Given its subject matter on unsolved murders, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call this a “feel-good” story. But Scott Ostler’s profile on Matt Hutchinson, a curious and determined Bay Area detective with a knack for solving decades-long cold cases in his free time, is a great read. In the seven years Hutchinson has been part of the robbery-homicide unit at the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety, he has solved eight cold cases—six homicides and two sexual assaults. Thinking out of the box, and also using today’s DNA testing and crime-solving tools, “[h]e has solved more cold cases in three years than any single detective in the last 15,” and in the process has helped to bring peace and closure to some of the victims’ surviving family members. Not bad for someone off the clock.
So in March, Hutchison contacted Marta Mena-Gordon, who was 9 years old when her big sister was murdered. He told her he was digging back into the case, then followed up with updates. Mena-Gordon welcomed the reports.
“When he would call, his voice, he just has this very sincere voice,” Mena-Gordon said. “It was like, OK, he brought us some hope. It devastated my father and mother not knowing anything.”
In early October, Hutchison flew to Portland to meet with Mena-Gordon. He was able to tell her that the case had been solved and closed, and although her sister’s killer was dead, they knew who he was.
“It was quite a moment, definitely,” Mena-Gordon said. “So many emotions. Lots of happy tears.”
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During a wave of international private adoptions beginning in the ’60s, thousands of Guatemalan children were taken from their families. Jaladoras, or baby brokers hired by lawyers, often coerced or tricked Indigenous Mayan and poor women to give up their babies. In some cases, such as that of “adoptee” Dolores Preat, children were outright kidnapped.
It was illegal for baby brokers to offer birth mothers money, but it sometimes happened. More often, though, they used other methods of persuasion. Linares Beltranena’s paperwork, along with police records and Guatemalan news reports, showed that his jaladoraswould approach poor, often Indigenous women who were visibly pregnant – at home, at bus stops, in hospitals, in marketplaces. Baby brokers sometimes also worked as midwives, maids, nurses, obstetricians or civil registrars, or they ran nurseries or daycares. They would ask if the mother-to-be had money to raise a child, or if the child would be better off with a foreign family in a country with more opportunities. Some jaladoras carried photo albums, which they flipped through in front of pregnant women, showing them Guatemalan boys and girls in the comfortable homes of middle-class families abroad. Many of the women they approached already had young children they were struggling to feed.
Linares Beltranena’s files contained photographs of the adoptive couple, often pictured in classic all-American scenes, like sitting together at a picnic table on a front deck with their barbecue grill visible behind them. One couple sent a photo of the whole family out jogging together. Interiors feature bourgeois comfort: pianos, wall-to-wall carpeting, fireplaces.
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The rollercoaster of losing your health. Analyzing the film The Zone of Interest. An unusual con artist. Calculating love versus genetics. Recalling a dark childhood. All that—and more—in our first edition of 2024.
Tom Scocca | New York Magazine | January 2, 2024 | 6,677 words
Sometimes it feels like medical mystery stories are everywhere. Long COVID. Rare disorders. The New York Times’ ever-popular “Diagnosis” column. It’s a genre to itself, and by now we know that genre’s beats: onset, frustration, revelation, closure. Tom Scocca’s own experience, though, enjoys no such arc. From the moment he notices symptoms—innocuous at first, but not for long—uncertainty is his only constant. “I’ve told the story over and over, to various doctors, till it almost sounds like a coherent narrative,” he writes. It’s not a coherent narrative, of course. That’s not how these things work, no matter what similar stories may suggest. But Scocca meets the incoherence head-on with spare, even wry, prose: “I started buying five-pound bags of rice from H Mart instead of ten-pound ones. Then I just started getting rice delivered.” His malady takes root during a professional down period, and financial dread lurks in the background here, making each new physical issue that much more harrowing. He finishes a recruiting call before going to the ER; he has a phone interview hours after he wakes up from a muscle biopsy. All the while, his body betrays him in novel and confounding ways. That’s not to say he doesn’t find some measure of relief. He does. What he doesn’t find is answers, which is exactly what makes this piece so destabilizing. “This is what disability advocates have said all along,” he writes, “not that it usually sinks in: The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times.” —PR
Giles Harvey | The New York Times Magazine | December 19, 2023 | 4,710 words
I have seen The Zone of Interest, the film that this article is about, twice now. It is a hypnotizing, unnerving masterpiece. For the unacquainted, a quick description: the movie is about Rudolf Höss, the real-life commandant of Auschwitz, who lived in a home that shared a garden wall with the camp. Director Jonathan Glazer never shows audiences what goes on inside the camp—though you hear it; god, do you hear it—choosing instead to focus his lens on the quotidian existence of Höss, his wife, and their five children. The effect of this bifurcation of sight and sound is extraordinary, as writer Giles Harvey explains in this essay. “The average viewer is unlikely to see himself in the figure of a death-camp C.E.O., but a family that sleepwalks through their own lives, heedless of the suffering that surrounds them, may feel closer to home,” Harvey writes. “To a greater or lesser extent, we all ignore and deny the pain of others, including—perhaps especially—when that pain is inflicted by our own governments on designated enemies.” It is fitting that such an astonishing movie is the subject of one of the best pieces of film criticism I’ve read in ages. Harvey pulls from philosophy, history, and conversations with Glazer and his team to situate The Zone of Interest both in the canon of Holocaust films and in our present moment. See: Trumpism. See also: Gaza. “When I first started on this, I genuinely couldn’t get my head around how a society could have gone along with these hideous ideas,” Glazer tells Harvey at one point. “During the time of making the film, it’s become blindingly obvious.”—SD
Chris Walker | 5280 | December 29, 2023 | 6,863 words
As I browsed links I’d missed over the holidays, André Carrilho’s colorful illustration for this 5280 story caught my eye. I’m glad I clicked. In my post-holiday COVID haze, not many stories have held my attention, but this piece by Chris Walker, about a con artist named Aaron Clark, was easy to read and enjoy. Clark was a rising star in Colorado’s tech scene in 2020: a promising Black businessman who could spark change at a time when companies pledged to invest more in DEI efforts. But the only thing Clark brought to the table, in any venture, was financial chaos. As Walker follows the trail of breadcrumbs into this mysterious man’s past, he finds a history of business scams in California and abroad in Nairobi’s emerging tech community and a man with a habit of disappearing, changing identities, and starting fresh. But why would someone with the ability to really make an impact resort to this? “In key ways, he never fit the mold of a classic con man,” writes Walker. Ultimately, Clark’s deceit seeded distrust in Colorado’s startup world, now making it harder for Black entrepreneurs and DEI consultants to get buy-in and attract investors. A curious tale of grift. —CLR
Krithika Varagur | Harper’s Magazine | August 1, 2023 | 8,133 words
I had missed this piece when it was originally published by Harper’s in August, but, luckily, it caught my attention after The Guardian published an edited version in December. Nkechi and Subomi first met at work. They first spoke while doing community service together. They first went for a drink at a dive bar, and Nkechi first revealed her genotype after a few days. From the beginning, they knew they had “no business” dating. Subomi had two abnormal S genes for hemoglobin, meaning he had sickle cell disease. Nkechi was a carrier—with one abnormal S gene and one normal A gene. There was a 50 percent chance their children would have the disease. Opening with their love story, Krithika Varagur instantly pulls you into a world where sharing genotype screening is typical, and a social norm is consolidating against two people with sickle cell genes from dating. Perhaps understandable in a society where nearly six million people carry the disease (Nigeria is the sickle cell capital of the world). But what about when love happens, “like a coconut dropping on your head while you’re walking down the street?” Varagur meticulously delves into the people behind the stats, talking to many disease carriers: single, married, separated, parents, and non-parents. But Nkechi and Subomi’s story is the constant thread, and the investment in their tale sheds the most light on how devastating genotype calculations can be. —CW
N.C. Happe | Guernica | December 11, 2023 | 5,021 words
It can be appealing to try to blow the dust off the old you and reinvent yourself in a place where you’re a stranger. As N.C. Happe recounts her move to Canada in this beautiful but sometimes difficult read for Guernica, she recalls her Minnesota childhood and her father’s dark moods and explosive temper alongside the casual—and sometimes invited—violence of the playground. Cinematic details make this essay an immersive read. You can hear a dying deer bleat and imagine its accidental and untimely death. You can feel the author’s cracked dry lips; you can taste the copper when they bleed. “The realization dawned: violence runs in the blood of everything, everywhere,” she writes. “For me, it took leaving the country to learn this. For the doe from my childhood home, it had been as simple and as quietly done as jumping a fence.” What Happe shows us through this thoughtful piece is that while sometimes you can jump the fence and leave home, you might be surprised by what you’re unable to leave behind. —KS
Audience Award
What was our first editor’s pick winner of the year?
Lila Shapiro | The Cut | December 20, 2023 | 6,405 words
At times, this is a slightly uncomfortable read—particularly in discussing why men value younger women. However, it also offers a more balanced and nuanced approach than many a take on this topic, and Lila Shapiro’s writing is as sharp as ever. (The photographs of couples taken on their beds are also strangely fascinating.) —CW
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A multi-level house might feel like the perfect way to share a home your elderly parents. And maybe it is—to a point. As Kevin Chong points out with candor and humor, old dysfunctions die hard. Bookmark this one; you might need to consult it a few times (or a hundred) somewhere down the road.
My wife and I are covering the mortgage for a house on which my mother placed a seven-figure down payment, while I’m taking my mother to appointments, hauling out her garbage, and doing her internet troubleshooting. In exchange, we’re living in a space and a long-gentrified neighbourhood we love, one we couldn’t otherwise afford. We also get free child care that consists of trips for dim sum and lightly supervised iPad time for my eight-year-old daughter.
And yet that narrative still gets steamrolled by the stigma. At an appointment at the kidney clinic, my mom will tell the nurse that we live together. I am always quick to blurt out my qualifiers: WITH MY WIFE! AND MY CHILD! (WHOM I CONCEIVED DOING ADULT THINGS!) ON SEPARATE LEVELS!
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Kanji (rice gruel) is a common feature in South Asian homes, but for some, it is more than just a meal. In this piece, Pallavi Pundir discovers how kanji became a Tamil symbol of resistance in Sri Lanka, and the painful memories it can now invoke. A vivid essay on just how much memory and trauma can be held in a simple dish.
The aftermath of the war brought in sweeping military presence and restrictions in the north and east, even as the country opened up access to the north for war tourism in 2014. Since then, simple acts of remembrance like cooking and serving kanji have become a dangerous form of resistance, often inviting police surveillance and action.
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Richa Kaul Padte suffered from unexplained, debilitating chronic illness including fatigue and dizziness for three years until an orofacial surgeon and pain management specialist discovered that Padte’s severely dislocated jaw was behind her medical problems. For Hazlitt, Padte relates seeing a myriad of medical professionals to no avail and the unusually close doctor-patient relationship she developed with the one person who had offered her some relief.
Over the years, I have often wondered why I so urgently want to be my doctors’ favourite. The most obvious reason is that if doctors like me, they’ll treat me better. There is an undeniable truth to this: doctors’ biases and prejudices often show up in differential treatment. Even if I tell myself it isn’t true for my doctors, surely at some level I know it could be.
At first, my leading theory was that I’m an A+ student, in this as everything else. My doctors give me balance exercises, so I do them religiously. They propose a gluten-free diet, and I ferry beetroot pasta from Bombay to Goa. When there’s homework, I look for extra credit. But if I’ve substituted doctors for teachers, the conjecture falls apart. I was never invested in being the teacher’s pet. I always wanted to be at the top of the class—not the favourite so much as the best.
My partner’s theory is that I have Stockholm syndrome, doctors edition. I’m trapped in their world, and instead of resenting and mistrusting them, I’ve become obsessed with them. There’s some truth to this, too: if I weren’t perpetually stuck in their clinics, in their waiting rooms, at their mercy, I would be free. Instead of freedom, I’ve found love. It helps that like true kidnappers, they keep me oriented toward a hopeful future where—if I follow all their rules—I may one day be liberated.
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A powerful investigation into dating when the genetic odds are against you. Krithika Varagur talks to couples in Nigeria, the sickle cell capital of the world. (Its residents account for about half of all new annual cases of severe hemoglobin disorders worldwide.) The moving case studies show the true struggle of weighing risk against attachment.
From the beginning, Nkechi knew that she and Subomi had “no business dating.” His genotype was SS: he had two abnormal S genes for hemoglobin, the oxygen- carrying protein in his blood. Nkechi’s genotype was AS: she had one abnormal S gene and one normal A gene. Like an estimated quarter of all Nigerians, she was a silent carrier. There was a 50 percent chance that any child they had would suffer from sickle cell disease like their father. This was no light prospect. Subomi’s own childhood had been marred by secrecy and shame over his condition. Nkechi, meanwhile, had lost four cousins to the disease. Those deaths might be understood as products of an earlier, benighted time, when the average Nigerian knew far less about genetic testing and disease management. Today, however, there was a growing consensus— particularly in their college- educated, upper- middle- class milieu—when it came to passing on two sickle cell genes: don’t risk it.
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