The Darkness That Blew My Mind

Tim Neville encounters himself in this piece—after immersing himself in darkness for a few days. His thought processes (and hallucinations) during this sensory deprivation are fascinating, and Neville does not hold back in sharing the places his mind takes him to.

At first the visions are fun, because they seem so real. I blink a dozen times to confirm that the room has indeed become a limestone cave illuminated by beams that shoot from my eyes. And the darkness is no longer monolithic, but swirls with shades of black and a parade of textures. Meanwhile, my proprioceptive senses have gone haywire. I take a bath, and when the water cools I can see my foot reach up to find the hot-water faucet handle. I can’t see any detail. My foot just looks like a darker, smoother patch of darkness, but there’s no mistaking that it’s there.

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Is It Even Possible to Become More Productive?

Deep work. Flow states. We’re awash in the language and concepts of “productivity,” all seemingly calibrated to help us escape digital distraction and answer the question of how to be more effective. But for someone like Esquire editor (and Longreads alum) Kelly Stout, who used to literally fantasize about having more work to do, immersing yourself in self-maximization raises some questions of its own.

The main question of my day, every day, was: How can I get myself into a flow state? I would sometimes overshoot the mark and get myself flowing on flow itself, leaving not much for the actual work. On Newport’s advice in Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, I planned out every minute of my day on a sheet of graph paper, dividing the day into optimistically labeled chunks. The joy I felt when I could actually produce was overwhelming yet relaxing. I felt like a hybrid vehicle at a stop sign: silent, sustainable, efficient, morally correct. But I despaired when, instead of using the designated hours for “deep work,” I used them to look at photos of my dog on my phone from when she was a puppy or write an email about a contract. I felt like a third grader telling the teacher his favorite subject was recess when I filled in “lunch!” at 12:30.

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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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