People embrace extremity for all kinds of reasons. Aimee Levitt ended up in the Antarctic because, as she tells us, she was angry. Angry at her job situation, angry at what her life had become, angry at herself for letting things get this way. So: extremity. Buffeted by cold and wind, yet buffered from a world that was lurching toward a pandemic. No easy resolutions here, though—just a plainspoken excavation of the interior journey that goes along with a physical one.
I went home and Googled. It turns out there are a lot of ways you can go dogsledding. You can go for an afternoon, or for a couple of days. You can stay in a nice, warm cabin or at a lodge where they give you elaborate meals and hot chocolate spiked with whiskey when you come back from your afternoon with the dogs (you could probably get that in a flask for the sled, too). You can get a full spa treatment, with massages. For some reason, I rejected all of these. I’m not sure why. I think I was still thinking of the two women sleeping in a tent they had hauled from Istanbul to Tibet on the back of a bicycle. Real adventure is hard.
And that was how I landed on Outward Bound. I read the website very carefully. I wasn’t quite sure it would make me into a true adventurer or even a better, more confident person, but there were dogs. They also said no one had ever died on one of their expeditions. I was sold.
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More than a thousand children injured in Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza are now amputees. What do their futures hold? In a heartbreaking dispatch, Eliza Griswold meets some of the children and some of the people treating them, including doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who spent 43 days in Gaza performing surgeries:
To mark the gravity of these procedures, and to mourn, Abu-Sittah and other medical staff placed the severed limbs of children in small cardboard boxes. They labelled the boxes with masking tape, on which they wrote a name and body part, and buried them. At the pub, he showed me a photograph he’d taken of one such box, which read, “Salahadin, Foot.” Some wounded children were too young to know their own names, he added, telling the story of an amputee who’d been pulled from rubble as the sole survivor of an attack.
The number of child amputees carries long-term implications, Abu-Sittah told me, listing his concerns. Israeli forces destroyed Gaza’s only facility for manufacturing prosthetics and rehabilitation, the Hamad hospital, which was inaugurated in 2019 and funded by Qatar. The leading manufacturer of child prosthetics, the German company Ottobock, is working to supply the necessary components to children up to the age of sixteen, with donors in place to fund the project through its foundation. Procuring prosthetics, however, is only the first step. “Child amputees need medical care every six months as they grow,” Abu-Sittah said. Because bone grows faster than soft tissue and severed nerves often reattach painfully to skin, child amputees require ongoing surgical interventions. In his experience, each limb requires eight to twelve more surgeries. To track this cohort, Abu-Sittah is consulting with the Centre for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College London and the Global Health Institute at the American University of Beirut; their goal is to create a cloud-based database of medical records that can follow these kids wherever they go. For the rest of their lives, these amputees will need answers regarding their medical history. Abu-Sittah knows how this works: for years, as a pediatric trauma surgeon, he’s fielded calls from his former patients.
Abu-Sittah, who’d recently travelled to Qatar to consult, recalled meeting a fourteen-year-old boy who’d lost his leg after being trapped under rubble. He’d spent a day beneath the debris holding the hand of his dead mother. “These are vulnerable people in the midst of the storm,” he said.
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In November 2018, the town of Paradise was devastated by the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history. Five years after they first visited Paradise in the wake of that apocalypse, J. Matt went back to take the measure of the town’s rebirth, and to consider what the Camp Fire continues to mean for those living in the WUI (wildland-urban interface). There’s much to mourn here, but there’s also hope for how we might fare in the face over ever-increasing wildfire risk—and the solace we might find in one another.
The first flowers to bloom in Paradise after the Camp Fire were daffodils, a North African species widely hybridized. True: these flowers are not native to this place in the Sierras, any more than contemporary Paradesians are. But the town is returning here, perhaps even blooming, because it is a place: a community with a history. It is a town being rebuilt on the ashes of catastrophic failure. It may not work. Nobody I spoke with saw self-sustaining tax bases and reliable economies as faits accomplis. The lessons of Paradise are incomplete, as are revisions to the ways we live, everywhere, in the face of global warming. Our history of living on earth is proving to be not-great. But it is the history we have, the one we must carry into the futures we make for ourselves.
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Rose Hackman was just 14 when she started seeing 22-year-old Fred. In this powerful piece, she impressively shows the relationship through her eyes now, and those of her younger, more naive, self. As an adult, it is easy to see coercion. As a vulnerable child, it is not.
Fred became a part of my adolescent routine, and a respectable-presenting one at that. He stayed up to date on the news and routinely impressed people with facts of the day. After finishing his thesis and graduating college, he got his first job in finance. He always showed up to the front door impeccably dressed – more often than not in a piece of clothing featuring the print of a polo player. He helped improve my basketball shot and eventually took over coaching my team. His close friends accepted me – some of them I truly adored.
His carefully maintained facade did little to quell regular, private sadistic outbursts. He had a love for fast, drunk driving that ramped up the more frightened I became. I can still hear him laughing as he swerved the corner, descending the hill towards the square I lived off, me begging him to slow down. “Is this better?” he would inquire, foot pressing on the accelerator pedal.
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• A secretive organization’s questionable practices.
• The unknown truth behind a 35-year-old crime.
• Conspirituality’s long historical trajectory.
• Long COVID: overt costs and hidden tolls.
• Recovering a life of words after brain injury.
Antonia Cundy | Financial Times | March 16, 2024 | 7,704 words
Teena, Anne Marie, Monica: the three former Opus Dei assistant numeraries at the heart of Antonia Cundy’s investigation are the first women to speak publicly about their treatment in the Western world. Their stories are not unique; Cundy interviewed 40 former and current Opus Dei members for this piece, just part of her meticulous research into the decades of exploitation carried out by this Catholic organization, a fictionally heightened version of which many learned first about through The Da Vinci Code. Her case studies are now in their 50s and 60s, but as girls, they gave their lives to Opus Dei as domestic workers, part of an army of free labor used to prop up the powerful institution. It may not be Dan Brown, but Cundy still hints at mysterious dealings (such as how Opus Dei’s massive London headquarters near Kensington Palace are owned by the Netherhall Educational Association, whose trustees are all Opus Dei members, despite no reference in the name). However, the primary focus here remains the women behind the scenes who have kept operations running through the mundane of cooking and cleaning, and woven among their narratives is Opus Dei’s history as young conscriptees learn it themselves—a well-honed piece of indoctrination. Domestic work may now be shared, but as Cundy writes, it was only in 2021 that “Monica and 42 other former assistant numeraries from Latin America accused Opus Dei of enslavement in Argentina.” The shield of mystery around Opus Dei still needs to be fully removed. May investigations like this one keep chipping away. —CW
Adrian Walker, Evan Allen, Elizabeth Koh, Andrew Ryan, Kristin Nelson, and Brendan McCarthy | The Boston Globe | December 1, 2023 | 30,259 words
As the word count indicates, this project is an epic feat of storytelling. Told in nine parts, it examines one of the most notorious crimes in Boston history. In 1989, Charles Stuart claimed that a Black man had shot him and his pregnant wife, Carol, spurring a racist manhunt that terrorized and ensnared innocent people. Stuart himself was behind the crime, which took the lives of Carol and her baby. If you’ve heard of the case, you probably already know that. What you might not know is that there was evidence pointing to Stuart’s guilt that police ignored. “No one considered the simple fact that the leading cause of death for pregnant women in America is murder,” this story notes. “A pregnant woman is more likely to be killed by the father of her child than she is to die from anything related to her pregnancy.” Most galling of all, the story reveals that there were at least 33 people in a “sprawling whisper network” who knew Stuart was lying and said nothing, including two pallbearers at Carol’s funeral. “Chuck didn’t pull off his racist hoax alone,” the authors write. “He had everyone’s help.” There’s so much to admire about this project, from the pacing to the depth of research to the introspection about the role The Boston Globe played in the injustice. It integrates a stunning number of perspectives, including that of DonJuan Moses, who was 11 when the shooting happened. Through Moses’s eyes—indeed, through his whole body—readers experience the police bursting into his home to detain his cousin on suspicion that he was the shooter. You can feel the “low thunder” of the cops’ approaching footsteps and the sudden clang of discordant notes ringing out when Moses, backing away from the police, crashes into a piano. Thirty-five years later, Moses keeps a dashcam in his car in case he encounters cops. Trauma is one of the enduring legacies of the Stuart case, and Moses is one of the people who has “never managed to get free.” I’m grateful to know his story. —SD
Frederick Kaufman | Harper’s Magazine | March 18, 2024 | 5,928 words
The January 6 insurrection didn’t expose anything that hadn’t been simmering for years. QAnon had long ago turned the disaffected and gullible into a mob of self-exalting “patriots.” “Do your own research” had already been the mantra of people whose critical thinking skills crumbled in the face of a Facebook meme. And as Frederick Kaufman makes clear in his searching Harper’s profile, Jacob Angeli-Chansley was just the latest in a long line of people who confused magical thinking with a hidden truth. You remember Angeli-Chansley even if the name doesn’t ring a bell; he was “QAnon Shaman,” the shirtless guy in horns and fur walking through the US Capitol like a new-age Fabio that day in 2021. Connecting with Angeli-Chansley after his prison bid, Kaufman maps their conversations (and JAC’s conspiratorial worldview) against history and science in surprising and illuminating ways. Fascinations with Norse mythology and Carl Jung sparks parallels with German volkisch movements and the history of JAC’s home state of Arizona; tossed-off references to “quantum particles” lead to a fascinating section on Wolfgang Pauli, a quantum pioneer but also one of Jung’s most famous patients. Even Isaac Newton makes an appearance—not for his laws of motion, but for his obsessions with alchemy and numerology. The occult has fascinated people for centuries because it’s intrinsically fascinating, regardless of how rational a society’s intellectual temperature or identity might be. As Kaufman writes, “The age of Locke and Voltaire is littered with victims of poison, electrocution, and asphyxiation.” Anyone writing about a man like Jacob Angeli-Chansley may be tempted by ridicule, but that’s not Kaufman’s tack. Instead, he delivers an analysis of conspirituality that’s as well-reasoned as it is memorable, and serves a valuable reminder: you don’t profile to condemn, nor to forgive. You profile to understand. —PR
Lygia Navarro | Switchyard | January 8, 2024 | 6,110 words
Lygia Navarro’s essay on long-hauler life was published in January, which was the first time I got COVID. I caught it from a relative who went to our Christmas gathering knowing that their spouse—my uncle—was sick, but decided to go to the party anyway, mum and maskless. When I decided to isolate from my husband and daughter in a nearby Airbnb, some people found that odd and excessive. So here we are, entering year four of the After Times. People have long moved on. “In 2020, we heard that the pandemic’s silver lining would be all the inequalities it had highlighted; at the dawn of 2024, it’s clear those inequalities are just as entrenched, or worse, than before,” writes Navarro. At first, we were all bound by togetherness. We would protect the vulnerable among us. But “[w]hat long-haulers are now living through, social justice and disability-rights activists remind us, is the American landscape as it has always been.” I found myself immersed in Navarro’s recollections of 2020, her quiet lockdown experience similar to my own family’s quarantine at our former wine-country home, where I spent the days chasing my toddler in our half-acre garden. But our paths quickly diverge from there. Likely asymptomatic when her child had a probable COVID infection that first spring, Navarro started to experience symptoms eight months later, including fatigue and brain fog, and was eventually diagnosed with POTS, a heart condition that can dramatically change the way people navigate day-to-day life. “I would remember 2022 as the summer when people stopped caring,” she writes, reflecting on others’ dismissal of her symptoms and the lack of help, and the realization that she was now disabled. Navarro mourns for things that once were, like her body and ability to participate fully in her offspring’s childhood, but makes clear that what she grieves the most is her lost faith in humanity. “Bodies like mine, lives like mine are the future,” she writes. But this is a truth that most have chosen to ignore. —CLR
Judith Hannah Weiss | Salmagundi Magazine | June 5, 2023 | 5,936 words
Back in 2006, Judith Hannah Weiss suffered a serious brain injury after a drunk driver crushed her parked car. Before the accident, language had been her livelihood—clients paid her to create clarity. She wrote for big-name glossy magazines and was set to ghostwrite a book for a famous doctor. After it, plagued by aphasia and amnesia, she had to relearn to speak and write, tallying the accident’s toll in the words and memories it instantly obliterated and in relationships forever altered. In this cogent essay she does the impossible: convey what it’s like to live with a brain recovering from trauma. “Imagine you are trying to speak and no one can understand you. That’s what it’s like to live with aphasia. Imagine you are with other people and you can’t understand them. That’s what it’s like, too,” she writes. “Like twenty words are twenty kids playing twenty different sports at the same time, in the same space, in my skull.” Over time as she relearns to walk, speak, and write, Weiss becomes “we,” an amalgam of her pre- and post-accident selves. Once the writer who met with famous clients, she is also the woman who has worked hard to navigate life with brain damage—proving that we as humans are always far more than the sum total of what we have lost. —KS
Sarah Zhang | The Atlantic | March 18, 2024 | 2,827 words
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. —CLR
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In 2017, Thailand tried to stop the aggressive advertising for baby formulas and toddler milks, as officials wanted to instead encourage breastfeeding. But with the help of the US government, formula manufacturers like Mead Johnson and Abbott fought back. As a result, more than 1 in 10 Thai children under 5 now struggle with malnutrition and obesity. In this infuriating investigation, Heather Vogell reveals how the US government has worked with billion-dollar corporations over the decades to thwart efforts from 17 jurisdictions around the world, many of them developing countries, to restrict formula marketing.
The next year, Sumet and Jintana celebrated the birth of their second child, Gustun. As she had with her firstborn, Jintana breastfed Gustun until he was 3 months old, then started him on formula so she could go back to work.
The couple diligently followed the “stages” prescribed by Dumex, which came in a cheery red package: Stage 1 formula when Gustun was an infant, Stage 2 when he was an older baby and Stage 3 when he became a toddler. He craved formula, and his parents, believing it was healthy, always gave him more. By the time he was 3, he reached his peak weight of about 66 pounds — the same as an average 9-year-old. He was drinking six or seven bottles a day, each holding about 12 ounces of toddler milk.
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As freshly minted adults in Bangalore with a bit of cash to spare, we bought books. We rooted among the used piles at Blossom Book House by day, haunted Petromax-lit roadside tarp shops by night, and scoured the infant internet for information by dial-up. I came upon a 1942 essay by Borges. He said, of a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge: “In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.”
A difficult and delightful outsider finally vindicated my love for lists. I was smitten.
We are not new to lists in the East. We are quite big on them, in fact. Take a look at how the Bhagavad-Gītā, the most intense part of the great Indian epic Mahābhārata, opens:
The battlefield of Kurukṣetra. It is the war to end all wars. The Pāṇḍava and the Kaurava armies are arrayed for battle, warrior after legendary warrior, each named, each terribly prepared. Sañjaya, a minister temporarily granted clairvoyance, has been tasked with giving Dhṛtarāṣṭra, the blind Kaurava king, a blow-by-blow narration. On the Kaurava side, the grand patriarch Bhīṣma blows his tremendous conch, roaring like a lion, setting off horns and trumpets, cymbals and drums, heralding what is to come. On the Pāṇḍava side, Kṛṣṇa blows his conch Pāñcajanya, and the five brothers theirs, Arjuna, his Devadatta, Yudhiṣṭhira, his Anantavijaya, Bhīma, his mighty Pauṇḍra, and Nakula and Sahadeva, their Sughoṣa and Maṇipuṣpaka. Thundering across earth and sky, the great sound shatters the hearts of the hundred sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra. A list. And the epic, which has all of life and then some, is strewn with lists. The form accomplishes a lot with a little. It builds scenes layer by layer. It accretes, elevates, and expands feeling—thrilling awe and power here; fear, futility, and despondency there, joy and victory elsewhere. It permits story after story to get in through osmosis, establishing epic architecture in the mind, until you have always known it, until you have never not known it. “No Indian ever hears the Mahabharata for the first time,” said A.K. Ramanujan, a noted poet and scholar.
Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, Eight Chapters, the foundational text of Sanskrit grammar that has influenced all of linguistics and computer programming, is a list. Patañjali’s famous Yoga Sūtras are a list. The sūtra form, like a bead on a string, is the basic unit of the list. The Buddha himself was a list-maker extraordinaire. Take a look at this doorstop of a book. The form works.
We all make lists, if only to buy bread and milk. But we tend to forget how mythic and subversive (as we have just seen), joyful and maddening, enchanting and sobering, and utterly chilling lists can be—and what they can do. To love a list is to partake in letter and word, form and change. To make lists is to join a long line of list makers, to indulge in a timeless art, to break down the artificial wall that separates thinking and doing, thinkers and doers.
List making to comprehend infinity and ensure immortality! This interview succeeds in putting a spotlight on the list form by probing the mind and work of one of its most radical and vocal lovers. For Eco—a philosopher, semiotician, and novelist, whose own work teems with lists—the list is the creator, curator, and arbiter of culture, and by extension, civilization. He points out how Homer, in attempting to convey the size of the Greek army in The Iliad, “cannot find the right metaphor, and so he begs the muses to help him. Then he hits upon the idea of naming many, many generals and their ships.” As we saw earlier, the infinitely ambitious Mahābhārata, seven times longer than The Iliad and The Odyssey combined, uses the same technique to express the inexpressible.
The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order—not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists—the shopping list, the will, the menu—that are also cultural achievements in their own right.
This informative essay presents the list as “one of humanity’s oldest writing systems.” There are older oral (and enumerative) traditions across the world, but the written word seems to have originated with Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, China, and Egypt—particularly the Mesopotamian civilization of Sumer, through which the essay takes a gentle stroll. The earliest uses of the list were lexical and administrative. Nonetheless, all that naming, counting, and cataloging fed our big brains. Eco concurs, in a manner reminiscent of facet analysis, “The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions. The essential definition is primitive compared with the list.” Let’s hope the palate-sticking ickiness of the word “listicle” is no measure of our alleged advancement.
Lists may not seem like cognitive dynamite, but their proliferation appears to have helped develop new modes of thought in early societies, encouraging us to think analytically about the world. “The list relies on discontinuity rather than continuity,” writes anthropologist Jack Goody. “[I]t encourages the ordering of the items, by number, by initial sound, by category, etc. And the existence of boundaries, external and internal, brings greater visibility to categories, at the same time as making them more abstract.
As Goody argues, the process of constructing a thematic list “leads to increments of knowledge, to the organization of experience.” It is a precursor to organized philosophical systems, and, eventually, to science.
Eco’s book, The Infinity of Lists, is always drawn upon in the matter of lists because it is vast and voluble on the subject. But as Gralla rightly notes, where are the women? And I must add, where is the other half of the world? It only covers the West. I suppose half of infinity is still infinity. Literature loves lists, and there is a lot of ground to cover. This delicate essay notes, “one of the archaic definitions of list is ‘to like, wish, choose,’ a cognate to the German gelüsten, ‘to desire or lust.’” “Lists are lusts itemized,” the author says, traversing a terrain dotted with Japanese court literature, French erotica, and contemporary poetry, fiction, and memoir, exploring and questioning their female authors and protagonists and their various desires and preoccupations.
Truth be told, literary lists catalog desire in all forms. One of the most famous examples is Casanova’s The Story of My Life, a compendium of conquests strained through the male gaze. In such a text, lists can amount to a fragmentation of the (usually female) body of the beloved— an additional, twisted conquest to complement the one made off the page.
Are women’s literary lists intrinsically different from men’s? It’s tempting to see them as a part of a larger effort by female authors over the centuries to claim agency through fragments like diary entries or letters. Unlike a collection, which subsumes parts in a whole, a list yearns with each entry, honoring its disparate items. In the case of many female lit listers, their catalogs desire to transform both author and readers through that longing.
In 1960 France, Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais formed the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), better known as the Oulipo, with the stated aim of using rules and constraints, often mathematical, in literature. A list, as a form, is a fruitful constraint. Italo Calvino, a member of the Oulipo, put it to beautiful use in Invisible Cities and in If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, “I should now list the wares that can profitably be bought here [in Anastasia]: agate, onyx, chrysoprase, and other varieties of chalcedony …. ” But it was Georges Perec who took the “love of taxonomy to its blazing reductio” with Life: A User’s Manual. Mapping a 10 x 10 chessboard to each cell of which was attached a series of lists, or “schedule of obligations,” onto the elevation of a Parisian townhouse, he made a “Knight’s Tour” of movements, which then became the novel. This sharp essay dissects his cataloging mind.
… Perec remained true to his favourite themes of classifying and schematising places and objects (such as alternative methods for the ‘art and manner of arranging one’s books’) – and he compiled lists. These ranged from a catalogue of all the different beds in which he had slept, to a detailed description of the evolution of the Rue Vilin over a 12 year period, and his notorious Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four (1976) – ‘one thrush paté… fourteen cucumber salads… seven pigs’ trotters… one chicken kebab… two guava sorbets… one Saint-Emilion ’61… four Guinness’. Another member of the Oulipo, Claude Berge, had proposed that a novel could be built around a theoretical mathematical structure known as a ten by ten Graeco-Latin bi-square, and Perec realised that by using this structure as a reference to a series of lists, such a novel would almost write itself.
In this essay, which grew into the beautiful book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Gawande, surgeon and MacArthur Fellow, offers a thoughtful meditation on a simple idea for a complex world—the checklist. Drawing examples from fields of great complexity, such as flying advanced aircraft and providing critical care for trauma patients, where the total volume of knowledge far surpasses any individual’s capacity for retention and flawless retrieval, the author observes what a simple, unassuming tool might be able to accomplish. The willingness to use checklists, he suggests, is a welcome admission of human fallibility and a step toward addressing it.
We have the means to make some of the most complex and dangerous work we do—in surgery, emergency care, and I.C.U. medicine—more effective than we ever thought possible. But the prospect pushes against the traditional culture of medicine, with its central belief that in situations of high risk and complexity what you want is a kind of expert audacity—the right stuff, again. Checklists and standard operating procedures feel like exactly the opposite, and that’s what rankles many people.
It’s ludicrous, though, to suppose that checklists are going to do away with the need for courage, wits, and improvisation. The body is too intricate and individual for that: good medicine will not be able to dispense with expert audacity. Yet it should also be ready to accept the virtues of regimentation.
Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India. She like lists.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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