“The world would be forever mixed; now Germany had some India and more Ashkenazi Jew in it.” In a stunning, probing essay at The Kenyon Review, Diane Mehta examines the unknowns surrounding her birth, and her parents’ trajectories and family history. Mehta digs into who her parents were — especially her mother, a Jewish American woman living in postwar Germany — while also exploring what it means for pieces of paper to control our lives and seal our fates.
I’m a fill-in-the-blanks sort of person, so I believe that each of the boxes on the FS-240 embodies all the possibilities of circumstance, pleasure, and menace that as an infant I did not know until they happened to me. Perhaps this is my first clue that I have no control over being, and limited control over the rhythm of my days in this world. There is not only Frankfurt, where I lived for six months, but other borders and cities in me. I can keep filling in the blanks with constructed narratives, to explain the accidents that others call fate; I do not believe in it any more than I believe in astrology or magnetism or the Year of the Tiger. I do believe in habit and imagination, and out of that you can burn your way into any narrative you choose.
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Imagine three children, ages 2, 4, and 5 being abandoned in a train station in Barcelona in 1984. They do not know what their surname is. They do not know the names of their parents. Add a mafia boss, a hit man, and a soothsayer, and you have the makings of a mystery that spanned four decades. At The Guardian, Giles Tremlett attempts to do the math.
When I visited Ramón in a small penthouse apartment in Barcelona, he recalled once finding a pistol in a house where they were staying. He and Ricard started playing with it on an outdoor staircase. Ramón pointed the pistol at his brother, then turned away and pulled the trigger. The gun recoiled as he fired a real bullet. He explained with photographic exactitude the shape of the staircase, the white outside wall and a garden below. “My father was furious,” he told me.
He remembers, too, his father driving them to a beachside restaurant and leaving the engine running while he went inside. They waited a few minutes before he reappeared, bleeding from a badly beaten face. “I recall the tension in the car as we drove off,” Ramón said. Ricard’s memories are fewer, but also vivid: his father parking the black Porsche above a vertiginous cliff; a wood-lined Paris apartment with a view of the Eiffel Tower; visiting his father in a hospital room. They seemed like scenes from a French noir gangster movie.
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Once upon a time, I wanted to be a doctor. Never mind my terrible grades in all things science. Never mind that I decided this in my second year of college, after deciding that the music school that I’d wanted for years wasn’t for me. It was 2006. It was the age of Dr. Gregory House.
I love a good medical drama. My mother, a nurse, raised me on ER and General Hospital, always pointing out all the plot lines that “would never happen in real life” but were really cool to watch on TV. My mother credits ER with pushing her toward her decades-long career in the operating room. So when I, a poor lost college sophomore who had gone to school to play French horn (French horn!) and found it wasn’t what I thought it would be, I did what I knew best to do and turned to TV. And on TV, I found House.
House had it all: a painkiller-addicted doctor with a smart mouth and a slap-worthy face, medical mysteries solved via CSI-style case-of-the-week format, and a beleaguered crew of sidekick physicians whose instincts were never quite as good as House’s. I would spend each episode studying the setup and trying to unravel what the medical culprit could be before the ultimate reveal. Instead of realizing that what I might want to be was a writer with a good plot, I missed the mark and decided I wanted to be a doctor.
Reader, I did not become a doctor. (That fizzled out after one year of biology classes and a stint working in a local nursing home.) But I remain a lifelong medical mystery buff. Here, then, are a few of my recent long-form favorites — enjoy the game of whatdunnit.
Swamp Boy (Kris Newby, Now This News, October 2022)
One day, a 14-year-old boy with no previous physical or mental issues informs his parents that he is the “evil, damned son of the devil” and he needs to kill himself before he destroys them all. Thus begins the onset of a massive medical manhunt to uncover exactly what is causing the boy’s psychosis and physical symptoms, which include OCD, shortness of breath, chronic pain, frequent urination, intense headaches, the belief that he had green vines growing under his skin, the belief that he was a bird, and the belief that the family cat was ordering him to kill everyone around him — including the family fish.
Complete with vivid graphic-novel-styled art illustrating some of the reported hallucinations, this piece has it all, including a father’s fight against the medical establishment and an ending you’ll never see coming. In other words, it’s about as close as one can get to a real-life episode of House.
Meanwhile, back at home, now more than seven months after his son’s first psychotic breakdown, Scott could finally clear his mind, and began to focus his analytical skills on Michael’s case.
To the medical experts, his son had been a ten-inch-tall stack of paper annotated with clinical notes. Each expert had examined one piece of Michael—his brain, his stomach, his heart, his immune system, his gut, his spine, his skin, his eyes. Scott, meanwhile, was determined to analyze Michael as a whole. “I knew I had to figure out what was wrong, or I’d lose my son,” he said.
It was during one of his many conversations with doctors about Michael’s potential treatment that Scott had an epiphany: Maybe no one could help their son because they were treating the wrong illness.
On an ordinary day in Le Roy, New York, a high school cheerleader begins twitching. Another cheerleader develops tics a week later. And another after that; and another after that. It spreads past the cheerleaders and on to the art kids, a boy, kids in neighboring schools. Is there something in the water? Is it those mysterious bins labeled with hazardous waste from a nearby factory? Is it that strange orange ooze coming up from the ground on the football field? Or is it all in their heads?
Featuring media vans, Dr. Drew appearances, familial finger-pointing, women’s least favorite H-word (hysteria), and a cameo from legal crusader Erin Brockovich, Dominus’s reporting takes us into the mystery that consumed a small Northeastern town, while still making the science accessible to lay readers.
How could one person’s illness be reflected in another person’s neural pathways, playing a trick on consciousness, convincing the host that it originated in her own body? In the last decade, scientists have begun to explore the concept that regions in our brain once thought to activate only our own activity or sensations are also firing what are known as mirror neurons when we witness someone else perform an action or feel a sensation. Mass psychogenic illness could be thought of as the maladaptive version of the kind of empathy that finds expression in actual physical sensation: the contagious yawn or sympathetic nausea or the sibling who grabs his own finger when he sees his brother’s bleed.
No, not that pandemic. Pate McMichael looks back at the teenager who may have died of AIDS more than a decade before HIV gripped the nation. But where did the virus come from? How did a young boy who was not a drug user, had not left the state, and never received a blood transfusion contract a virus that wouldn’t be detected in the United States for another decade? Furthermore, why did the news break in the mainstream media before the scientists who first identified the strain even had a chance to understand what was in their lab?
This piece combines two of my favorite things: a medical mystery and an ethical quandary. It pulls back the curtain on how the scientific establishment studies new diseases and how and when they release that information to the public. Add in that historical lens — doctors seeing a new and potentially terrifying disease in the 1960s, the echoes of Hurricane Katrina in Pate McMichael’s 2007 writing — and you’ve got a winner.
A few years later, in 1973, Elvin-Lewis and Witte presented Robert R.’s case at a lymphology conference and published a journal article on his systemic chlamydia in The Journal of Lymphology. The paper they presented actually raised as many questions as it answered. Why had Chlamydia spread throughout the body, when it normally stayed near the port of entry? And why did this young man have these purplish, malignant lesions called Kaposi’s sarcoma, as the alert pathologist had discovered during the autopsy? Kaposi’s sarcoma was known as an old man’s skin disease, typically affecting Jews and Italians. The pathologist decided that Robert R. had an African variant that affected children and primarily targeted the lymphatic system. That decision suggested an intriguing question: How did a black 15-year-old from St. Louis acquire Kaposi’s sarcoma?
A woman seeking her familial DNA for a clinical trial learns that not only is her father not her biological father, but her bio dad is actually her mother’s fertility doctor. All together, now: Yikes. Worse, she finds out that she is not alone; several other children conceived via fertility clinics have also discovered that their fertility doctors are their real fathers. One doctor, featured in the Netflix documentary Our Father, sired over 90 children.
This piece grapples with ethical questions and hard-to-draw lines: Is it medical rape to inseminate someone with fraudulent sperm? Do these doctor-fathers owe their scores of children anything? Should these children, once the fathers are discovered, seek a relationship with their bio dads? And what if the bio dad wants nothing to do with them? What if these men fail to see their behavior as a violation?
Not a mystery, but still riveting — and a good case study around the meaning of consent.
Not everyone who is watching Our Father has a personal connection at stake, but they are drawn in regardless. Fertility fraud rivets audiences because it channels the mysterious allure of genetic inheritance, crossing it with the perverse power relations between a doctor and their patient. Conception — so often an intimate act — is made impersonal and medicalized in the context of the fertility clinic, and then made intimate again through the abuse of the doctor-patient relationship.
Every child of fertility fraud is a baby who was desperately and deeply wanted by their parents. The exploitation of that desire is devastating; the fact that the body becomes evidence of the transgression is all the worse.
If Rule 34 of the internet is that there exists porn for every possible interest, then Rule 35, according to Jo Piazza of the podcast Under the Influence, is that there exists an influencer for every topic — including diarrhea.
Why yes, Hot Girls do have IBS, and you can hear all about it on TikTok, Instagram, and pretty much anywhere else there is to make money off of “bloating positivity.” (Truly, if there was ever a sign that we really are in late-stage capitalism, this has to be it.) But really, why do so many hot girls (and other mortals) have IBS these days? This essay takes a look at the history of digestive discomforts, all the way back to the 1700s when The Gentleman’s Magazine examined why all the “well-to-do Ladies” complain of stomach “[d]iagnosticks … neither visible or certain” and to our new era of “normalizing bowel function” (finally!).
It has a name, but not much else. IBS is a so-called “functional disorder,” meaning that it is a condition without identifiable cause. Unlike with inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, patients diagnosed with IBS have no medically detectable signs of damage or disease in their digestive tracts. Essentially, IBS is diagnosed when tests come back normal; it’s what’s written down on a chart when there’s nothing else left to identify. Many people with IBS struggle with the implication that their symptoms are made up — especially as IBS both relies on self-reporting and presents differently from patient to patient. It is a catch-all term for a variety of gastrointestinal ailments, including cramping, bloating, intestinal gas, diarrhea, and constipation. Statistically, it affects more women than men, and is most common in people under 50. Regular exercise, cognitive behavioral therapy, yoga, and meditation have all been shown to alleviate symptoms. Even so, “IBS is not a psychiatric illness,” says Dr. Arun Swaminath, director of the inflammatory bowel disease program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, “though stress and depression can make symptoms worse.” Despite its growing prevalence — IBS is the most frequently diagnosed gastrointestinal disorder — some doctors and digestive specialists question its utility as a medical construct, since the diagnosis does not elucidate anything about patients’ physiology or the causes of their discomfort. It is, however, very profitable: in the United States, the annual medical costs associated with IBS exceed $1 billion.
Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.
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Edward Alperowitsch was only 22 years old when he traveled to Nuremberg in 1948, ready to testify to the Nazi war crimes that had claimed most of his family. Instead, he was disqualified on procedural grounds. Yet, as George Anders writes, transcripts came to light of extensive pre-trial conversations Alperowitsch had had with the prosecution team — allowing father and son to revisit that time together, and perhaps to find some measure of closure.
It’s been nearly 75 years since my father traveled to Nuremberg, and there are times when he still regrets the legal fastidiousness that barred him from the witness stand. He wishes he could have testified, believing that some German generals’ complicity in the Holocaust would have earned much harsher punishment. Yet on a different level, Ed appreciates the Allies’ scrupulous adherence to the highest legal standards. Even today, Nuremberg is upheld as the model of how to run a war crimes trial. And the strength of the U.S. legal system—even when buffeted by the most odious pressures—is one of the things he cherishes as a naturalized American.
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In this excerpt from her book, Wavewalker: Breaking Free, Suzanne Heywood recounts the misery of her unconventional childhood. A three-year sailing adventure ended up being nearly a decade trapped on her parents’ boat — which Heywood remembers here with a brooding resentment. This edited extract gives a full picture of her remarkable story.
My parents always claimed our time on Wavewalker was wonderful and told me I’d had a privileged upbringing. But this oft-repeated mantra conceals a much darker story. What I found, when I mustered enough courage to look back, was that many parts of my childhood were worse than I’d been willing to admit.
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One of the largest homeless encampments in the U.S. continues to grow in downtown Phoenix, and a longtime sandwich shop, Old Station Subs, sits in the middle of it all. Eli Saslow writes a heartbreaking, bleak, and deeply immersive piece for The New York Times about this massive camp; the unsheltered, mentally ill, and drug-addicted people trying to survive; and the shop owners — Joe and Debbie Faillace — trying to find a way out.
He had washed 268 windows in the last month, but he was still nowhere close to saving enough for a security deposit and rent, so instead he had settled into an encampment so immense that it operated as its own separate economy. Blue fentanyl pills sold for $2, and anyone could trade a decent pair of shoes for a week’s supply of methamphetamine. A group of young men in the encampment had begun selling off pieces of the public sidewalk, charging each person $20 a week for what they called “lot rent and security.” That had seemed ridiculous to Kipp until he decided not to pay and then awoke one night to the smell of someone dousing his tent with lighter fuel.
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In this interview, Amanda Petrusich talks with Nick Cave about grief, resilience, religion, music, and Faith, Hope and Carnage, a book based on his conversations with journalist Seán O’Hagan. Sure, these are topics you’d expect in a Q&A with the Australian singer-songwriter, but that doesn’t make it any less rich or moving. I like their exchange about channeling spirituality or some kind of “enigmatic otherness” when making music, and dealing with loss over time, which Cave says gives us a deeper understanding of being human. His thoughts on AI, ChatGPT, and art also bring music to my ears.
I went out in public after my son died and a woman from Infinity Foods, a vegetarian takeaway I used to go to, whom I knew. She didn’t mention anything when she took my order, didn’t say anything, which I felt was strange, you know? But when she gave me back my change she squeezed my hand. It was a silent but deeply articulate act, beyond words, and more comforting than anything I had read or that anyone had said. It struck me that it doesn’t require much for people to deal with the grief of others. It just requires a small, sincere acknowledgment, and then we can move on a little bit rather than be stuck alone in an undeclared falseness. But I do also understand that it can be very difficult for people to have to deal with somebody else’s grief, especially if they are seeing them all the time.
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