In this gripping essay, Judith Hannah Weiss recounts life before and after the traumatic brain injury she suffered after a drunk driver hit her parked car. Left with aphasia and amnesia—which instantly altered her life as a writer—she documents her long physical and cognitive recovery.
In my first life, I was a freelance writer. We ate my words at every meal and they paid the mortgage, too. Prolifically not myself, I wrote countless pieces of promotion for clients like New York, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, PBS, Disney, and Vogue. More a story seller than a storyteller, I was a tool like a broom or a mop. I wrote about places I didn’t go, and things I didn’t do, for legends I didn’t know.
Then a drunk driver stole a truck, jumped a curb, and compressed a parked car. I was in the car. The good news was I survived. The bad news was brain damage. It was an accident.
My first mind had furnishings. You know, nice chairs, a sofa, floor to ceiling shelves for beautiful things. It also had a foundation. My new mind tips in and out, devoid of furnishings. I was a mommy, I was a badass, then I was in pieces, invisible. An instantaneous dissolution of an entire culture, formerly between my ears. The brain that blew was mine.
Once I can use my hand, I start scratching any words I can find on any surface I can find – paper plates, paper cups, placemats, Popsicle sticks. Fragments not in alphabetical order, not in numerical order, not in chronological order, but out of order, like me.
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Bridget Read | Curbed | March 12, 2024 | 6,005 words
When I first started reading this piece, I wasn’t sure whether to be appalled or amazed. Last September, realtor John A. Woodward IV listed 1316 Beverly Grove Place for just under $5 million. When the pool guy asked whether the new owners might keep him on, Woodward knew something was up—no one had bought the house. Raucous parties complete with thumping bass were said to take place five nights a week. Jittery, glassy-eyed partygoers spotted in daylight signaled debauchery. Unsatisfied with a “suggested donation” as the price of admission, the cons started to rent out rooms in the mansion they didn’t own. LeBron James—who lives nearby—was among a growing number of concerned neighbors. Who was living at this Beverly Hills property? For Curbed, Bridget Read spins a cinematic story of deception and intrigue worthy of a blockbuster movie. This piece features multiple grifters experienced in a variety of scams, and Read does a terrific job unraveling the twisted tale for gobsmacked readers incredulous at the perpetrators’ audacity. “The latest accused fraudsters to take up residence were louder, more obvious, and more desperate than their predecessors,” she writes, “but the mansion had long been in the possession of people who got it by lying and stealing.” Let’s hope The House of Deception eventually comes to a movie theater near you. Maybe they can get Quentin Tarantino to direct. —KS
Oscar Schwartz | The Drift | March 12, 2024 | 6,077 words
When Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk was released last September, the response was as predictable as it was divided. Musk had bought Twitter more than a year into Isaacson’s reporting and writing process, completing his transformation into an ideological lightning rod—and all but guaranteeing that the book’s reception would simply be a microcosm of the fractured public opinion about Musk. But Oscar Schwartz’s fascinating Drift essay makes clear that that initial spate of discussion overlooked Isaacson’s own intellectual (d)evolution. Schwartz traces the biographer’s life not just through his book projects, but through his employment history, teasing out connections and creating a nuanced portrait. As Isaacson moved from Henry Kissinger to Benjamin Franklin to Albert Einstein, his CV evinced an increasingly blinkered neutrality and credulous techno-optimism; by the time he chronicled the life of Steve Jobs in 2011, he had perfected the art of conflating personal flaws with genius. That embrace of the founder myth suffuses Elon Musk, Schwartz’s analysis of which is both surgical and undeniable. (It also doesn’t happen until more than 4,000 words into the piece, making for some deliciously delayed gratification.) “Like Vasari to the house of Medici,” Schwartz writes, “Isaacson has tied his name to the house of Palo Alto. He is unable to unveil its darker truths without implicating himself.” Schwartz has no such ties and no such compunctions. And readers are better off because of it. —PR
Mosab Abu Toha | The New Yorker | February 24, 2024 | 2,259 words
Ninety-three percent of the population in Gaza, more than two million people, are experiencing “crisis,” “emergency,” or “catastrophe” levels of food security. This dire statistic sounds abstract and unemotional on paper, but in this heartbreaking essay, Mosab Abu Toha—who fled Gaza with his family in December—describes what that looks like for his loved ones who remain there, including his parents and brothers. Toha recounts speaking to his mother, looking weak and pale on his phone’s screen, who tells him she’s scouring the ground for edible plants—while military drones buzz in the background. He listens to his brother’s messages and reads updates about how hard it is to find food: how they’ve mixed bits of grain with rabbit, donkey, and pigeon feed; searched for sacks of flour in the rubble of their family’s destroyed home; paid $95 for a small plate of uncooked rice and raw beef; and, after his wife gave birth at a hospital while bombs fell around them, received just one syringe of milk before being asked to leave. Reading Toha’s piece, I’m reminded of a profile we published recently about a Palestinian American chef in Arkansas whose family has run a bakery in Gaza for over a century. While these two stories are very different, both explore the meaning of food in a time of war, and how families connect across borders through their memories around the table. Now in Egypt, Toha writes: “As I eat simple meals of chicken, rice, salad, and olives with my family, I think of the hunger in my homeland, and of all the people with whom I want to share my meals. I yearn to return to Gaza, sit at the kitchen table with my mother and father, and make tea for my sisters. I do not need to eat. I only want to look at them again.” —CLR
Sierra Bellows | The American Scholar | March 4, 2024 | 7,526 words
I know several New Yorkers, myself included, who have had a dream in which they find a secret door in their apartment leading to a large room they didn’t know they had access to. In the dream, the discovery of extra space in a notoriously cramped metropolis is euphoric, transformative. Sierra Bellows describes what to my mind is the equivalent experience for a nonfiction writer: finding a door that opens to reveal a trove of stories waiting to be told. The door in question was in the attic of the now-shuttered Willard Asylum for the Insane, and the trove was hundreds of suitcases that belonged to the institution’s patients. One held a vanity set; another held books; one contained only a toothpick. When Bellows learned about the suitcases, through photographs shot by Jon Crispin, she was struck by the mysteries and possibilities they contained. “Whereas I had previously imagined life in a psychiatric hospital to be filled with moments of high drama and suffering, I had not considered the quotidian aspects,” Bellow writes. “I wanted to see more. I wanted to know more about the lives of [the patients].” But her essay isn’t strictly an illumination of what she learned about the people institutionalized at Willard. It also wrestles with questions of privacy, agency, and historical memory. And it contains a passage about the human impulse to understand lived experiences other than our own that was so arresting I texted it to my husband before I’d finished reading the piece: “Someone told me once that sharing your life with a partner is consolation for only being allowed to live one life,” Bellows writes. “That when you know someone else intimately, when you participate in the daily joy and sadness that person feels, it is as close as you can come to living more than one life. It seems to me that we need that consolation many times over, in many forms.” —SD
Stuart Heritage | The Guardian | March 11, 2024 | 1,908 words
This year was my first time watching the Oscars live. Partly due to being in the same timezone, and partly—I’ll admit it—because I wanted to see Ryan Gosling sing “I’m Just Ken.” (It did not disappoint.) During the show’s many pans to the audience, I noticed the eye-popping frocks, the clapping dog, Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie sweetly holding hands, and, now and then, up above the glitzy auditorium, hints of faces peeking down from the ether of the mezzanines. A glimpse into the shadow world. Although vaguely surprised that the audience above the shiny people was so vast, my concentration whipped back to a naked John Cena. Stuart Heritage returned me to the heights with this delightful piece for The Guardian. Only the A-listers saw Al Pacino up close as he skipped all the nominees to quickly growl Oppenheimer for Best Picture. (He probably had to get back to that new baby.) Up above, it’s a whole different crowd. I am a sucker for a bit of irreverence, and I thoroughly enjoyed Heritage’s take on spending the Oscars with “the normal people.” In the mezzanines, Heritage joins other press members, crews from nominated departments, and friends and family of nominees. Initially, sitting beside a woman mindlessly scrolling through red carpet selfies, he is unimpressed by this version of the Oscars, but as he begins to recognize the groups of people championing particular films, his view shifts. For these people, the stakes are high. Heritage muses, “It might lack the star wattage of the lower levels, but there is something beautiful and human about going through it surrounded by people who are invested in the outcome.” This essay is a lovely reminder of the hugely collaborative effort behind the films, and what they mean to those who don’t make it to the floor of the Dolby Theatre. A reminder that made this my favorite piece of Oscar coverage. And don’t worry—Heritage doesn’t leave without a celebrity encounter (by getting in the wrong lift). I’ll let you read to find out who. —CW
Adam Rogers | Business Insider | March 3, 2024 | 2,922 words
“This is the story of the Theranos of marshmallows” is an undeniable line. Irresistible, even. So what if the parallels are tenuous? Adam Rogers’ tick-tock about the rise and fall of Smashmallow might lack the manipulation and villainy of Silicon Valley’s Potemkin startup, but the lesson at its core is the same: scale at your own risk. —PR
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Where is Kate Middleton and what the heck is really going on? For Nieman Lab, Ellie Hall dissects the oddities in how Kensington Palace PR and press outlets have handled Kate Middleton’s mysterious and ongoing absence from the public eye, complete with a detailed timeline of unfolding events.
Royal press offices rarely go on the record. As former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger noted in this great column that I reference all the time in my work, it’s “unusually difficult” to judge the reliability of royal reporting because “it is a world almost devoid of open or named sources.” You almost never see stories with direct attributions to royal spokespersons, which is one of the big reasons why this “Kate Middleton is missing” saga is so interesting. A Palace spokesperson has gone on the record three times — first in response to a Spanish media report that Kate was in a coma, then in response to the widespread social media speculation about her status, and then once again in response to William’s reaction to the social media speculation.
In this case, the lack of speculative tabloid coverage about Kate’s status is one of the things that people have found suspicious about the current situation. The historically nosy news outlets haven’t theorized about what specific type of surgery she had or the circumstances that led to her medical issue being discovered. Until the TMZ photo was published, there hadn’t been any stories about or photographs of the famously close Middleton family. There’s also a distinct dearth of the fluffy, low-stakes stories about the princess that you usually see in the tabloids (like “What Kate’s doing to relax” or “How Kate’s staying a hands-on mother during her recovery”).
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Susana Guerrero and Madilynee Medina explore Americana folklore with the tale of a ghost that supposedly haunts a San Francisco highway. While some fully believe in the spirit, others cite pranks as the source of the continuing story. With personal experiences to fall back on, Guerrero and Medina provide insight into the tall tales.
When an SFGATE reporter recently walked through the historic town of Niles, locals of all ages said they’d at least heard of the ghost story. Several also mentioned a teen who’d stood in the canyon wearing a white sheet. Carol Williamson, who was born in Niles and graduated from Irvington High School in 1964, told SFGATE that she’d heard of the prank as a kid — but that didn’t stop her and her friends from going out looking for the ghost girl.
“When we were in school … you know, everybody would get in their cars and you would just drive through the canyon and somebody would naturally scream and everybody would scream,” Williamson said. “I never saw anything, but you always wanted to.”
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Maya Binyam’s profile is ostensibly pegged to the release of James, Percival Everett’s latest novel, but the stars aligned in a wondrous bonus: at the Academy Awards the night before, Cord Jefferson won Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction, which stems from Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure. None of that bears even remotely on the profile itself, which is an exemplar of what can come when a very smart writer comes to the table with an encyclopedic knowledge of her very smart subject’s very smart work. There’s scenework, and there’s dialogue, but the real joy is how Binyam gets inside Everett by getting inside his prodigious output—teasing out his leanings and pressing him on them. She gets him; he gets her. It seems like a friendship in the making, and I sincerely hope that comes to pass.
When asked if an interpretation was his intention, Everett almost always says yes. He knows that his books depend on an audience to achieve significance, and he seems to encourage that dependence. In 2020, he published three versions of his novel “Telephone,” a move that he knew would emphasize the authority of his readers—and piss them off. (The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.) “He plays with the reader,” his longtime editor, Fiona McCrae, told me. “Part of his subject is our reaction to his work.”
Because Everett refuses to analyze his fiction, he is popularly regarded as a “difficult” author, a distinction he wears with pride. “I am a famously difficult interview,” he told me more than once. He acknowledges that he can be spacey when his interest isn’t held, and he often splices amusing non sequiturs into conversation. (“If you were going to be an animal, which animal would you be?” “Do you think there’s a Sasquatch?”) He believes that awards are “offensive,” and describes them as “invidious comparisons of works of art.” His books have won many. “I’ve never met somebody who gives less of a shit,” the director Cord Jefferson, who recently adapted “Erasure” into an Oscar-nominated film, “American Fiction,” told me.
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Apparently all you need is a fake piece of paper to start a new lease on life. For Curbed, Bridget Read reports on the serial scams of those connected to 1316 Beverly Grove Place in Beverly Hills, California, a mansion overrun by fraudsters determined to live the lifestyle of the rich and famous—even if they had to steal it.
“When John A. Woodward IV got the listing in September, the mansion was priced at $4.995 million. It was unfurnished, so Woodward had to borrow old photos from the former broker, but other than that, it was in good condition. He hired a pool guy and a landscaper to keep the place looking nice for tours. There were the usual showings, some offers. Then, a few weeks before he heard from the producer, Woodward got a call from the pool guy. Someone had pulled up with a U-Haul, he said. He assumed there was a new owner and was hoping they might consider keeping him on. Woodward raced over to Beverly Grove to see what he was talking about. When he got there, he found his clicker no longer opened the gate. His keys didn’t work in the front door, either. Someone had even ripped up and discarded his FOR SALE sign. When he realized he was locked out, Woodward called the police. Two beat cops showed up and went inside; when they came back out, they said the people in the mansion were claiming they had a lease. It was a civil matter now, and there was nothing they could do.”
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Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk was the latest and most controversial in his series of biographies, but it was also in many ways the apotheosis of Isaacson’s own evolution—or devolution, in Oscar Schwartz’s view. In this deeply satisfying critical essay in The Drift, Schwartz takes stock of Isaacson’s career both on and off the page, creating a compelling argument that mythologizing Musk has long been Isaacson’s inevitable destination.
With Franklin and Einstein, Isaacson was simply rearticulating the achievements of canonical geniuses in the vernacular of his time. Jobs represented a different challenge: because he was still alive, a case had to be made for his inclusion in Isaacson’s coterie of polymaths. Following some two years of reporting, Isaacson wrote a fluent narrative about Jobs that, at least superficially, depicted a man with two sides. Sometimes he is a brilliant, intense, eccentric creative with an uncompromising aesthetic vision. Jobs drops acid and travels to India. He takes a course in calligraphy and later uses what he learned there to help develop the Mac’s font range. He sees a Cuisinart food processor at Macy’s and has the idea to encase his computers in molded plastic. Other times, Isaacson shows Jobs as volatile and cruel. He gets his girlfriend pregnant, then denies it. He betrays old friends (including his Apple cofounder, the true engineering genius Steve Wozniak). He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. But whenever Jobs behaves badly or demands too much of his staff, or loses himself in perfectionistic pursuit of some detail, Isaacson demonstrates how the unwieldy parts of Jobs’s temperament allowed him to create world-changing products. The cruel and authoritarian impulses were established, in other words, as necessary components of his creativity. “His personality and passions and products were all interrelated,” Isaacson writes, “just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system.”
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