Fran Laughinghouse keeps in her house a 2012 prom photo showing her son, Alex, and three of his friends, Nixon Floyd, Richardson Sells, and Cole Thomason. Cole is the only one in the photo who’s still alive. Alex’s brother, Jackson, is dead too. This is the story of how opioid addiction ravaged a friend group and their families in Greenville, N.C.:
“I hate the saying, ‘Everything happens for a reason,’ or ‘It’ll get easier,’ because it doesn’t,” Ellie said. “It doesn’t get easier. Grief and loss never do. I think they just get different. You learn where some days you’re an emotional wreck and others, you don’t think about them as much. Or you think about them with a smile.”
Oct. 2, 2013, was not the day the drug epidemic reached Greenville. But beginning with Jackson’s death that day, a group of at least 16 young men and women who grew up together in this small, eastern North Carolina city would succumb to overdoses of opioids and other drugs over nine years. More of their peers became addicted or overdosed but managed to survive.
“It was almost like a generation that went to war didn’t come back,” said J.D. Fletcher, whose son died in 2019.
How rural America is failing migrants. The life lessons of soccer strategy. Moving on after the unthinkable happens. One house’s unsettling past. And a conversation between film icons. (Who doesn’t need more Nic Cage?) Welcome to our editors’ five favorite stories of the week.
Kartikay Mehrotra, Matti Gellman | ProPublica, The Kansas City Star | November 19, 2022 | 5,098 words
At the Statue of Liberty, the final line of Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus” reads: “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” There’s no question that the Biden administration had the best intentions in evacuating Afghan allies out of the country in August 2021 when the United States turned its back on the country, 20 years into a failed war. But some of the tempest-tost of Afghanistan have found small (if any) welcome in rural America, where there is little experience in helping newcomers and immigrants to become happy, productive members of the community. In this nuanced piece jointly published by ProPublica and The Kansas City Star, reporters Kartikay Mehrotra and Matti Gellman try to unravel the bureaucratic inadequacies that failed the Kohistani family — and may have caused 14-year-old Rezwan Kohistani to take his own life. —KS
Rosecrans Baldwin | GQ | November 29, 2022 | 3,306 words
Like so many others in my generation, I grew up playing soccer. And like so many others in my generation who grew up playing soccer, the magic of Dutch footballer Johan Cruyff was drilled into both my head and feet: his on-ball moves, his off-ball philosophy. Team Netherlands’ totaalvoetbal (Total Football) strategy may not have reigned on the international stage past the ’70s, but its emphasis on flowing in and out of space would inform player development even in the States into the ’90s. It also came to govern the larger philosophy of Rosecrans Baldwin’s friend Lars, a man who loved soccer and coaching as fiercely as he loved his family — until he succumbed to cancer three years ago. Now, on the eve of the Dutch and U.S. men’s teams meeting in the World Cup, Baldwin unpacks Lars’ impact on his own life, and how he sought to chronicle and preserve Lars’ outlook while there was still time. This is a piece about Baldwin’s loss, of course, but it’s really a piece about how soccer changed Lars, and how Lars changed the world around him. “A friend comes into your life and shows you it’s flexible,” Baldwin writes. “A friend alters your life by appearing in a new role. The role changes, the friendship changes.” Sharing space isn’t just for the game pitch. —PR
Deepa Padmanaban | Fifty Two | November 25, 2022 | 4,006 words
In these times that feel constantly pierced by mass death events, we’ve seen more stories detailing the invisible and often forgotten work of emergency responders who are first to encounter the dead. In a resource-strapped country like India, it’s hard to imagine the logistics of rescue operations, and even more so what is needed to properly and humanely manage a massive number of bodies after a large-scale natural disaster. But Deepa Padmanaban lays this all out with care in this Fifty Two story. “Prioritising the living over the dead is a given,” Padmanaban writes, but she also says that more respectful handling and more swift identification of victims allows their families to move on. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami revealed the lack of forensic infrastructure in the country, and Padmanaban reports on how practices like forensic odontology, which uses dental expertise, can be a reliable way to identify victims. (Padmanaban shares that Argentinian grandmothers in the late 1970s were the first people to suggest forensics as a way to identity victims — in their case, their daughters who had been abducted by Argentina’s military junta, and their daughters’ children.) This is an interesting piece on humanitarian forensics in India and, above all, honoring the dead and offering compassionate care to those left behind. —CLR
Matt Blake | The Guardian | November 19, 2022 | 3,311 words
Lying at the intersection of real estate, horror, and murder mystery is this gripping essay by Matt Blake. Have you ever considered your house’s past? Unless you are sitting in a brand new building, other people have called your house home before you. Blake knew this, but as he states, “treated this house’s past like the junk folder in my email: you know there might be bad stuff in there, but so long as you never open it, it can’t do any harm.” Then he opened it. Uncovering a gruesome story, Blake asks fascinating questions about where we live. Does a house soak in vibes? I was amazed to learn tears and sweat glands pump out “chemosignals” other people detect, not only in the moment but after the source has gone. Miss Habersham’s house must have oozed sadness for years. Blake traces his house’s history back to the very beginning. You can imagine the lives of the people that stood on those floors before him: “When Queen Victoria died, it was inhabited by a cordwainer – a shoemaker – and his family. When the first world war broke out, a wonderfully described ‘cutter of fancy materials’ was here with his wife and three children.” Knowing what Blake learns about a later inhabitant, I may not have stayed in that house, but Blake and his daughter do. The next family to make it their home. —CW
Hannah Ongley | Document | November 28, 2022 | 3,752 words
In my house, we worship at several artistic altars, two of which are Nicolas Cage and horror movies. My husband is a devotee of the former, I of the latter. So I can’t help but feel that this conversation between Cage and horror auteur John Carpenter was made specially for us. Situated here as two of the weirdest, most talented figures in modern Hollywood — no arguments from me — the pair talk about James Dean’s “perfect” career, how to know if your child is an actor, some very discomfiting alpacas, and doing charades with Anthony Perkins. Their dialogue is a delight. Time to rewatch Halloween and Mandy. —SD
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When it comes to conservation, it’s common knowledge that preserving the environment is critical. It’s perhaps less widely known but just as important to understand the cultural behaviour of whales — the practices and habits passed on from generation to generation — that can help or hinder pods to succeed.
(Biologist Hal) Whitehead uses the belugas of Hudson Bay, in northern Canada, as an example. At least three populations of belugas migrate to Hudson Bay in the summer, and Whitehead focuses on two: One that goes to the eastern side and one to the western side. Which side a whale goes to is a matter of family tradition that baby belugas learn from their mothers. Decades ago, commercial whalers overharvested the eastern population. Yet new generations of eastern belugas kept following their mothers to that more dangerous side of the bay. The eastern population became dangerously depleted while the western whales thrived.
When a pocket of animals with specialized knowledge is lost, “it’s not like it’s immediately replaced. And so you start to blink out unique cultures,” he said. “And that is a loss of adaptive potential going forward.”
Electric vehicles are supposed to support a healthier environment, but in Indonesia, home to some of the world’s largest reserves of nickel, a key component in EV batteries, the burgeoning industry is doing the opposite. Fueled by China’s appetite for EVs and contracts with companies like Tesla, pockets of Indonesia are facing environmental and social devastation, including health problems that the story’s author suffered herself:
Data shared with Rest of World by the community health center of Bahodopi shows that, since 2018, upper respiratory infections have been at the top of the list of diseases in the district — nearly 7,000 cases in total — with health workers claiming that the dust from the industrial complex is the main culprit. There were 928 upper respiratory infection cases in 2021, higher than the 855 cases reported the year before. Health workers told Rest of World that in 2018 and 2019, as IMIP expanded to add more steel factories and coal-fired plants, the construction had led to even more dust. In those two years combined, they counted a total of 5,153 respiratory infections.
…
A few days before leaving Sulawesi, I experienced first-hand some of the consequences of the industrial activity that villagers had spoken about. It started with an intense pain in my left eye, which I initially brushed off. But the pain only grew, and rapidly developed into a severe eye infection.
Later, in Jakarta, doctors said that the infection was likely caused by the dust and other air pollutants that I had been exposed to in the industrial areas I had visited. The infection was so severe that it damaged my cornea, and I was bedridden for weeks, unable to see. Today, months after our visit, I’m still waiting to fully regain the function of my left eye, which can only be restored by a cornea transplant.
If we’re going to send humans to Mars or beyond, we need to figure out how they’ll survive the monthlong (or yearslong) voyage — and oh, by the way, they’ll need to do so without food, since it’s logistically impossible to bring enough for that kind of trip. As it turns out, the animal kingdom has shown us a possible way forward: torpor. With tautness and humor, Brendan Koerner investigates researchers’ long-ranging quest to turn astronauts into icetronauts.
But if hibernation does indeed become a realistic option for humans, even those of us in decent shape may find it tempting. Induced torpor seems to offer a roundabout path to realizing at least a couple of transhumanist dreams. Like life extension, perhaps—provided you’re not purely bent on extending your conscious life. As Raymond J. Hock noted in 1960, hibernation really does seem to offer a fountain of youth. Earlier this year, for example, a team at UCLA found that yellow-bellied marmots, which hibernate for as much as two-thirds of every year, possess much more robust genetic material than might be anticipated based on their chronological ages. “The molecular and physiological responses required for an individual to successfully hibernate may prevent aging,” the researchers wrote in Nature.
This a beautiful essay about friendship. A friendship between two men, and a friendship with a dog. It is also about dealing with grief after a member of your pack passes on. Have a tissue handy.
He learned that in 2016, the salesman’s best friend had died of cancer, and that two years later, that man’s son, also a close friend, had died from ALS. He learned how David and Lucky had met, and how much the dog meant to the salesman. He learned that Lisa Smith-Batchen considered Lucky “not a dog, but a special being.” He learned that in the salesman’s view, “Lucky chose me, I didn’t choose him.”
As the planet continues to warm and change, people around the world will face more large-scale natural disasters. Rescuing survivors is a priority, but in resource-strapped countries like India, putting processes in place to manage the dead is also crucial.
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami “laid bare India’s own lack of forensic infrastructure,” writes Deepa Padmanaban. In this Fifty Two feature, Padmanaban details what improvements the country must make to better prepare teams in times of emergency — not just first responder training, but victim identification and, as a result, more support and compassionate care for victims’ families. Padmanaban notes that Argentinian grandmothers in the late 1970s were the first people to suggest forensics as a way to identity victims — their abducted daughters and grandchildren — and goes on to describe how fields like forensic odontology (looking at the teeth of the dead) can be a reliable process of victim identification in India.
Prioritising the living over the dead is a given. But the dead have an afterlife, particularly for their families, and ignoring them has terrible consequences, both in the matter of emotional closure, and other, material ones. In the absence of a positive identification and death certificate, families can only report their loved ones as “missing.” Their lives can, quite literally, be put on hold.
This is at the heart of the humanitarian approach to forensics, a shift from the more traditional approach that deals with criminal investigations, law and order, and evidence. For survivors, humanitarian forensics helps provide closure, and a chance to face the future with a measure of peace. For state agencies and record keepers, it offers a chance to plan for and protect the fragile future of all humans.
