A security camera caught 19-year-old Zac Brettler jumping to his death from a fifth-floor apartment in London. But did he commit suicide? Brettler’s parents’ attempts to answer that question led to shocking revelations, including that their son was posing as the heir of a Russian oligarch, and that he had fallen in with a known gangster, Dave Sharma:
The morning Zac’s body was identified, the private investigator the Brettlers had hired, Clive Strong, visited Sharma at Riverwalk. Sharma, who was short, sharp-featured, and physically fit, liked to box, and told Strong that he’d just returned from a sparring session. According to Strong’s notes, Sharma said that Zac had presented himself as someone whose “father was an oligarch,” and had claimed that he’d clashed so much with his mother—who lived in Dubai, along with four of his siblings—that she’d barred him from their various luxury properties in London. He was therefore homeless, despite being fantastically rich. “I felt sorry for the young man,” Sharma told Strong. “I said that he could stay in my flat”—the Riverwalk apartment.
Sharma, the last person to see Zac alive, told much the same story as Shamji: the previous Thursday evening, Zac and Shamji had come to Riverwalk; Sharma’s daughter, Dominique, joined them; after a few hours, Shamji and Dominique left; Sharma fell asleep, and when he awoke, at 8 a.m., Zac had vanished. In Sharma’s opinion, Zac had been a troubled kid who was “becoming suicidal.” Sharma noted that he was happy to talk to Strong, because he was a private investigator, but he preferred not to speak with the police, as he’d had some “bad experiences in the past.”
Sharma didn’t volunteer what those experiences were, but he did have a history with law enforcement. In 2002, he was arrested on heroin-smuggling charges. He was later implicated in the murder of a bodyguard turned night-club owner, Dave (Muscles) King, who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2003, as he was leaving a gym in Hertfordshire. It was the first time that a fully automatic AK-47 had been used to murder someone in England. At a high-profile trial, the judge described the assassination as “thoroughly planned, ruthless, and brutally executed.” The gunman and the driver were each sentenced to life in prison.
Sharma had been one of Muscles’ friends in the drug trade, but they fell out. When authorities arrested Sharma and others in the 2002 heroin bust, the only suspect they didn’t end up prosecuting was Muscles, and in front of witnesses in open court Sharma angrily called him a “grass”: an informer. Moments after Muscles was shot to death, the assassin called a mobile phone in France, which the police subsequently linked to Sharma. I spoke to a former official who was involved in the investigation, and he said that Sharma was a dangerous person. At the time of the murder trial, authorities had tried to locate him in France for questioning, but he’d gone underground. “I’ve no doubt Sharma was involved in organizing the shooting,” the former official told me. “But we didn’t have enough evidence to charge him.”
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In this excerpt adapted from her book The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, Elizabeth Rush recounts an expedition to the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. As she reflects on the thrill of visiting the glacier, she recounts the gargantuan task of communicating the experience with precision.
I hadn’t imagined how profoundly apart this place would feel—how it would appear gigantic and fully formed, an entity all its own, well beyond the limits of human understanding and resistant to whatever language I might try to pin on it.
Afterall, this floating ice shelf is comprised of snow that dropped before the rise and fall of Rome, before Jesus or the Buddha were born, before the invention of the alphabet. Before sound became symbol.
At some point, I sprint to the galley, scarf down two hard-boiled eggs and half a cinnamon bun, and run back up, taking the stairs two at a time. Soon I am outside again, attempting to honor the ice by looking away as little as possible. Thwaites’s calving edge stretches over a hundred miles, and so it takes us hours to travel its length. Sometimes the margin appears steep and sturdy and sheer; in other places it loses its sheen, seems chalky and distressed. We turn a corner and the face rockets upward into a wall. A wild line twists along the top of the shelf, tracing gorges into the blue-white snow. Then, just as abruptly, the parapet has crumbled, cluttering the water with floating pieces of brash.
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A delightful essay about a small piece of history (sometimes not so small). Why did men start wearing pockets of fabric over their crotch? Why did they stop? Zaria Gorvett finds out with some attention-grabbing reporting.
Some time around 1536, Hans Holbein the Younger was finessing Henry VIII’s crotch. With a fine brush in his hand and a palette of watercolour paints beside him, the master artist took pains to give his client’s ornately decorated bulge its due prominence.
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In 79 AD, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed several ancient Roman towns, including Pompeii and Herculaneum. It also buried the Herculaneum papyri, a collection of ancient scrolls in an Italian villa, in the process. To date, about 800 scrolls have been recovered from site excavations, but classical historians think there may be thousands more. There have been unsuccessful attempts over the centuries, however, to unroll these fragile scrolls.
In this entertaining read for Businessweek, Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet describe computer science professor Brent Seales’ more recent quest over the past 20 years to decipher them. With the help of a former GitHub executive, more advanced technology, and a machine-learning competition called the Vesuvius Challenge, it’s finally happening.
Terrible things happened to the scrolls in the many decades that followed. The scientif-ish attempts to loosen the pages included pouring mercury on them (don’t do that) and wafting a combination of gases over them (ditto). Some of the scrolls have been sliced in half, scooped out and generally abused in ways that still make historians weep. The person who came the closest in this period was Antonio Piaggio, a priest. In the late 1700s he built a wooden rack that pulled silken threads attached to the edge of the scrolls and could be adjusted with a simple mechanism to unfurl the document ever so gently, at a rate of 1 inch per day. Improbably, it sort of worked; the contraption opened some scrolls, though it tended to damage them or outright tear them into pieces. In later centuries, teams organized by other European powers, including one assembled by Napoleon, pieced together torn bits of mostly illegible text here and there.
The files generated by this process are so large and difficult to deal with on a regular computer that Friedman couldn’t throw a whole scroll at most would-be contest winners. To be eligible for the $700,000 grand prize, contestants would have until the end of 2023 to read just four passages of at least 140 characters of contiguous text. Along the way, smaller prizes ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 would be awarded for various milestones, such as the first to read letters in a scroll or to build software tools capable of smoothing the image processing. With a nod to his open-source roots, Friedman insisted these prizes could be won only if the contestants agreed to show the world how they did it.
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A network state starts as an online community of like-minded people, connected by something—a big idea, an innovation, a commandment—then moves offline into the physical world. Consider Vitalia, a pop-up city on an island off the coast of Honduras that’s focused on prolonging life. Or Praxis, a VC-funded group that wants to build an “eternal city” in the Mediterranean, free from the clutches of America’s flawed democracy. Given the US’s history of “secessionist yearning,” this idea is not new, and “[i]n hindsight, the network state is clearly the dream that Silicon Valley has been building toward since the very beginning,” writes Kaitlyn Tiffany. In her piece for the Atlantic, she recounts her experience from another network state, Zuzalu, the two-month experiment hosted in Montenegro last year and organized by the inventor of Ethereum.
Other than that, the model is choose your own adventure. Hypothetically, Srinivasan suggests network states for people who eat specific diets (kosher, keto), for people who don’t like FDA regulation, for people who don’t like cancel culture, for people who want to live like Benedictine monks, for people who might want to limit internet use by putting public buildings in Faraday cages. It doesn’t matter what the state is based on, but it has to be based on something—a “moral innovation” or a “one commandment.”
These projects are pitched with a sense of grandiosity and grievance: The twisted bureaucracy of democratic governance is constraining humanity. Decades ago, we went to the moon; why don’t we have flying cars? Centuries ago, we praised frontiersmen and pioneers; why are they vilified now? Why all this disdain for the doers and the builders? Why all this red tape in the way of the best and the brightest?
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“Are you traveling alone?” the agent asks as I hand over my passport.
“Yes . . .” A nod would have been louder. “Yes,” I try again, uncurling my shoulders.
I’m out of practice with confidence. I’m out of practice with a lot of things.
It’s late October and I’m flying to Milan to wrap myself in its chestnut-scented fog. I’m headed back to the city where I lived in my 20s, because I miss it, because I miss myself.
I move my carry-on behind my knees, partly to hide its size but mostly to stabilize myself. I’m such a fool; my angst is totally self-inflicted.
I must’ve been about 5 when my dad drove me to a playground to meet a friend. He parked across the street from a house that had just burned down. I have always been petrified of fire; I usually avert my eyes from anything to do with it. Somehow, that day, I forced myself to study the scarred skeleton in a curious, steady analysis of hurt.
I am prepared to mourn myself the same way in Milan by staring the loss straight in the face.
Just how much has this illness engulfed?
“Let it all in,” Ethan said earlier as we pulled into the drop-off lane. “I think you’ll find that your nerves are also excitement.”
In our 20 years together, I’ve never had to justify to Ethan that I feel six emotions in one breath. While so many others shame me for my emotionality, he considers it a gift. By all, he means: the joy, the pride, the grief, the fear, the giddiness, the awkwardness, the loneliness, the triumph.
He’s right—I am excited. I’ve planned a homecoming not only to Milan but to my other beloved northern Italian places: Cinque Terre and Venice, on opposite coasts.
“You’re planning to do all that? On yourown?” My loved ones are concerned. They’ve witnessed every act in my drama, every tango between force and fragility. I’ve done it before; do they think I can’t do it again? Their doubts become mine. Or maybe they were mine all along.
I live on the fault line at the intersection of two axes—illness and wellness—and two planes: what is and what could have been. My body is the most unpredictable factor in every day. My decisions, however mundane, involve a constant negotiation of energy. My time is dissected into pacing and pushing, with episodes of hurling myself past the breaking point and paying for it, only to feel a semblance of normal, of able, of the before—if there ever truly was a before, a time when this beast didn’t inhabit me.
Resilience has a cost.
Sadly, though, French has changed my vowels and endo has changed my bowels.
“You’re leaving Ethan alone? Is there food for him in the freezer?” My grandmother’s notion of independence is one thrust onto her as an immigrant and a widow, not an elective independence like mine. “No,” I want to tell her, “but I’ve left him love notes in the sheets and in his boxer drawer.”
Our independence had always been our defining feature; we lived as individuals first and a couple second. Much of our story has unfolded on separate continents, with us chasing our own dreams. We honor our distinct cultures and faiths. Even our wedding bands don’t match—he prefers yellow gold, I prefer white.
My independence also once meant I’d take so many flights a season that I’d fall asleep during takeoff, unfazed—or debilitatingly fatigued, unknowingly, even back then. Predicting my future from the sludgy swirls at the bottom of my cup of Armenian coffee was an easy task for our elders. “There’s a voyage around the corner,” they’d say, seeing open horizons in patterns of coffee grounds, and they were never wrong.
But the weed inside me tethered my organs and bound my ship to its anchor. It suffocated the independence that pulsed through me since I last stood in Milan. I went from winning more scholarships than I could accept to watching my savings dissolve into medical debt. I walked out on a dream career in academia after my PhD and became self-employed to give myself breathing room between surgeries—a “choice” my Italian supervisor called a real shame for the field that had invested in me.
I asked Ethan for more and more: to do my dishes, to run my errands, to support me financially, to speak for me, to bend down for me, to pull up my underwear, to carry me back to bed. He dealt with the stress of being our household’s sole contributor. He dealt with our shared PTSD from medical appointments gone badly. He dealt with us being late to everything because I couldn’t get myself off the toilet. He dealt with our rattled intimacy, with my screams in the night, with the sight of me depleted, pale, immobile. With every thank you and I’m sorry that he collected from me, my individuality unspooled.
Through it all, he’s been more than stoic—he’s been loving. He swaddled me in acceptance long before I could even entertain the idea of acceptance myself. But I often wonder: How fine are we, really? How far can we bend without breaking? And so, when I remember, I refrain from complaining. I try to balance taking with giving. I test how long I can hold out without letting the word “pain” sneak into my sentences. I make myself lovable, to the extent possible. I’ve come to rely so much on Ethan. Do I even make sense without him?
I tuck my boarding pass into my passport. I’m flying solo to test my wings.
There’ll be no one to help lug my suitcase, my groceries, my body. But surely, Milan will feel good. . . . But what if I don’t feel anything at all? What if healing has left fragments and fissures that can’t be made whole? What will Ethan do with his time now that he’s unburdened by me?
My seat on the train into Milan has me going backward. Fitting, I think, to be pulled into my city in reverse, my life on rewind.
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Soon, I have an ornate key in my purse again and my address refers to a peach house with trees sprouting from its rooftop and balconies crowded with pots. Milan is a city of handsome façades and secret universes tucked backstage in interlocking private courtyards, and my neighborhood—Brera—is its artistic heart.
I have a type when it comes to cities; Milan isn’t it. Its dense smog veils the Alps and gives me a chronic cough that only disappears if I go to Switzerland for the weekend. Every intersection is a chaos of squealing trams, cars, scooters, and pedestrians, each fighting for their slice of space. Its only waterfront is along the banks of its murky Navigli canals.
But I grew up here. Milan was my companion as I befriended the voice in my head—the voice that was suddenly so loud when I left my parents’ nest and ventured overseas with a big red suitcase packed with ambition and anxiety. Milan taught me the art of being alone—really alone, before smartphones and social media strapped us into a permanent grid. Without Google Maps in my pocket, I’d rely on my hand-drawn scribbles of cross streets or, if I was feeling brave, my instinct. As we got to know one another, Milan grew smaller. Locals began asking me for directions. Dinner for one became comfortable, even romantic. I was unbothered by glances and poised for inspiration. I was free.
Milan raised me to believe I could do and be anything. To have had that and to have lost it might be worse than never having had it at all.
The story of city and self is often intertwined; where we loved, where we lost, where we came alive. When my nostalgia swells, I wonder what I’m missing: the back then of Milan, or of me?
When I step out, it feels as though I’m walking inside my mind, opening drawers and boxes I sift through often in my daydreams. I let my senses fill with all that used to be mine, and my chest might just burst open. I comb the streets that I knew better than those of my hometown. I didn’t expect such fuzzy memory traces. I know this once mattered, but I can’t tell why. I’ve forgotten the order of the subway stops. Left here, right there. Yes, now I remember. Milan is motor memory—a sequence of dance moves that primes the next, lyrics that form on my lips before my brain even wipes off their dust. I’ve tripped here, on this tram line, on this raised cobblestone. I’ve written in my journal here, laughed with friends there. I’ve photographed this angle, these shadows, that door. But I ached less then and my heart had fewer locked rooms.
Who knows how many times these shops and restaurants have changed before this iteration. I recognize the awnings and logos of the mainstays, but for all that’s new, only the structure of the space seems familiar—the bones, not the body. A whole new neighborhood has sprung tall with buildings that show no bruises or wrinkles. Milan is more vibrant than it was a decade ago. Am I?
I notice the uncertainty around my eyes in my selfies. I catch glimpses of my body in store windows—hunched, soft, off-kilter. I imagine the younger me reflected, slender and serene, maybe even sexy. I can feel traces of her lingering on these same street corners and in the routines I settle back into. I feel like I’m acting, playing her part.
The story of city and self is often intertwined; where we loved, where we lost, where we came alive. When my nostalgia swells, I wonder what I’m missing: the back then of Milan, or of me? I’m resistant to changing my rituals, to deviating from the script. I order the same gelato, take the same shortcut, sit in my same spot on the fountain and on my bench in the park. I want to stick to what I used to do and who I used to be.
Sadly, though, French has changed my vowels and endo has changed my bowels. I can no longer repeatedly eat bread or pasta without consequences. I need more bathroom breaks and more downtime. I travel with my hot water bottle. My clothing is looser, longer. I’ve traded my heeled suede boots for sneakers that fare better with Milanese puddles and my tingling feet. On days where rain is imminent, I take pleasure in leaning on my umbrella for extra support. Before I unpacked, I moved a dining room chair into the entrance so I can sit while I tie and untie my shoes. When I go to the market to buy myself flowers, they call me signora instead of signorina.
I’ve aged before having aged.
But my Italian friends claim they don’t see it. “Ma non sei cambiata! Sei sempre la stessa!” They marvel at how I haven’t changed. I admit, that makes me happy. There’s a strange sense of pride in staying the same—consistent, unscathed. We are conditioned to grow, but not to age, to blossom, but not from wounds.
When I meet my friend Stella for lunch, we share our shortcomings over orecchiette. Stella has her own invisible disability to accommodate—a crippling fatigue that has been her shadow for years, wedging itself between her wants and her cans. With the Italian lunch hour whirling around us, we are cradled in a confessional safe haven. We talk about how foreign our bodies feel sometimes and how our truth inconveniences others. The need to draw boundaries to nurture ourselves is often isolating. Stella is more practical with her grief than I am, at least today. “When people ask, ‘how are you?’ I say, ‘I can tell you, but you won’t like the answer!’” We laugh, though we are both unsure how to navigate a society that conflates being real and being negative. Fifteen years ago, we had academia in common. Now, this.
I’ve tripped here, on this tram line, on this raised cobblestone. I’ve written in my journal here, laughed with friends there. I’ve photographed this angle, these shadows, that door. But I ached less then and my heart had fewer locked rooms.
The way I dreamed up this quest was fueled by my internalized ableism—to check if I can, to be disappointed if I can’t. My grandmother’s resilience is entrenched in my concept of self-worth. That life is meant to be endured with a brave face, and that rest—much like praise—is earned by plowing through pain. “Look what I managed to do at 92” is the underlying message of our evening chats when she tells me about her windows, floors, and thriving plants. “That’s more than I can manage in a day at 38,” I chuckle, secretly worried about getting to 92. My own look-what-I-managed-to-dos are photos texted to Ethan. I get a thrill when he’s proud of me, when he sees me on my own two feet, doing what I love. The snapshots don’t show the abandoned climbs, the turn-backs, the breathlessness.
Milan is my timepiece, my meter of selves past. I was prepared for my return to sting.
But I remind myself of what it is taking me a decade to unlearn: it’s not all or nothing. There’s triumph in staying in, in saying no, in resting before feeling floored, in getting groceries in three trips, in choosing the later train or no train at all. My limits make me more intentional. I start to send Ethan pictures not only of the things I did do, but also those I deliberately didn’t do and felt at peace not doing. I shift my attention to being instead. I can’t shake my limitations, but I can shake the shame and the inner turmoil. I can let my joy take the edge off the grief. It’s not about testing my wings, but about recalibrating them. I was and still am free.
I swing by the pasticceria for my usual brioche oozing with custard cream. I stand at the bar, face-to-face with a large mirror. I don’t like what I see, so I look down. No, that feels cowardly; I force myself to meet my gaze. I’m on this trip to spend time with myself, after all. Between sips of my cappuccino, I study the lines, the signs of swelling, the double chin that belongs to my mother. And when I least expect it, my insecurity melts into a smile.
I lean into Milan. I feel my posture lengthen and my jaw muscles soften. I was afraid the now would override the then. But her Milan coexists with my current Milan; my new rituals won’t erase hers. We are two selves, threaded close.
It was never supposed to be the same; I’ve become too much to go backward. Though I’m still reluctant to pick a new favorite gelato, on my next train ride, I make sure to choose a forward-facing seat.
Kristina Kasparian (@alba.a.new.dawn) is an emerging writer, neurolinguist, and health activist advocating for social justice in health care, especially for disabling conditions like endometriosis. Her writing on identity has been published by Roxane Gay (Emerging Writer Series), Catapult, Newsweek, Fodor’s, the Globe and Mail, and a number of travel and literary magazines. Visit her website atkristinakasparian.com.
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The United States leads the world in airline safety. That’s because of the way we assign blame when accidents do happen. Kyra Dempsey, aka Admiral Cloudberg, explains the governing norms of post-accident investigations:
It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. In some industries, this is called a “blameless postmortem,” and in aviation, it’s a long-standing, internationally formalized tradition. In the mid-20th century, when technical investigations of aircraft accidents were first being standardized, an understanding emerged that many crashes were not the result of any particular person’s actions. Most famously, in 1956, the Civil Aeronautics Board’s Bureau of Aviation Safety, the predecessor to today’s NTSB, concluded that no one was at fault in a collision of two airliners over the Grand Canyon because the two crews likely could not have seen each other coming until it was too late. The cause of the accident, they determined, was the lack of any positive means to prevent midair collisions.
The exact origins of this norm are debatable, but we might speculate that it arose from several factors, including the lack of survivors or witnesses in many early aircraft accidents, which left scant evidence with which to assign fault; the fact that pilots held high status in society and many were reluctant to blame them in the absence of such evidence; and the presumption that flying was dangerous and that disaster was not always an aberration of nature. These realities likely predisposed aeronautical experts to think in terms other than blame.
The end result was that the aviation industry became one of the first to embrace the concept of a “blameless postmortem” as a legally codified principle underpinning all investigations. In 1951, compelled by the reality that their industry was not widely regarded as safe, aviation experts from around the world gathered to compose Annex 13 to the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation. This seminal document aimed to standardize the conduct of air accident investigations among all member states of the International Civil Aviation Organization.
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