The Cousin I Never Knew

Sophie Vershbow dug through years of letters, diaries, and ephemera to profile her cousin Jeffrey Bomser, who died at age 38 of complications related to AIDS. Bomser was a ray of light in the community; he used his privilege to speak out against stigma and advocate for clinical trials, but above all, took every opportunity he could to help others with HIV and AIDS, bringing comfort and support to others who shared his disease.

“Jeff believed that the more people who knew about AIDS and people who had it, the better chance there would be of finding a cure. He was aware of his privilege as a charismatic, straight-passing, sober, middle-class white man dealing with a diagnosis mostly shared at the time by gay men and disadvantaged IV drug users who were being systematically ignored. For so long, Jeff’s privilege had been used to feed his ego and drug addiction, but in the final years of his life, he used that privilege and charisma to contribute to a movement.”

Throughout his time as an activist, Jeff stuck ACT Up’s silver “Touched by a Person with AIDS” stickers on any public surface he could find. Jeff’s goal as someone living with AIDS was, metaphorically, to touch as many lives as he could every day, whether it was opening someone’s mind or opening someone’s access to treatment. The impact he made in such a short time makes me even more regretful that his life was cut short, knowing how much more he could have done if he’d lived longer.

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Pork, Love, and Money: Life According to La Piraña Lechonera

This is a joyous account of the singular experience of dining at La Piraña Lechonera, a restaurant run by chef Angel Jimenez. Open on summer weekends, La Piraña is as much about the atmosphere as the food—and is run in a style that most capitalist ventures would balk at. There is noise, smells, and grease aplenty in Abe Beam’s great piece.

While I was waiting, Angel pulled from a Heineken and chatted up the crowd, occasionally fighting with an inebriated local woman he clearly had some history with, and offhandedly mentioned to me that earlier that day he had served a plate of lechon to Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor. The story had the flavor of a guy talking elaborate shit from his station at a dominoes table on a street corner, but when I checked him on it, Angel pulled out his phone. Sure enough, there was a selfie taken that day, posed with the justice from Soundview.

When it was finally my turn to order, Angel had run out of rice, guineos, and seafood salad, leaving only the lechon. I shared it with my wife, passing the hefty clamshell back and forth in the car, eating roast pork off our laps with a plastic fork. It was somehow one of the best meals I had last year, and I haven’t been able to shake the experience since.

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What’s the Future of Solitary Confinement?

Tough-on-crime rhetoric has meant that no other country in the world imposes more long-term solitary confinement than the United States. The practice is well known for long-term, permanent consequences such as post-traumatic stress disorder, paranoia, loss of identity, psychosis, memory failure, and difficulty concentrating—just to start. Many say it’s torture. For Deseret Magazine, Natalia Galicza introduces us to Frank DePalma, a man who had been incarcerated in Ely State Prison in northeastern Nevada for 22 years, seven of which he spent in isolation in a room “roughly the size of a parking space.”

Finally, in 2014, he transferred to the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, about 30 minutes from Reno. His prison sentence was scheduled to end soon. And given the amount of time he’d spent in confinement, the move to the correctional center was meant to help him learn how to socialize again before parole. This was a medium-security facility, with fewer restrictions than the maximum security in Ely. It would offer Frank more programs and, comparably, more freedom.

Shortly after his arrival, a nurse at the correctional center’s mental health unit handed Frank a mirror. He trembled as he held it, afraid to look, with only a vague idea of what he’d see when he met his reflection. He knew he was 58 years old, but only because the nurse told him. He knew, by touching his head, he’d lost all his hair, and he’d seen the damage time had wrought on his hands — the topography of wrinkles and scars. But his face remained unknown. He understood that once he looked into the mirror, he would have no choice but to confront who he’d become and what he’d lost. So he braced himself. Then he looked.

His shoulders appeared stuck in a slouch, like his posture had forfeited all rights to confidence. He had missing teeth. Fine lines ringed round his forehead and under his eyes. Is that me? Tears rolled down his cheeks.

There were many occasions over the last two decades when he wondered if he existed at all. For at least the last five of those years, he never once stepped outside the confines of his cell. But there he was now. Face to face with himself for the first time in 22 years.

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Inside the Slimy, Smelly, Secretive World of Glass-Eel Fishing

Inside the fascinating—and sometimes stomach-churning—industry of eel fishing. With eels reaching staggering prices, the stakes are high. In her detailed report, Paige Williams dives deep into what it takes to be successful in this slimy world.

During a favorable market and a hard elver run, a Mainer may earn a hundred thousand dollars in a single haul. Each license holder is assigned a quota, ranging from four pounds to more than a hundred, based partly on seniority. Even the lowest quota insures a payout of six thousand dollars if the price per pound breaches fifteen hundred, which happens with some regularity. Maine is the only place in the country where a kid can become eligible for an elver license at fifteen and win a shot at making more money overnight, swinging a net, than slinging years’ worth of burgers. Elvermen have sent their children to college on eels, and have used the income to improve their homes, their businesses, their boobs. This year, more than forty-five hundred Mainers applied for sixteen available licenses.

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The West Coast’s Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico

A citizen sleuth in Portland, Oregon, uncovered hundreds of stolen bicycles online, all sold by the same company. Would law enforcement care? Christopher Solomon tells the wild story:

Before the Facebook page for Constru-Bikes disappeared, Hance had written down an email address listed on it as a contact. He plugged the address into Google. This took him to different web pages, some of which had bikes for sale, too, and contained more breadcrumbs of information. On one page he found a phone number. He plugged the number into Google. This took him to still other websites. The digging also led to cached pages with an advertisement for a raffle, of all things, with bikes as prizes. The ad bore a phone number and, oddly, bank account information where people could send money to enter that raffle. And right there on the raffle’s ad, he came across a name: Ricardo Estrada Zamora. The man’s nickname, the web told him, was Ricky.

Eventually, Hance discovered that the Constru-Bikes Facebook page hadn’t disappeared entirely; whoever was running the page had simply blocked users in the US from seeing it. Hance used a VPN to route his internet traffic through another country and regain access to the page. Now he could see both Constru-Bike’s Facebook page and its Insta account, and that bikes would appear for sale on both accounts, only to be taken off the Facebook page once they sold. Hance and the people helping him could now see the full scale and history of the business—and just how many bikes were coming and going.

Soon, Hance and a volunteer found Zamora’s personal Facebook page. They saw that he lives in La Barca, a city of about 68,000 people in southern Jalisco, more than an hour outside Guadalajara. They also found ample evidence that Zamora and Constru-Bikes were one and the same. The same bicycles often appeared on his personal page. And for a period of time the owner of the Constru-Bikes Instagram page had forgotten to turn off the geotagging feature, so Hance could see that some images were tagged as La Barca. Hance also noticed that certain architectural features appeared in the background of many bike ads and in photos of proud customers standing with their new bikes. One day during my visit with Hance, he surfed over to Google Street View and typed in the address they had found for Zamora: There, within feet of the address, was a golden garage door; bits of an address on a wall; the same vibrant, tropical paint—the same details I could see clearly in the bike ads.

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I Spent a Week Eating Discarded Restaurant Food. But Was It Really Going to Waste?

For five days straight, Morgan Meaker used her grocery budget to experiment with an app called “Too Good To Go,” all to try to better understand and reduce food waste in London, England. The app matches bargain-hunting users with hotels, restaurants, and markets that sell leftover food for a reasonable prices, meals and groceries that would otherwise be diverted to the garbage bin.

Over the next two days, I live like a forager in my city, molding my days around pickups. I walk and cycle to cafés, restaurants, markets, supermarkets; to familiar haunts and places I’ve never noticed. Some surprise bags last for only one meal, others can be stretched out for days. On Tuesday morning, my £3.59 surprise bag includes a small cake and a slightly stale sourdough loaf, which provides breakfast for three more days. When I go back to the same café the following week, without using the app, the loaf alone costs £6.95.

TGTG was founded in Copenhagen in 2015 by a group of Danish entrepreneurs who were irked by how much food was wasted by all-you-can-eat buffets. Their idea to repurpose that waste quickly took off, and the app’s remit expanded to include restaurants and supermarkets. A year after the company was founded, Mette Lykke was sitting on a bus when a woman showed her the app and how it worked. She was so impressed, she reached out to the company to ask if she could help. Lykke has now been CEO for six years.

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When My Father Talked About Larry Bird

Jeremy Collins grew up in Atlanta, but his Indiana-reared father made sure his Hoosier love for Larry Bird lived on through his son. (As a Hoosier with a father from Boston, I arrived at the same outcome through different variables.) In 1991, though, after almost 15 years of soaring NBA excellence*, Bird came crashing back down to earth—as did Collin’s adolescence. A beautiful, thrumming piece about basketball, family, and vulnerability.

At the line, your dad sinks free throw after free throw and recounts Bird at the line against the Clippers, immune to the tricks of the San Diego Chicken. He details the left-handed jumper of New Albany’s Terry Morrison, who played AAU with Bird for Hancock Construction. He then asks if you know what’s happening to Hoosier families right now. Poor families like the Birds once were. Farm families in Fort Wayne? Working families in Gary? You don’t. You’re fourteen. “Right now,” he says, “and across America, the rich hoard third homes and second yachts while steelworkers and mill workers donate blood to feed their families.”

His words form a background noise, a music you try to tune out. When he tells you to bend your knees deeper and hold your follow-through longer, you tune in. Swish.

*This soaring was figurative only, even though Bird could, against all odds, manage a reverse dunk from time to time.

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