Richard A. Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry, is uniquely suited to attest to hallucinogens’ psychological benefits. But as it turns out, all that mind expansion might be completely independent of the whole melting-walls, I-see-the-oneness-of-everything experience. In The Atlantic, he details how and why that is—as well as some of the progress being made.
I don’t mean to discount the delight and power of a transcendent hallucination. Many people who’ve tripped on psychedelics describe the experience as among the most meaningful of their life. And in several studies of psilocybin for depression, the intensity of the trip correlates with the magnitude of the therapeutic effect. A trip is an extraordinary, consciousness-expanding experience that can offer the tripper new insight into her life and emotions. It also feels pretty damn good. But it’s far from the only effect the drugs have on the human brain.
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This week’s edition highlights a series of dispatches from Gaza, a true-crime story about a family of turtle hunters, an essay on the literal messiness of death, a portrait of the last lighthouse keeper in the US, and a can’t-miss profile of a legendary basketball coach with a complicated legacy.
Atef Abu Saif | The Washington Post | October 30, 2023 | 5,279 words
This week marks a month since, in response to attacks by Hamas, Israel launched a campaign of unconscionable violence against the Palestinian people. As of this writing, Israel has slaughtered more than 10,000 men, women, and children. Much has been written about the unfolding genocide—it should not be controversial to use that word—and this stark diary of life under siege is among the most arresting. A raw draft of history, its contents began as voice notes that Atef Abu Saif, a novelist and the minister of culture for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, sent to friends abroad. He was in Gaza, enjoying a morning swim, when the bombing began, and he describes the horrors of the present through the crucial lens of the past. “I often think about the time I was shot as a kid, during the first intifada, and how my mother told me I actually died for a few minutes before being brought back to life,” he says. “Maybe I can do the same this time.” This memory, like many in the diary, is a stark reminder that Israel has oppressed Palestinians in a system of apartheid built on the heels of the mass dispossession of their land 75 years ago. And that is the wellspring: the violence that begets more violence in a devastating cycle. “Just as life is a pause between two deaths,” Atef Abu Saif says, “Palestine, as a place and as an idea, is a timeout in the middle of many wars.” —SD
Sonia Smith | Texas Monthly | November 7, 2023 | 5,973 words
I was hooked from the first line of Sonia Smith’s true-crime tale about the elusive alligator snapper—a large species of turtle found in the southeast US—and the Louisiana family of prolific hunters who poached them for decades. The snapper was declared endangered in the ’70s in Texas, which allowed a protected population to multiply. But that didn’t stop the Dietzes from crossing the border to capture and smuggle them home to sell, the carloads of turtles so heavy they’d sometimes blow out the engine or overwhelm the brakes. Smith’s piece unravels like an engrossing movie. The Dietz relatives, whose lives are deeply embedded in the bayou, are fascinating characters, and so is the Marine-turned-wildlife inspector who grows determined to catch them. My favorites, though, are the two enormous turtles, Brutus and Caesar, who are undoubtedly the most memorable characters by far. —CLR
James McNaughton | Guernica | November 6, 2023 | 5,369 words
James McNaughton’s brother Conor died of an overdose at 27, relapsing after two years of sobriety during which he built a successful roofing business. McNaughton bookends this essay with scenes where he and his family are clearing out Conor’s apartment, literally cleaning up what his brother left behind. Death and grief are messy, and Conor’s passing was no different. But in the face of the sheer force of death, it’s the subtlety of McNaughton’s writing that will knock you flat: “We stopped by Publix and rented a Rug Doctor. We signed a contract on the counter that said we would return it clean.” That last sentence is filthy with nuance, as is the whole piece. McNaughton deftly juxtaposes those there to help with those who prey on vulnerable people like Conor, struggling to stay sober. He exposes the scurrying cockroaches using Conor to further their own agenda, those out to make a quick buck off a distressed sale, off the distressed family of the deceased. This is by no means an easy read, whether you’ve lost someone dear to you or not. But sometimes braving what’s dark and messy—equipped with only words as a beam of light to shine on the dirty work of grief—is the one way you can try to get clean. —KS
Dorothy Wickenden | The New Yorker | October 30, 2923 | 4,500 words
Sally Snowman is the 70th keeper in the history of Boston Light lighthouse. She is also the first woman. And the last. When Snowman retires, the station will be “unmanned”—“unwomaned,” as she puts it—and Boston Light will go the way of many a lighthouse before it. (The United States currently has about 850 lighthouses, but only half are active, and these use automated eclectic lamps.) In this lovely ode to a dying profession, Dorothy Wickenden looks at the history of Boston Light: tragic deaths, minimal pay, unbearable loneliness, and madness. It’s a ride. There’s also stuff on the mechanics of lighthouse lenses, if you’re into that sort of thing, but for me, it was Wickenden’s honest descriptions of lightkeeper life, with only the “moan of the foghorn and the ceaseless crashing of the waves” for company, that drew me in. A piece of history worth remembering. —CW
Kevin Koenig | GQ Magazine | November 7, 2023 | 6,248 words
I spent this past weekend in the college town where I grew up. This college town also happens to be where legendary basketball coach Bob Knight cemented his complicated legacy. (Yes, I was at the game where he threw the chair.) Through three national championships and more wins than any college coach at the time, he loomed over the place like a god—a temperamental, wrathful god, but a god all the same. After Knight died last week, a deluge of remembrances followed. To a one, they celebrated the man’s accomplishments and acknowledged his flaws. Yet none of them came close to capturing him the way Kevin Koenig’s 2015 profile in Angler’s Journal did. Three days with Knight fishing in the Bahamas. Three days of witnessing his locker-room joviality giving way to a tempest. Three days of conversation and combat, drama and détente. It’s a portrait that feels complete, and a portrait I never thought I’d read. I missed it the first time around; thankfully, GQ reprinted it this week, with a foreword from Koenig unpacking the aftermath of his warts-and-all approach. If you love sports, it’s a can’t-miss. Even if you don’t, it’s still mandatory reading. Rarely these days do profiles steep you in a sense of place, but Koenig’s bucks that trend. You’ll feel the spray in your face, the sun on your arms—and in the many moments where Koenig’s questions encounter Knight’s volatility, the burn of shame on your neck. —PR
Luc Rinaldi | Toronto Life | October 31, 2023 | 6,588 words
A detailed investigation into the ease of buying a “suicide kit” online and the forums that peddle them. Luc Rinaldi focuses on the case study of Kenneth Law—who built his business during the pandemic—and the people who have used his kits to die. A difficult read, but one that sheds light on a dark part of the web that needs awareness. —CW
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Chances are you didn’t read Kevin Koenig’s profile of legendary college basketball coach Bob Knight when it ran in Anglers Journal in 2015. Good thing, then, that GQ syndicated the piece this week after Knight’s recent death. Whether or not you’re a sports fan, this is the kind of profile that doesn’t come around often: intimate, unvarnished, and content to spool out a three-day encounter with all the patience of a fly fisher.
Think of the strongest, most charismatic personality you’ve ever met. Now multiply it by 10. That’s Bob Knight. He is constantly testing people. Bullying, cajoling, charming, asking pointed questions out loud so everyone can hear. One minute he will lean over conspiratorially and whisper a joke in your ear. You will laugh, because Knight really is a funny bastard. You will think, This man really likes me. Then you will ask him a question he doesn’t quite like the bend of. And he will look you square in the eye with nothing short of malice and go stone silent. You will think, Wow, this guy actually hates me. Truth be told, in my five days with Knight I was never quite sure where I stood with him, which is ironic, since Knight is famous for not mincing words. His naked contempt for the media is no secret. He calls us “the press,” and spits it out like it’s an epithet.
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For The Baffler, Caroline Tracey reports on the important work of the humanitarian forensic anthropologists working with Operation Identification (OpID), a program helping to bring closure to loved ones by identifying migrants who died in their attempt to enter the United States from Mexico. A fascinating discipline, “. . . .humanitarian forensic anthropology starts with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team: ‘the world’s first professional war crimes exhumation group,’ as Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman write in Mengele’s Skull.”
The women were forensic anthropologists with Operation Identification, or OpID, which is based at Texas State University and conducts exhumations across South Texas, seeking to identify and repatriate migrants who have been improperly buried after dying while attempting to cross from Mexico into the United States. The hole where they were working was located in the Maverick County Cemetery, a grass plot the size of a city block. It was so close to the U.S.-Mexico border that you could smell the Rio Grande—at least when you stepped away from the hole, which smelled like decomposition.
It was the last day of work; the team had exhumed fifteen bodies in the previous two weeks, and they believed there were four more still in the ground. By the end of the day, they would uncover them all, carefully lift them out, and perform “intake” procedures, which entailed removing their clothes and placing them in Ziploc bags, taking notes on any identifying features, and preparing them to be transported to the laboratory at Texas State.
Many of the anthropologists said the hardest part of the work is not handling the remains themselves but coming face-to-face with effects—the keepsakes, talismans, and handwritten lists of phone numbers that once represented the hope of a new life. During one intake, Konda grabbed a shoe and checked inside, since that’s where migrants often store important paperwork. She found an identification card. “I happened to look at the birthday. He was only two years older than me, and his birthday was around the time he probably drowned,” she told me. “He probably thought he would have made it by his birthday.” She added: “I learned that I can’t think like that because I’ll cry. Crying is OK, but I was not hydrated enough to risk crying in that hot tent!
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Dorothy Wickenden’s case study of Sally Snowman, the last lighthouse keeper in America, is the starting point of her journey into the history of the lighthouse keeper. A dangerous and lonely profession, it’s a fascinating one to honor before it finally goes extinct.
Commercial ship pilots tend to be hardheaded, by necessity, but even they say that lighthouses still have a place. Captain Brian Fournier learned his trade as a tugboat operator in Boston Harbor. “Boston Light was my back yard,” he told me. These days, he generally pilots oil tankers in Maine, and like other professional navigators he uses G.P.S. Still, he prefers to rely on the evidence of his eyes and the reassurance of a long tradition. In low visibility, Fournier said, “I’m looking for the flash of a buoy, the flash of the lighthouse.”
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James McNaughton recounts cleaning out his brother Conor’s apartment after Conor died of an overdose, relapsing after two years of sobriety. This stunning essay confronts not only grief but the bottom feeders of the world who prey on vulnerable people to profit off their distress.
After my younger brother died, I began to get calls from people who wanted to buy my parents’ house. As I write this, Conor has been dead for over three years. Nobody outside of family much asks about him anymore. My mother speaks to Conor on her hikes. My father talks to him early, when he putters in the garden, and last thing before bed, lauds and complines, morning and evening prayers. I lack that open line. Sometimes I nod internally to Conor’s soprano laugh; other times, in the shower, an unbidden fuuuuck escapes my front teeth. On a jog between magnolia trees leafless and blooming, I say suddenly to my wife: I mourn his lost possibility. Or I say: The present is against grief. It sides cruelly with what is.
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In the ’70s, Texas declared the alligator snapper—a large species of freshwater turtle found primarily in the southeastern U.S.—as threatened. It became illegal to capture them, as well as traffic them out of the state. But that didn’t stop the Dietzes, a Louisiana family of prolific turtle hunters. In this engrossing true-crime feature, Sonia Smith recounts how a wildlife inspector infiltrated the family’s decades-long turtle poaching operation.
The sale of alligator snapping turtle meat was banned in Louisiana in 2004 (and has long been illegal in Texas), but Colo, Viola, and other local sellers had no trouble finding a wide array of buyers for their catches, including a former starting pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, an auto mechanic, and a local businessman who has since been elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives.
Guidry asked him to estimate how many turtles weighing more than one hundred pounds he had caught in Toledo Bend. Without hesitation, Colo answered “five hundred.” “There ain’t nobody gonna ever catch as many turtles as I caught, because you could wipe out all the rest that they’ve got in Louisiana and Texas and never have as much as I caught,” Colo boasted. “That’s all I used to do. Twice a week I’d go.”
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