, Sitwell was divisive, controversial, flamboyant, gracious, and scornful. She possessed a heart capable of absorbing and displaying the most delicate beauty, hardened perhaps, by her upbringing in a family so well off that it was able to wallow in a pit of morbid peculiarity. Her poetry is wonderous; her literary analysis revelatory. Many thousands of words have been written concerning Edith and the Sitwells, but almost certainly none as moving and striking as those you will discover here, written by her own hand.
I remember little of Mr. Stout’s outward appearance, excepting that he looked like a statuette constructed of margarine, then frozen so stiff that no warmth, either from the outer world or human feeling, could begin to melt it. The statuette was then swaddled in padded wool, to give an impression of burliness.
Sometime in the 1990s, a small group of amateur historians in Liverpool, United Kingdom, made a startling discovery. Local rumors had long circulated concerning a network of tunnels, even an entire subterranean world, hidden beneath the streets of the city’s Edge Hill area. The group was able to verify that a number of underground entrances did indeed exist, on land previously owned by a mysterious recluse named Joseph Williamson. Excavating by hand, they could not possibly have imagined what they were about to discover.
Born in 1769, Williamson worked his way up through the ranks at a tobacco factory owned by the wealthy Tate family of sugar importers. Williamson married into that family, took ownership of the factory, and prospered. He retired when in his 40s, and here is where the story proper begins. For reasons that are still unclear (and still heavily debated), Williamson, utilizing a small army of employees, began carving out immense underground chambers beneath his homes. It must have taken a large amount of his fortune and a huge portion of his time. But why? When you’re rich, perhaps nobody asks. It’s known that Williamson was secretive about his tunneling activities, never revealing their true purpose. Fine arches led nowhere; certain passages were carved out and then filled in. All activity ceased with his death, and the labyrinth remained untouched until the locals whose voices you will hear in this excellent article rediscovered this giant conundrum.
“The whole place is so full of mysterious questions — an awful lot of questions that nobody will ever be able to answer,” Stapledon told The Post. “When you look at some of the structures underground, you think: How the hell did he create these? What the hell was he doing building all this stuff?”
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
In the final six months of the Trump presidency, the federal government executed 13 people. In January 2021, the same month he incited an insurrection at the Capitol, Trump oversaw three executions in just four days. There’s really no other way to put it: Trump was eager for the state to kill people on his watch. Two Rolling Stone reporters detail the unprecedented stretch of executions:
It was Sessions’ successor, Barr, who took the concrete step in July 2019 of ordering the Federal Bureau of Prisons to resume executions.
Barr wrote proudly of the decision in his book One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, published about a year after the Trump presidency ended, devoting a whole chapter — “Bringing Justice to Violent Predators” — to the blitz of federal executions. Not a shocking move from a man who, while George H.W. Bush’s attorney general in the early 1990s, praised the death penalty in a series of official recommendations, claiming that it works as a deterrent, “permanently incapacitate[s] extremely violent offenders,” and “serves the important societal goal of just retribution.” (Without a hint of irony, he added, “It reaffirms society’s moral outrage at the wanton destruction of innocent human life.”)
Trump, of course, was not so keen to engage with the subject intellectually. The sum total of his discussions of the death penalty with his top law-enforcement officer, Barr says, was a single, offhand conversation. After an unrelated White House meeting, Barr was preparing to leave the Oval Office when, he says, he gave Trump a “heads-up” that “we would be resuming the death penalty.” Trump — apparently unaware of his own AG’s longstanding philosophy on capital punishment — asked Barr if he personally supported the death penalty and why.
Trump’s lack of interest in the details had grave repercussions for the people whose fates were in his hands. According to multiple sources inside the administration, Trump completely disregarded the advice of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, an administrative body designed to administer impartial pleas for clemency in death-penalty cases and other, lower-level offenses. And Barr says he does not recall discussing any of the 13 inmates who were eventually killed with the president who sent them to the death chamber.
That means Trump never talked with Barr about Lisa Montgomery, a deeply mentally ill and traumatized person who became the first woman executed by the federal government since 1953. Or Wesley Ira Purkey, whose execution was delayed a day by a judge who ruled that his advancing Alzheimer’s disease had left Purkey unaware of why he was being executed. (The Supreme Court reversed that ruling the next day.) Or Daniel Lewis Lee, Dustin Lee Honken, Lezmond Charles Mitchell, Keith Dwayne Nelson, William Emmett LeCroy Jr., Christopher Andre Vialva, Orlando Cordia Hall, Alfred Bourgeois, Corey Johnson, and Dustin John Higgs.
And it means Trump never spoke with Barr about Brandon Bernard.
