“The weird thing about growing up in oil country was that I had no idea I was growing up in oil country,” writes Jonathan Blake at the outset of this fascinating piece about Los Angeles’ still-active oil industry. Many have seen the wells near Baldwin Hills—it’s tough to miss them when driving down La Cienega—but fewer are aware of how drilling fields persist a century after the original oil boom, particularly in urban residential settings.
A synagogue with the facade of a theater, a school with the facade of a Brooklyn house, an oil drilling operation with the facade of a synagogue: uncanny architecture that gives no hint of the buildings’ actual uses. Strangest of all, perhaps, is that there is active oil drilling just 125 feet from people’s homes, according to the environmental justice group STAND-L.A., a distance that seemed generous to me when I visited recently. Apartments abut the alleyway behind the tower. Some residents have windows that look onto its ivy-covered walls. Without leaving their homes, neighbors could easily read the number for the emergency hotline on the sign by the door to report a leak.
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At one time, the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver had a drug overdose rate of 25 times the national average due to the unpredictable composition of street drugs sometimes laced with lethal amounts of fentanyl and carfentanil. Activists Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicums believe that harm reduction via safe supply is the only way to save lives. So, the pair founded the Drug User Liberation Front. At first, they bought cocaine and opium on the dark web with their own money and gave the drugs away for free. Later, they started a group called the compassion club geared toward safe access to drugs.
This is how the compassion club worked: first, Nyx and Kalicum converted crowdfunded Canadian dollars to Bitcoin, then traded that for Monero, an untraceable cryptocurrency. They used private browsers to access the dark web and, for extra security, operated on private servers, which encrypted their IP addresses. To find online drug vendors, they searched discussion boards where people posted tests of substances they received. Careful to avoid international shipments, they only bought from Canadian vendors with good reviews. After selecting one, they’d order a small amount to confirm its purity. If a sample wasn’t received—or if they got a bad product—they could get a refund. Communication was limited to ordering and address details; the goods were delivered by Canada Post.
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From all-night poker games, sports betting, playing the three-number “Italian lottery,” and eventually, taking bets from others in the neighborhood, Victor Lodato recalls the pervasive gambling that went on during his childhood. Until it nearly tore his family apart.
At least I had my mother’s nose, and, more important, I had inherited her belief in magic. Both of us understood that in order to survive it was necessary to arrange things in a certain way. You had to take life’s terrifying unpredictabilities and rally them, by ritual or formula, into an army that would do your bidding.
There was a period of several months when I kept suggesting my mother play the same three numbers. Seven, one, four. Something about that arrangement seemed friendly, not to mention that the numbers added up to twelve, which, when added again—one plus two—gave you three, meaning the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I saw no sacrilege in this reference to the Trinity. Gambling, I sensed, was a kind of prayer—though my mother didn’t always direct these prayers toward God. Sometimes she invoked the dead, playing the birth date of a deceased relative, often her grandmother. Such bets were akin to lighting candles in church, which you had to pay for, too. Both transactions were a request to be remembered by Heaven—to be helped, or saved.
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From scary movies to roller coasters to extreme sports, there are ways we can scare ourselves—for fun. Why do some people enjoy uncertain, risky, or dangerous situations? In this Believer essay, Elisa Gabbert reflects on her fear of heights, and also explores fear as pleasure, the philosophy of games, and anxiety as a luxury.
I collect this kind of story, the kind that reveals a crack in reality. They give me that skin-tingling feeling, a flutter in the chest. We tell ourselves that roller coasters are perfectly safe and that planes don’t crash. I don’t want it not to be true; I don’t want to die on a plane. So why do I like the stories? It’s like I want my sense of reality to be destabilized. It’s like I’m playing some kind of game, a game in which the complex world falls away and I focus on a single threat. A single strange-but-very-real threat. I can stop riding roller coasters, obviously, but it’s harder to avoid planes or other forms of transportation. Trains do get derailed. Bridges do collapse. So the threats are very real—but not immediate. Not for me, when I’m reading the news, when I’m sitting at my desk.
Is there anything useful about that feeling, I wonder? That artificial fear, or fear at a distance? Might practicing fear be a good idea? It seems more useful than anxiety—if anxiety is just the brain burning energy it doesn’t really need, because you’re not currently starving, or trying to outrun a lion. These may be just concepts, words I attach to agitation, but when I call the feeling anxiety, I’m mapping it alongside paralysis and existential dread. I associate anxiety with stasis, with insomnia, lying supine in bed. Fear, on the contrary, is a vertical feeling. It’s activating. If I’m scared, I want to be moving.
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For Granta, Momtaza Mehri reflects on the life and legacy of Sinéad O’Connor, on the first anniversary of the singer songwriter’s death.
I suppose that’s why I’ve always been in awe of O’Connor as a musician and a daughter. In publicly exorcising the mother-daughter relationship, she obliterates the hyphen at the cost of her sanity. There’s a reckless porousness to her work, a willingness to return again and again to that garden, locked-out and trembling. Formative nightmares can sometimes fuel you. An artist can decide to have her own baby, despite the stern advice of her record label. She can willingly choose the terror of motherhood. In photoshoots, her belly will protrude. ‘Wear a Condom’, her crop top reads. She will flash a cheeky grin. Her first child will be born three weeks before her debut album.
If you are implicated in everything you witness, and vice versa, then how do you live with yourself? The borders of your personhood become dangerously compromised. Such hyper-empathy can be a perilous position from which to think or live, one with personal and professional costs.
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• A woman who survived the unimaginable
• Whether a school shooter’s parents are legally liable
• A mother’s ordeal, a son’s journey
• The reality of an autism diagnosis in your 40s
• The massive, marvelous ecosystem living in the earth’s crust
Ryan Hockensmith | ESPN | June 26, 2024 | 5,538 words
Eleven years ago, Emma Carey plummeted 14,000 feet to the ground after a tandem jump with her skydiving instructor went horribly wrong. For ESPN, Ryan Hockensmith takes us through Carey’s life-altering fall. “Emma Carey is flying, and she is so happy,” he writes. “She is 14,000 feet above the earth, gripping the straps of her parachute pack like an excited kid on the way to her first day of school. Oh my god, I’m going to become a skydiver, she thinks, not knowing that just about the most terrifying thing a human being can experience is about to happen to her.” Her accident could have easily taken center stage in this piece. Hockensmith is a skilled reporter and writer who uses evocative detail to tell us so much more than the basic facts of Carey’s accident and the aftermath. He introduces us to Emma and her best friend, Jemma Mrdak. The duo is a “package deal” who did everything together, including skydiving. It’s unclear precisely what happened during Carey’s jump. All she knows is that the main and safety chutes became entangled and neither opened as expected; her instructor landed on top of her, unconscious. She does not blame him for what happened and has kept his name out of news reports in the aftermath. The premise of this story is compelling, but what I loved most is that Carey’s attitude is almost a full-fledged character in this piece. “She began toggling between moments of tremendous gratitude that she’s alive, and tremendous anger at the accident, at the world, at her body, at everything. Sometimes she had a good morning and a bad afternoon. Other times it was a bad 1:52 p.m. and a good 1:53, then a bad 1:54. She just tried to keep getting to 1:55,” Hockensmith writes. This is a gripping story of pure will and determination. While Emma may have lost feeling and partial use of her legs, she is here to tell you that as a person, she is absolutely whole. —KS
John Woodrow Cox | The Washington Post | July 8, 2024 | 8,641 words
This is the second story I’ve chosen for the Top 5 this summer that focuses on the parents of young people who committed mass shootings. The first, written by Mark Follman for Mother Jones, is about Chin Rodger, who is helping experts understand the psychology and behavior of mass shooters in an effort to prevent future crimes, based on her experience with her son, Elliot. The second, by the masterful John Woodrow Cox, is about James and Jennifer Crumbley, who were recently convicted of involuntary manslaughter because they failed to secure the gun that their son, Ethan, used to murder four people and wound seven others at his high school (a gun, it is worth noting, that his parents gave him as a gift). Together, these stories point to new fronts in the effort to combat America’s epidemic of gun violence, and the one Cox depicts is controversial. As the headline of the story notes, the case against the Crumbleys was historic—no parents had ever been held legally responsible for a mass shooting committed by a child—but it was also high-risk. Karen McDonald, the prosecutor who led the cases, faced death and rape threats, as well as doubt from some of her peers. The work consumed her life and that of her colleagues; the need for therapy is mentioned in the story more than once. Cox embedded with the prosecution over many months, which allows him to show in intimate narrative detail what it took to win in court and what was lost in the process. “Before the shooting,” Cox writes, “there was a lightness to McDonald, at least with family and friends, said her 26-year-old daughter, Maeve Stargardt, describing her as a ‘total goof’ who reveled in throwing surprise parties and giving quirky presents. She watched that part of her mom wither. But she’d accepted that’s what her mother needed to become, not just to support four grieving families, but also to overcome the persistent doubts about her decisions.” I found myself commending this sacrifice while also thinking that no one should have to make it. America’s toxic gun culture destroys lives in more ways than one. —SD
Ryan Nourai | Esquire | July 24, 2024 | 4,757 words
It does little good to dance around the atrocity, so here goes. Four years before Ryan Nourai was born, his mother was carjacked, kidnapped, and repeatedly raped, then shot twice in the head and left for dead in an alley. She survived, albeit with fragments of a bullet lodged in her brain. Her son knew the bullet part, but little else; only after her death, decades later, did he begin to seek the full breadth of what had happened. “Why,” he writes, “now that she was gone, now that her body was in the next room, was the incident starting to feel closer than ever?” The assailants had long been captured and imprisoned for the attack, so Nourai’s ensuing investigation is more of a howdunit than a whodunit, an effort to fill the lacunae that existed between him and understanding. But as he gets closer, jumping across the years—scattering her ashes, riding with the retired homicide detective who investigated the crime, even speaking at one of the attackers’ parole hearing—you start to realize that closure isn’t the point. Something else is at play here, something shaped like grief but tinted like self-discovery. “I had been trying all along to find out whether her mettle and spark lived in me—and to do that, I thought I had to replicate her pain,” he writes. “Now I knew that wasn’t true.” In unadorned prose, Nourai sketches the boundless length and depth of a son’s love. —PR
Mary H.K. Choi | New York Magazine | July 3, 2024 | 5,906 words
My brother received his autism diagnosis in his late 40s—an important new framing for our family. At the time, I thought such a delayed diagnosis was unusual, but a few years later, I had the honor of editing John Paul Scotto’s Longreads piece about his own late diagnosis, “I Tried to Forget My Whole Life. I’m Glad I Failed.” After the essay was published, Scotto was overwhelmed by the number of people who contacted him to share their affinity with his story; it can be significant to shine a light. When autism was not as well understood, discovery was slower, and many grew up without the knowledge that could have helped to alleviate many difficulties. But it’s never too late to seek answers, as shown yet again by Mary H.K. Choi’s powerful piece for The Cut. Choi explains that even after being diagnosed at age 43, she still grappled with a form of imposter syndrome, writing, “And even if I was officially autistic, was I autistic enough for it to matter? And what did that mean?” She struggles to feel that her diagnosis of ASD level one, the mildest form of autism spectrum disorder, counts despite being able to see—and candidly write about—her anxiety, her awkward moments, and the pain she has caused those close to her. Gradually, Choi comes to terms with how “the disorder is not a spectrum but spectra, a solar system of sprawling constellations in 3-D that differs from one person to the next,” and that it intertwines with her cultural identity and other influences to make her who she is. After so many years of trying to fit a box, she is finally adapting the box to suit her. —CW
Ferris Jabr | The New York Times Magazine | June 24, 2024 | 5,966 words
Deep within the Earth’s crust, an ancient underworld teems with intraterrestrial microbes. They’re tiny but mighty, and different from their cousins above ground—breathing rock instead of oxygen, for one. They’re also extraordinary, having carved massive caverns over time, “engaged in a continuous alchemy of earth,” writes Ferris Jabr. They’ve survived the planet’s cataclysmic events over billions of years, possibly even helping to form the continents and lay the foundations for terrestrial life. I’m drawn to writing about Earth that frames its vast geological history in an accessible and beautiful way, and Jabr does exactly this, bringing inanimate rock, and these amazing microbes dwelling deep within it, to life. He explores some of the principles of Earth-system science, which studies Earth and life as a single self-regulating system, and the idea that living creatures—humans, animals, plants, microorganisms—aren’t just products of evolutionary processes, but participants in their own evolution. In other words, he writes, we are Earth. My favorite science writing informs as well as awes. Much like Jabr’s story on the social life of forests, this piece reminds me of the interconnectedness of all things, and challenges and shifts my understanding of this wondrous physical world we live in. —CLR
Audience Award
What was our readers’ favorite this week? The envelope, please.
Simon Wu | The Paris Review | July 18, 2024 | 2,841 words
There’s little to be said about wholesale members’ club Costco that hasn’t been said already. (Including in our own pages.) Or so I thought. Simon Wu adds to that prodigious canon by organizing a family vacation to Costco Travel’s most popular and well-reviewed destination: the Mayan Riviera. The result: an essay as thoughtful and selective as a trip to Costco isn’t. —PR
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Eleven years ago, Emma Carey survived falling 14,000 feet to the ground after a tandem skydive went horribly wrong. For ESPN, Ryan Hockensmith recounts the story and the aftermath, highlighting Carey’s incredible courage and sheer determination in the face of disaster.
She soars for the first half-minute, soaking in her first skydive. About 30 seconds in, she feels a tap on her shoulder, the signal from her instructor to cross her arms to brace for the jolt of her chute going off. She crosses her arms and then … nothing.
She’s not slowing down. She feels a tug on her hair, and she tries to see what the instructor is doing behind her. He’s out cold, unconscious from the ropes attached to the chutes. She can see the chutes, giant chunks of red fabric, flailing around in bunched-up bundles. They’re not supposed to be bunched-up bundles.
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