Club Med

Colleges and graduate schools. Creative industries. Wall Street. Silicon Valley. Adderall is everywhere*, prescribed and taken by millions of people—some of them the thinkers who have advanced modern society, the visionaries who have created the art and entertainment we consume, the minds who have built the internet to which many of us are addicted. The nine dispatches in this Pioneer Works series (by Daniel Kolitz, Geoffrey Mak, Danielle Carr, Leon Dische Becker, Amber A’Lee Frost, P.E. Moskowitz, Joshua Tempelhof, Elena Comay del Junco, and Kendall Waldman) offer a glimpse into amphetamine culture. What is it like? Why is it so hard to quit? How did we get here? Taken together, they’re a fascinating collection of perspectives on the topic and show the lasting effects of the drug on multiple generations.

*Yes, there’s been an Adderall shortage, which is addressed in a number of these pieces.

On Adderall, I can’t tolerate music unless it’s excellent. I hear it all. Hi-hats pattering like fingernails tapping on glass. The terrifying serenity of a kick drum tuned to a minor key.

Geoffrey Mak

The trouble with taking Adderall for your Instagram addiction is that, neurochemically, amphetamines hook you deeper into the endless scroll. You can’t fix the Internet attention economy crisis with Adderall, because the Internet was made by people on Adderall, for people on Adderall. The more Adderall you take, the better the whole thing gets (by “better” I mean “worse”).

Danielle Carr

Given too much room to roam, an Adderall article or essay can become overly ambitious, wandering and sprawling out into a totally unreadable (and unpublishable) manifesto that usually ends up foundering under the weight of overload. Adderall might help you annex Poland, but you’re not gonna take Russia in winter.

Amber A’Lee Frost

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Endo Days

Endometriosis, a painful condition in which endometrial tissue grows outside the uterus, is poorly understood and hard to diagnose. In this piece for The Baffler, Jess McAllen describes what it’s like to navigate the confusing and toxic online world of endo care, especially the (mis)information found in community forums and the content shared by social media-savvy surgeon-influencers.

All told, the average time from onset of symptoms to a confirmed diagnosis is over seven years.

Seven years is a long time. In the absence of clarity or relief, what’s a patient in pain to do? Recently, a cottage industry operating mostly on social media has sprung up to address this longstanding lack, offering advice and services to thousands of sufferers who turn to the internet for answers. On Facebook, there is Nancy’s Nook, a two-hundred-thousand-member private group run by a retired nurse named Nancy Petersen—the “Nancy” referred to in the Endometriosis Summit video—who maintains an elite list of personally vetted “Nook surgeons.” Then there are the surgeons themselves, who sometimes comment on Facebook support pages, or, like Vidali, entice people via Instagram. Many of these self-identified “endo specialists” are out-of-network, which means the cost of their procedures is often out-of-pocket, without a guarantee of diagnosis. Or of relief: the recurrence rate of endo tissue after surgery can be as high as 67 percent, yet some surgeons promote their operations as a panacea in jaunty posts and videos. The incentives of social media have collided with the complexity of endometriosis to create an environment rife with false promises and conflicting information.

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The Hotel Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave

Mickey Barreto, a man who’d checked into room 2565 of the New Yorker Hotel for one night, was able to claim ownership of the entire building using an obscure New York housing law. How did he do it? Matthew Haag explains in this bonkers story.

While the lawyer scrambled to file a lawsuit to revert ownership of the hotel, Mr. Barreto sent off an email to Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, which manages the property, notifying it that he now owned it. A Wyndham representative asked for a litany of legal and sales documents to be sent as proof. (They were not.)

Mr. Barreto also sent a memo to M&T Bank, the hotel’s lender, and asked for all accounts to be put into his name. (They were not.)

Next, Mr. Barreto walked into the Tick Tock Diner, which is connected to the lobby by double doors. He dropped off a letter addressed to the owners. Monthly rent checks, he wrote, should be sent to a new address: Room 2565.

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The Hero

The November 2022 shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs claimed five lives. If it weren’t for Rich Fierro, an Army veteran who helped subdue the shooter, more people might have died. Fierro has been widely lauded for his bravery, but as Dan Zak finds in this moving profile, being a hero is complicated. Fierro’s wife and daughter, Jess and Kassy, survived the shooting, but his future son-in-law did not:

Rich was scared to talk to Kassy about it. Her loss showed Rich a version of his life that was impossible to contemplate: What if he had lost Jess when he was 22? He believed that he relied more on Jess’s strength than she ever had on his. Where would he be now, without her?

Here’s your story: the Green Beret coming home, and his wife jumps in his arms …

Jess had repressed so much feeling over the years, when Rich was deployed, to stay focused on the mission: keeping the family together. But now those emotions were erupting, and it felt as if everything could come apart. At one point, months after the shooting, Jess went to urgent care because she thought she was having a heart attack. Her blood pressure tripled in a matter of minutes. It was a panic attack.

But now his wife has been through the same thing …

Rich already had an understanding of his own trauma responses, and an established support system of government services and fellow military veterans. Jess and Kassy did not.

At the gala in New York—where strangers toasted his valor and Jess called him a farce—Rich would offer a diagnosis of the Fierros’ new reality after a long night of drinking: “How about a whole family with PTSD?”

How do you survive that?

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Fire. Dog. Life. Ice

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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The Children Who Lost Limbs In Gaza

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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Paradise Redux

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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