An Italian woman named Antonietta spent her last years in a care home, with no visits from anyone that knew her. But she was not friendless. So why was no one in her community informed of her whereabouts? A heart-wrenching story of a woman, quite literally, lost in the system.
But those feelings soon gave way to sadness and bewilderment. Antonietta always wore her dentures in public, her friends said. She took pride in her appearance. Why didn’t she have her teeth at the senior home?
And why had her friends and neighbours been left in the dark about where she was?
“It was cruel,” said Eileen, adding Antonietta might have still recognized her, or just have been happy that someone came to see her.
“Everybody needs a visitor. Everybody needs a friend.”
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Danielle Elliot gives a brutally honest account of her battle to conceive in this fascinating piece for The Guardian. With vials of sperm selling like hotcakes, the road to finding the right donor is an arduous one.
The pandemic added unforeseen pressure. With lockdowns and contact-tracing requirements, it became hard to recruit donors. California Cryobank raised prices in 2021 in an effort to slow sales, as they feared running out entirely. Brian Hyde, its director of sales, told me last year that one donor’s 30 vials had sold in 30 seconds. “There was a three-month hiatus, March, April, May of 2020 where we were selling next to nothing and then from June until November it was insane. It was crazy. Being here and being part of it, it was crazy. We were selling more vials than I’ve ever seen before … If sales didn’t slow down we would have run out of donors to sell.” California Cryobank had more than 550 donors available when the pandemic started; by December 2021, the number had dropped to about 200. Hyde said that in January the company had added more vials than it sold for the first time in three years.
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Grand Marais is a quiet outpost on Lake Superior’s North Shore, set among boreal forest in the easternmost corner of Minnesota. The town of roughly 1,300 is home to a mix of artists and outdoor enthusiasts, working-class people and professionals, liberals and diehard Trump supporters. In the summer, Grand Marais’s art galleries, shops, and restaurants swell with tourists drawn to what the website Budget Travel once dubbed “America’s Coolest Small Town.” The wait for a table at the Angry Trout Café, which serves locally sourced cuisine in an old fishing shanty, can run to more than an hour. When summer is over, the town retreats into itself again, which suits full-time residents just fine. “Even though we’re a tourism economy, most of us live a life where we just don’t want to be bothered,” said Steve Fernlund, who published the Cook County News Herald in the 1990s and now writes a weekly column for The North Shore Journal. “I’m at the end of a road, and I’ve got 12 acres of land. My closest neighbors are probably about 600 feet away through the woods. So, you know, we appreciate being hermits.”
Content warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of the sexual abuse of children.
Yet privacy only extends so far here. Gossip travels fast while having breakfast at the South of the Border café, or in chance encounters along Wisconsin Street. Everybody knows everybody else’s business—or thinks they do. “Even though there are differences of opinion—we have an eclectic collection of opinions—this is a close-knit community,” said Dennis Waldrop, who manages the Cook County Historical Museum. “Anything that happens here is discussed extensively.”
The residents of Grand Marais have had a lot to discuss in recent years. A suspicious fire that destroyed the historic Lutsen Lodge. The suicide of their neighbor Mark Pavelich, a star on the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that defeated the Soviet Union. Plans for the 40 acres near town owned by convicted sex offender Warren Jeff’s fundamentalist clan. All those events stirred plenty of talk.
But nothing has captivated local conversation quite like what happened between Larry Scully and Levi Axtell in March 2023. A shocking act of violence attracted international attention and split the town over questions of truth and justice. Grand Marais is still trying to piece itself back together.
Every small town has its cast of offbeat characters. Larry Scully was one of Grand Marais’s. Larry, who was 77 in 2023, dwelled on the fringe of town, where Fifth Street meets Highway 61, and on the fringe of reality. His two-bedroom house, which used to belong to his parents, was crowded with items he’d hoarded over the years. The mess spilled into his front yard, which was cluttered with satellite dishes, a statue of the Virgin Mary, and a wood-frame sign advertising “antler bone art.” The sign was decorated with several of Larry’s scrimshaw carvings, which he hawked at art fairs. In addition to carving, he’d tried his hand at an array of other pursuits: refurbishing broken electronics, selling solar-powered generators that could run home appliances in the event of an emergency, and even fashioning leather lingerie that he peddled to women. Larry had had no stable career to speak of since he arrived in town in the early 1980s.
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Larry was a conspiracy theorist. On his Facebook page, he posted videos and articles declaring that the federal government controlled the weather, that Sandy Hook was a hoax, that Timothy McVeigh was a “CIA patsy,” that the totalitarian New World Order was real. Around Grand Marais, Larry was also known to be exceedingly religious. He attended Mass on Saturday evenings at St. John’s Catholic Church, always sitting in the front row, and he believed that the statues there cried actual tears—sometimes of blood. He carried a lock of hair that he said once belonged to Father Mark Hollenhorst, a priest at St. John’s who died in 1993, in a leather pouch around his neck; he claimed that it could effect miraculous cures.
Larry referred to himself as a prophet and would often appear around town dressed in a cloak and sandals and carrying a wooden staff. He once showed up on the courthouse steps for the National Day of Prayer clad all in black, his head covered by a medieval-type chainmail hood, and fell to his knees screaming. Another time he berated a group of gay people who’d gathered in downtown Grand Marais, shouting through a bullhorn that God didn’t approve of them.
Many locals found Larry’s zeal exhausting. “When I’d see him, I’d know I was going to be there for a long time, because he’d go on and on,” said Laura Laky, a Grand Marais resident. “He’d talk about the end-times, the Book of Revelation, Christ coming again.”
Other people were scared of Larry. Rumors that he abused children circulated around Grand Marais for years. People whispered about him watching kids from his parked car. There were claims that he’d videotaped girls’ volleyball games and children at Sven and Ole’s, the local pizzeria. A member of the nearby Chippewa tribe told me that Larry had been banned from the Grand Portage powwow after parents complained about him passing out candy to their children.
Larry once approached a man named Gary Nesgoda at a gas station and asked if he had kids. When Nesgoda said that he did, Larry showed him pictures of a fairy garden he’d built behind his house. There were miniature staircases and doors, and little figurines set amid tree roots. Larry insisted that Nesgoda, who had recently moved to Grand Marais, should bring his kids over to see it. “Everything he was telling me sounded pretty neat,” Nesgoda told me. Then, in the gas station parking lot, someone who’d overheard the conversation stopped Nesgoda. “Do not bring your children over there,” they warned.
This was a common theme. “Larry was the boogeyman,” said Brian Larsen, editor and publisher of the Cook County News Herald, who is a father of four children. “You’d tell your kids to stay the heck away from him.”
In 2014, Larry decided to run for mayor of Grand Marais. In a candidate forum broadcast on WTIP, a community radio station, he ranted about Christianity. “We can’t sit by and let our government stop us from having the Bible in the military, taking out the crucifixes, taking out the Ten Commandments in our federal buildings and establishments,” he said. Then, just before election day, the Cook County News Herald ran a front-page article that seemed to confirm the longstanding speculation about Larry. The piece detailed his criminal conviction for the sexual assault of a six-year-old girl.
Take whatever treatment is available to you,” the judge said, “because this type of conduct, of course, is just wholly unacceptable.
Before he became an object of fear and fascination in Grand Marais, Larry was married—twice. For a time he lived with his second wife, Sheila, in Ramsey, about 25 miles outside Minneapolis. On Ash Wednesday in 1979, Sheila went to evening Mass and then to bowl in her weekly league, leaving Larry home alone with their five children: three young boys from his first marriage and six-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, from hers. While the other children slept, according to police and court records, Larry invited his stepdaughter into his bedroom.
The little girl later told a police investigator that he showed her “pictures of naked people,” touched her “potty area” with a vibrator, then stuck his tongue and finger into her vagina. She said it wasn’t the only time he’d touched her, and that he’d warned her not to tell anyone, but she went to her mother anyway. Sheila reported the incident to child welfare services, who notified law enforcement. She told the police investigator that her husband had also recently become violent and suicidal.
The police arrested Larry. In a recorded statement with investigators, he admitted that he’d had sexual contact with his stepdaughter on two Wednesday evenings while his wife was bowling. A psychiatrist determined that he was competent to stand trial, finding no evidence of “any kind of psychiatric disorder.” Rather than face a jury, Larry confessed to second-degree criminal sexual conduct, and the prosecution recommended a sentence of five years. Two court psychologists submitted reports indicating that Larry wasn’t open to receiving treatment. At an October 1979 hearing, the judge urged Larry to reconsider. “Take whatever treatment is available to you,” the judge said, “because this type of conduct, of course, is just wholly unacceptable.”
Larry was incarcerated in Minnesota’s Stillwater prison, and in records from his time there, there’s no mention of him receiving counseling or treatment, though he did join a Bible study. Soon, changes to the state’s sentencing guidelines allowed Larry to seek early release. Since the state did not provide evidence that doing so would “present a danger to the public,” the court approved Larry’s request. He left prison on January 19, 1982, after serving a little more than two years for his crime.
In those days, there was no sex offender registry in Minnesota, or in most states. Larry was at liberty to go where he liked. Sheila had divorced him by then, and his three sons were living with their mother. Larry, who was 36 at the time, hitchhiked to Grand Marais to move in with his parents.
Three decades later, Larry lost the town’s mayoral election, 345 votes to 42. Many locals were surprised that he’d gotten any votes at all, especially after the story broke about his criminal record. “Forty-something people voted for him,” said Amber Waldrop, who lived down the street from Larry. “They knew about this guy. For anybody to even think that someone like that should become mayor of this town is sickening.”
Some of those votes came from Larry’s friends, many of whom shared his belief in conspiracy theories. Perhaps it’s no surprise that they also believed what Larry told them: that the accusations against him were made up, that his ex-wife had encouraged her daughter to lie to the police, that he only took the plea deal to avoid a long prison sentence.
Larry’s friends knew that he tended to hijack conversations and go on at length about topics ranging from the Rapture to homeopathic cures, and that he engaged strangers in ways many people found uncomfortable. But being an oddball, they said, isn’t a crime. Some of his friends thought Larry was on the autism spectrum, which made it hard for him to read social cues and show empathy. “This man has been persecuted all of his life,” said Bob Stangler, a Vietnam veteran who knew Larry for years. “The citizens of the area have labeled him a pervert, and he’s not a pervert at all. He’s a genius with Asperger’s who’s overcaring of people.”
A woman I’ll call Carol, who asked that her real name not be used, said she was so close with Larry that she spoke to him almost daily for 12 years. She knew him to visit sick people, distribute food to the needy, and take care of his ailing mother, who died in 2013. At her memorial service, Larry displayed his mother’s ashes in a cookie jar resembling the Star Wars character R2-D2, saying that it was what she wanted. (His father passed away in 1997.) “As long as I’ve known him, he never hurt anybody,” Carol told me.
She knows that hers is a minority opinion, that for many people in town Larry was foremost a convicted sex offender. “You can never get rid of that label,” she said.
Once they learned about his 1979 conviction, many parents in Grand Marais were more worried than ever that Larry posed a threat to their children. It’s a common enough fear. On the far right, popular conspiracy theories such as QAnon decry a global cabal of child molesters, but even among the general population, concern about the danger posed by pedophiles is widespread. In a Lynn University poll, 75 percent of roughly 200 Florida adults said they believed that sex offenders would reoffend. Yet according to a meta-study conducted by researchers at Public Safety Canada in 2004, one of the most comprehensive available, only 23 percent of people convicted of child sexual abuse were charged or convicted of a similar crime within the next 15 years. (The study’s authors concede that many victims never come forward.) In interviews for this story, researchers noted that recidivism rates have declined even more in recent years.
No one came forward to accuse Larry of more recent abuse after his 1979 conviction. Still, perception alone was enough to put many Grand Marais parents on edge. For one young man, that concern became an obsession.
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Amos Barshad reports on the rise of Bowlero, the empire of entertainment centers gobbling up the bowling industry in the US. There are about 3,500 independent bowling centers left in the country; depending on where you live, it’s possible that your local neighborhood bowling alley may have already shuttered or is soon to close—to be taken over by the bowling giant. The company boasts upscale entertainment and expensive cocktails, but there’s a lot more to Bowlero under the surface, and none of it is good: poorly maintained centers, questionable hiring and toxic employment practices, a CEO lining his own pockets while the company amasses debt, and probably the worst thing of all: a business that doesn’t care about the sport itself.
It all feels thoroughly American: In the interest of short-term profit, a corporation goes about methodically worsening a beloved national pastime. Do you sometimes ask yourself, why does it feel like everything is getting worse? Bowlero provides one possible answer: because somewhere, someone’s making money off the decline.
Shannon is a business owner, not a bowler. He got his start in the nineties, originally under the name Bowlmor, with one bowling center in New York City. It was there that he developed his big idea, the one that would become the Bowlero template: a bowling center as a glitzy all-in entertainment palace, where anything from cocktails to video games can draw your attention away from the lanes. In a 2011 interview with Bloomberg, just a few years before Bowlero began its aggressive expansion push, Shannon made an infamous and illuminating comment. “I don’t think anyone takes bowling seriously,” he said. “Why would you?”
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The Silver Lake Reading Club at the Lamill coffee house in Los Angeles is open every Tuesday evening for two hours. Here, close to two dozen readers pay $17 to enjoy their books in silence. Helen Bui, the club’s founder and organizer, is surprised at how popular the club has become, but when you think about it, spending a few hours to get lost in a different world—and then coming together to chat with other readers about the stories they’re immersed in—is heaven for book lovers. Thomas Curwen captures the magic in this light and breezy read.
So much of L.A. life is about coming and going, but the readers here inhabit an in-between space where motion has stopped and time is suspended, filled with the wonder, anger, humor and passion of writers — Paul Murray, Thich Nhat Hanh, Kurt Vonnegut, David Sedaris.
Their books are their calling cards, signals of taste and interests (spiritual, historical, popular, esoteric) that link the private with the public. Forget swiping right; this is the prospect of a post-pandemic meaningful encounter.
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About 100,000 people in the United States have the sickle cell disease, and roughly 90 percent of them are Black. In this investigative feature, the first part in an ongoing series, Eric Boodman speaks to 50 women with the illness about the challenges of accessing non-coercive, non-judgmental reproductive care. They describe being pressured into having tubal ligations, hysterectomies, and abortions:
Some stories carry echoes of “Mississippi appendectomies” of the mid-20th century, in which Black women would go in for a different procedure and wake up to learn that their uterus had been removed. It was a sickle cell crisis that brought Shirley Miller into a hospital in West Palm Beach, Fla., around 1984. She was 26 or so, newly married, and a few months pregnant, in so much pain and on so much medication that her consciousness was flickering in and out. She remembers being informed that the doctors were going to give her an abortion. When she came to, she learned that they’d tied her tubes as well. Her then-husband had given consent.
“They didn’t believe that I was ever able to carry a child. But whose decision is that to make?” Miller said. She doesn’t tell this story when she gives talks as a sickle cell patient educator; she worries the audience wouldn’t remember anything else.
It happened to Tonya Mitchell twice. “You can always go back and get your tubes untied when you are ready to have more children,” she remembers her doctor in Little Rock, Ark., saying around the time her younger daughter was born, in 2004. But that wasn’t right. The procedure is considered “permanent contraception,” and involves severing, crushing, blocking, or removing the fallopian tube, disconnecting ovary from uterus, preventing eggs from slipping toward fertilization. Reattachment is possible in some cases, but by no means certain.
For Mitchell, that was a moot point: A few years later, around 2008, she felt a pain in her abdomen, and a different doctor said her left ovary was dying and needed to come out. Then, at the last appointment before her scheduled surgery, he told her that within a year, many patients like her ended up having the same issue on the other side, and suggested removing both ovaries at once.
“Definitely not standard practice,” said Cara Heuser, an OB-GYN in Utah who specializes in complex pregnancies and is a spokesperson for the Society of Maternal-Fetal Medicine, when asked about that recommendation. There are some tumors and cancer-associated genetic mutations that might have warranted discussing such an extreme procedure, but Mitchell didn’t have a family history of the cancers in question, and at her age, the benefits of keeping one healthy ovary outweighed the risks.
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Mark Follman | Mother Jones | May 16, 2024 | 14,073 words
In 2014, Elliot Rodger murdered six people, wounded 14 others, and killed himself in Isla Vista, California. As Mark Follman shows in this thoughtful, compassionate feature, Rodger was an unwell, unstable young man whose actions—like those of many mass shooters—were likely preventable. The key component of any prevention strategy for gun violence is reducing people’s access to firearms, but Follman approaches the matter from a complementary angle: one focused on a troubled person’s experiences, needs, and risks. “Many mass shooters remain ambivalent about killing themselves and others—and most engage in observable warning behaviors well before they attack,” Follman explains. If these red flags are documented and reported, what’s known as “behavioral threat assessment” can kick into gear: “Made up of psychologists, administrators, law enforcement, and other trained practitioners who meet regularly to handle cases, the team conducts interviews and gathers information to gauge the danger. Then, over weeks or months, they use constructive tools like counseling, social services, and education support to guide the troubled person away from what the field calls ‘the pathway to violence.’” Follman delves into threat assessment as a growing field of study and action through the lens of Rodger’s mother, Chin, who became interested in it a few years after her son’s crime. Chin is now using her son’s story and her experience as his mother to help experts better understand what compels mass shooters to act and what it takes to stop them. In a profound act of grief, love, and generosity, she has made herself a case study. Follman’s piece is essential reading, going beyond the headlines and assumptions about mass shootings to illuminate root problems and cracks in various systems—social, familial, educational, therapeutic—that people like Rodger too often slip through. —SD
Scott Stossel | The Atlantic | May 28, 2024 | 4,580 words
Many years ago, I was fortunate enough to study with the late, great Phyllis Garland, an arts critic who believed that criticism deserved the same rigor and care as any other form of journalism. I think of her often, but one thing she said influenced me more than any other: it’s easy to write a negative review; it’s much harder to write a positive one. That axiom has an unwitting corollary, though. In truth, writing a memorable takedown—one that interrogates not just the subject, but the critic’s own stance—is an art of its own. Scott Stossel’s piece about tennis player Novak Djokovic emobdies this phenomenon. At its heart, it’s a deconstruction of why Djokovic has a legitimate claim to being the best men’s tennis player of all time, yet Stossel manages to seethe through the compliments: “He revels in playing possum, cavalierly frittering sets away early against weaker players in order to make the eventual comeback and execution all the more delicious.” The piece lacks the usual hallmarks of a takedown. It’s meticulously reported and venomously structured. There are no zingers or insults, just Djokovic’s play style, off-court carriage, and gamesmanship. (Seriously, what’s with the bathroom breaks?) Stossell even cops to the smallness of his own resentment, adding yet more seasoning to a thoroughly enjoyable read. He’s by no means the first person to dislike a win-at-all-costs champion, but he’s one of a rare few who can marshal facts and critical acumen to elevate a sports fan’s grudge to something more like art. —PR
Wei Tchou | Virginia Quarterly Review | May 14, 2024 | 8,135 words
Have you ever felt helpless and illegible to others, searching for a way to process loss and turmoil? For Virginia Quarterly Review, Wei Tchou uses her deep appreciation for ferns to better understand herself, and her brother’s mental illness. Studying books and field guides she becomes a taxonomist, finding inspiration in their variation and resilience. Ferns “make a home out of catastrophe,” she writes. “In a world where so much truth is malleable and relative, there is a subset of that world in language where truth is fixed. Either way, ferns grow regardless of our names for them. They spiral relentlessly.” In learning about the plant’s parts and varieties she absorbs a new vocabulary to better understand the world and her place in it: a new poetry, courtesy of ferns. “Instead of leaves, for instance, ferns have pinnules (the tiniest petallike leaves) and pinna (a set of them, waving from the body of the fern-like a feather). Stems or stalks are called petioles. You call the full articulation of pinnae, without the petiole, a blade.” Through this stunning essay, Tchou puts us in that rare place where the ordinary and the extraordinary sit together for a time, in conversation—that fertile spot where understanding and insight can grow. —KS
Sara Franklin | Taste | May 28, 2024 | 4,156 words
“This is a story told in lunches,” writes Sara Franklin at the start of this sumptuous essay. The technique works. Each exquisite new meal description joins a joyous thread that will leave you craving fresh, home-cooked food. And Franklin takes even more delight in her lunch companion: celebrated editor and writer Judith Jones, perhaps best known for discovering Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl in a publisher’s slush pile. Serendipity calls when The Julia Child Foundation asks Franklin to collect Jones’ oral histories for an archive. (Jones edited Child.) An ardent fan, Franklin is thrilled by this opportunity. But, in this piece, the interviews take a back seat, with just a few snippets of Jones’ life history thrown in: this essay is on friendship. (And food, but the food is the conduit of friendship.) Before each interview, Franklin and Jones make their lunch and, over each one, steadily develop a companionship, preparing their spread in a lovely, unrushed, sometimes silent waltz that becomes more adept with time. The slow formation of their friendship—despite the 60-year age difference—is written with tenderness and beauty, and, toward the end, I found I had to brush away a tear. You will come away replete.—CW
Alexander Sammon | Slate | May 23, 2024 | 5,569 words
I’ve always wanted to learn how to surf. I’ve lived near the California coast for most of my life and have traveled to many places where beginner lessons are plentiful, but I still haven’t taken the opportunity. What if there was a more accessible and less intimidating way to get me closer to my goal? In this enjoyable Slate read, Alexander Sammon visits the American Dream mall, a massive entertainment complex in New Jersey, to ride the artificial waves at Skudin Surf, the largest indoor surfing wave pool in the US. I expected Sammon, who grew up surfing outside in San Diego, to dismiss the chlorine-filled, Shrek-themed experience in a climate-controlled dome as completely soul-stripping, and to write a piece bemoaning another beloved activity now commodified, privatized, and optimized. But Sammon is thoughtful and nuanced, with insights on today’s youth, the future of IRL retail and the American mall, the death of subculture, the unique pastime of surfing, and ultimately, the things we choose to do that bring us joy. He writes that his $250 surfing session was a silly and manufactured experience, but it was also sort of fun and memorable: “[D]espite seeming like the fakest fucking thing imaginable for an activity obsessed with authenticity, there was actually something somewhat legit in the root of the experience.” —CLR
Krista Diamond | May 18, 2024 | Slate | 1,915 words
Faced with crushing academic debt and unable to find gig economy jobs in Las Vegas, Krista Diamond started to sell her plasma. After some react with horror when she reveals how she makes ends meet, she considers the far more demeaning work experiences she’s had in the past—in contrast with the kindness she’s experienced at the plasma bank. —KS
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