Since the rise of QAnon, much has been made of “conspirituality,” the alchemical process that turns new-age thinking into MAGA-inflected conspiracy theories. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a better analysis than Frederick Kaufman’s profile of Jacob Angeli-Chansley, better known as “the QAnon Shaman” from everyone’s favorite 2021 insurrection. By mapping Angeli-Chansley’s personal brew of beliefs to the (surprisingly woo) history of science, Kaufman teases out a discomfiting truth dating back to Isaac Newton himself.
With this intellectual lineage, conspiracy theorists are not about to back down from their truths, because their own scientific method possesses a historical claim as deeply entrenched as ours. And they have a point: their spooky correspondences, their spheres of influence, their invisible forces, their gravities and their magnetisms, their parsing of the invisible effluvia—without these, there never would have been any science at all. And that’s the reason reason has yet to dent the citadel of MAGA, and never will.
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In early 2020, at the start of the pandemic, people were bound by togetherness. We’ll get through these tough times. We’ll protect our vulnerable. But the world moved on. In this beautiful, reflective essay on mourning and loss, Lygia Navarro describes life with long COVID, becoming disabled, and being left behind.
When the forecast calls for the first snow, I make plans with a friend to meet at a nearby schoolyard for our kids to play, but, but we cannot even leave our driveway, as no one has shoveled the sidewalk. My wheels will not budge the snow. The only way to get across the street to the playground is to pick up my wheelchair and carry it over the ridge of slush at the edge of the road. This is too much for my body, but K is desperate to play. This is something tiny and beautiful I can do for my child right now, even if I’ll pay for it later.
During those months, I grieve all that has been taken from me: the enjoyment of my body, the friends of decades who have disappeared, my health, the chance to watch K experience a normal childhood. And I grieve for my family. Our lives are filled with indignity after indignity. My husband must wash my hair now, bring me food in bed. He is always dead tired and on the brink and we receive so little help. This fact alone leaves me aching.
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At-home DNA test kits like AncestryDNA and 23andMe reveal that children through incest are more common than we think. Sarah Zhang writes about Steve Edsel, a man in his 40s who discovered that he is the child of two first-degree relatives: a sister and her older brother. The piece is an emotional and challenging read on a sensitive topic—”one of the most universal and most deeply held taboos” across cultures. Zhang blends her reporting and current statistics with a very personal human story of discovery, truth, and belonging.
When Steve first discovered the truth about his biological parents, a decade ago, he had no support group to turn to, and he did not know what to do with the strange mix of emotions. He was genuinely happy to have found his birth mom. He had never looked like his adoptive parents, but in photos of her and her family, he could see his eyes, his chin, and even the smirky half-grin that his face naturally settles into.
But he radiated with newfound anger, too, on her behalf. He could not know the exact circumstances of his conception, and his DNA test alone could not determine whether her older brother or her father was responsible. But Steve could not imagine a consensual scenario, given her age. The bespectacled 14-year-old girl who disappeared from the hospital had remained frozen in time in his mind, even as he himself grew older, got married, became a stepdad. He felt protective of that young girl.
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In an epic feat of reporting and storytelling*, a team of Boston Globe journalists examines the legacy of one of Beantown’s most infamous crimes: the 1989 shooting of Charles and Carol Stuart. Carol, who was pregnant, died of a gunshot wound to the head; her baby was delivered via emergency c-section and lived only a few days. Charles survived a bullet to the back and claimed that a Black man had attacked him and his wife, setting of a racist manhunt across Boston. But Charles was the person behind the crime, and as this project reveals, he may not have acted alone or pulled the trigger. Certainly, other people were complicit in keeping his secret—nearly three dozen, in fact:
The story of the Stuart case holds that much of the world was shocked when the truth came out that Chuck was the real killer.
On Boston’s North Shore, it was old news.
The Globe found—through an analysis based on police files, grand jury testimony, recorded phone calls, and more—that at least 33 people knew the truth by the time Matthew went to police with his story on Jan. 3, 1990.
Thirty-three people knew that—as Matthew Stuart said to Michael Stuart three days after the murder—“There’s no Black person that did this.”
And yet, almost every one of those people stayed quiet, even as Chuck identified in a lineup a man they knew to be innocent.
Much like the rumor about Willie Bennett shared by a few teens in a Mission Hill smoke session, this, too, was a perverse game of telephone. Siblings told friends, who told friends, who kept it secret.
In Mission Hill, an 18-year-old Black man told his mother, who told a detective.
But in Revere, a type of omerta took hold among some Stuarts, their friends, and friends of friends. They talked—just not to police.
The Stuart case is not just a story about institutional failures by police, politicians, and the media. It is a story about the failures of regular people, too. People who believed themselves to be good and moral and decent who watched something terrible happen and did nothing.
The Globe reached out to every person who knew the truth before the police. None of them agreed to speak.
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This is a beautiful essay on family and aging, told through a bike passed down through generations. Ian Treloar explores the history of his family with respect and self-awareness. A reminder to honor your family treasures, and where they came from.
I guess I always had some distant awareness of the fact that the red bike was a part of family history stretching further back than my period of guardianship, but I was too caught up in the everyday to really engage with that story. There was Life Stuff to deal with: big things like relationships, work, family, as well as all the little things we get hung up on, thinking they’re big things. Covid-19 was a kind of a reset, though. More time at home with the kids. A more poignant relationship with my older relatives, particularly my Grandma over in South Australia, who I used to see a couple of times a year but who I now hadn’t seen for two years. And the whole time, growing increasingly dusty and rusty, the red bike and the secrets it held lay waiting under my parents’ floorboards.
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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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