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This week we’re featuring stories about restorative justice, donated bodies allegedly sold at Harvard, an ER doctor who recognized her own catastrophic symptoms, a fascinating career pivot, and chimpanzees on the lam.

1. After the Hit-and-Run

Mari Cohen | Jewish Currents | September 28, 2023 | 7,745 words

In 2015, I was on an Amtrak train that derailed, killing eight people, including the young man sitting next to me. I was lucky to escape with relatively minor physical injuries. In the years since, I have thought often about the engineer of the train, who was acquitted in a jury trial of a series of charges related to the crash. He had no intention to cause harm, and he certainly wasn’t responsible for the systemic issues that, had Amtrak addressed them proactively, might have mitigated the scale of the tragedy. I don’t think he should be made to suffer—I have no doubt that living with the knowledge of what happened while he was driving the train is a terrible enough burden. But this doesn’t mean that I’m not upset about the crash, a feeling that wasn’t really assuaged by the compensation that Amtrak provided victims. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to talk to the engineer, because in the exchange of words there might be some measure of healing for both sides. A similar notion is at the heart of Mari Cohen’s beautiful essay about being the victim of a hit-and-run. In the aftermath, Cohen began reporting on restorative justice approaches to traffic crashes, which advocates believe can “better serve the needs of all involved, creating a confidential space where drivers could express remorse without legal consequences, and where victims could receive the apologies they were looking for.” Through readings, interviews, and her own experience, Cohen considers whether restorative justice is a viable alternative to criminal justice. She suggests that it might be if we can shift our perceptions about closure. “I am trying to let go of the idea that a solution has to do everything,” she writes, “in order to do something.” —SD

2. Their Bodies Were Donated to Harvard. Then they Went Missing

Brenna Ehrlich | Rolling Stone | December 4, 2023 | 4,937 words

This grim tale explains the bizarre crossover between morgues and the oddities world. Bodies donated to Harvard (via the Anatomical Gift Program) may have inadvertently ended up as collectibles, after Cedric Lodge, the head of the Harvard morgue, allegedly allowed people to come in and pick out human remains to buy and take home. Yep, someone who gave their body for science may now have a body part on a collector’s shelf. Brenna Ehrlich unpicks this disturbing story for Rolling Stone and finds other morgue owners accused of the same crime. It’s hard to fathom that people in such positions of trust could be selling their charges or that anyone would actually want to buy them—a macabre segment of the world to discover. But it’s by talking to the families that Ehrlich shows us the true horror of this case: grieving family members are now unsure if they have the correct ashes or if their relative has ended up as an unusual knickknack. A touching detail was the number of people keen to discuss the secret recipes of their loved ones (William R. Buchanan had a famous carrot cake, Doreen Gordon some excellent macaroons, and Adele Mazzone was good at pork fried rice). I appreciated the care taken by Ehrlich to humanize those who donated their bodies in the first place. —CW

3. The Train Wrecked in Slow Motion

Grace Glassman | Slate | November 26, 2023 | 5,038 words

In an ongoing medical emergency, lay patients and their families often have no idea exactly how dangerous a situation has become as specialists and professionals speak in rapid-fire numbers and acronyms only they understand. (Strangely, if you don’t know precisely how dire things are, you also don’t understand how bad things could get, and this incomprehension can sometimes be a kindness.) As an emergency room doctor, Grace Glassman had no such luxury: when she went into hemorrhagic shock after delivering her third child via C-section, she knew she would die without heroic medical intervention and she asked for as much on the way to the operating room for life-saving surgery. “My doctor was running next to my gurney,” she writes. “I found her hand and said, ‘Dr. P., please, do everything. For my kids.’ I was shocked to see her wipe away a tear.” This piece is a master class in the personal essay: it unfolds with perfect pacing, placing you in the hospital room as trauma unfolds, delivering critical context you need to understand Glassman’s peril without overwhelming you with medical detail. It can be said that birth stories are all individual and universal, yet Glassman begets a piece that belies the genre. —KS

4. How to Build a Better Motivational Speaker

Tad Friend | The New Yorker | December 4, 2023 | 8,925 words

Part of being an aging rap fan means periodically being confronted with bizarre “what happened to X” moments. To wit: learning that Jesse Jaymes, the man behind the ill-conceived 1991 oddity “Shake It Like a White Girl,” is now Jesse Itzler, a billionaire (by marriage) and triathlete (by hobby) who is also bent on becoming a top-tier motivational coach. I still don’t know how to react to this development, but at the very least I can say that it gave Tad Friend his latest A+ profile. This is a window into a world that feels like the end state of every “optimization” podcast you’ve ever heard: “The conference-goers, mostly in their thirties and forties, have the air of commuters who missed the first train to the city and are determined to crowd onto the next one. They seek trade secrets and, better still, the mind-set to deploy them.” Personal development, as it’s currently known, is a massive industry, awarding (mostly) men six figures for a single speech at a popular conference. That’s where Itzler is aiming, though under the guise of helping people connect with gratitude and overcome self-doubt. But while there’s no shortage of great scenework—the green room before addressing people who sell dialysis machines, a spontaneous swim race against Olympic athletes—the real draw here is the keen deconstruction of the mythologies we establish. Last year, Friend’s feature about the world of door-to-door salesmen captivated me in similar fashion; he’s able to chronicle a certain kind of masculinity like few others can, teasing out its tensions and deceptions until what starts as a profile of one person becomes an X-ray of an archetype. You may not have heard this tune before, but you won’t be able to shake it. —PR

5. One Swedish Zoo, Seven Escaped Chimpanzees

Imogen West-Knights | The Guardian | December 5, 2023 | 7,400 words

You know right from the start that this one’s going to break your heart. But you carry on and brace yourself, because you can also tell, from the opening line, that Imogen West-Knights will deliver a riveting piece of reporting. Last December, the beloved chimpanzees in Sweden’s Furuvik Zoo escaped their enclosure. It took the zoo staff and keepers 72 hours to contain them to their ape house, and West-Knights reconstructs the ordeal with deft pacing and great detail. As the hours pass, the zoo must weigh the safety of the zookeepers and public at large against that of the chimps, and the situation grows more distressing. The photography in the piece—snowy landscapes of the zoo’s grounds that look more sinister than serene—add to the unsettling nature of the story, as you can’t help but imagine these great apes loose in the cold, some in their final moments. (You also wonder: why are we subjecting these animals to a place that’s too cold for them six months out of the year?) This is a sad read, but it sparks an important conversation around zoo safety protocols, climate-specific zoos, and whether zoos should even exist at all. —CLR

Audience Award

Do you hear timpani? This is the piece our readers loved most this week:

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In this edition, we recommend:

• A journalist’s essay about her childhood—and finding a voice through words.
• A story about a drug overdose prevention hotline operator who saves lives.
• A look into whether we can harness AI to communicate with whales.
• A portrait of Louisiana and singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams.
• A glimpse into sumo wrestling, a sport that’s becoming more popular in America.

1. I Never Called Her Momma

Jenisha Watts | The Atlantic | September 13, 2023 | 11,129 words

Journalist Jenisha Watts was raised in Kentucky, in part by her mom Trina Renee Watts, and in part by her granny. At one time, Trina was a promising track star. She loved words and was accepted to Western Kentucky University. But when she became pregnant with Jenisha, she dropped out. Soon, Trina was addicted to drugs, with five children from five different fathers, often leaving the kids alone when she left to get high. How did everything go wrong, seemingly so suddenly? Jenisha, a senior editor at The Atlantic, unravels a tangled family history skein by skein, discovering that Trina was sexually abused by her stepfather, Big Dishman, childhood trauma that became generational when Trina spiraled into addiction. Jenisha goes to Florida to live with relatives; her siblings went into the child welfare system. They never gained a stable living situation, causing damage that spurred their own addictions. This is a very tough read. It is a master class in craft, a bold testament to courage in the face of repeated humiliation. The final line of this piece is the most triumphant and inspiring sentence I have read this year. I won’t spoil it for you. It speaks to a truth: that we come into this world with part of our story written for us unless we can stand up, take the pen, and start to write the story for ourselves. —KS

2. The Woman on the Line

Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris | Slate | September 10, 2023 | 3,418 words

“Alive is better than clean.” This belief guides the operators who talk to drug users who dial the Never Use Alone (NUA) hotline, a service they can call while they use alone. If they become unresponsive during the call, the operator then sends help. This moving story by Aymann Ismail—a companion piece to Mary Harris’ This American Life episode—follows Jessica Blanchard, one such operator in Southwest Georgia, who takes these calls from her cellphone. Blanchard, a former nurse and NUA’s education director, is also a mother to an addict; she has a “mama spirit,” a sixth sense, and knows within a few minutes of talking to someone whether she’ll need to call EMS. Critics ask: Does this approach to overdose prevention enable drug use? Isn’t supplying your own daughter with a clean needle a step in the wrong direction? Blanchard is nonjudgmental, caring, and quite literally an angel, giving each person on the other end of the line another chance. As Ismail shows, the work of NUA makes a strong case for harm reduction, and how treating others with dignity is not only compassionate, but life-saving. —CLR

3. Can We Talk to Whales?

Elizabeth Kolbert | The New Yorker | September 4, 2023 | 8,276 words

David Gruber is the kind of man who contemplates such questions as “What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark?” He’s the kind of man I want to read about. One of the founders of the Cetacean Translation Initiative—Project CETI for short—Gruber is currently trying to decode sperm whale click patterns. In a nutshell: he wants to talk to whales. (I presume he has questions for them, too.) Animals having language can be a fraught topic in the scientific community, but Gruber has gathered an impressive group that includes big names from the artificial intelligence field. The theory is that with enough data machine learning, algorithms could be taught to understand whale clicks. However, getting the data requires sticking a recording device on a suction cup to the back of a whale—no mean feat, particularly with a reporter watching. Despite the odd wayward recording device merrily bopping about the Caribbean Sea, the team is persevering. I am glad. A lot is at stake with the development of AI models, but a better understanding of nature would be in the plus column. This piece gives you a lot to think about but rewards you with some incredible scenes I will let you read to discover. —CW

4. Lucinda Williams and the Idea of Louisiana

Wyatt Williams | The Bitter Southerner | September 4, 2023 | 6,303 words

When I opened the email from The Bitter Southerner on September 5, I saw that they were sharing a new piece about Lucinda Williams. They had my attention. Then I noticed the author: Wyatt Williams (no relation). I sat up straight. I remembered Williams from “Eating the Whale” at Harper’s Magazine, a piece I savored, start to finish. That feeling when you know something is going to be good, so very good? I had it. I ingested this piece over a few days because I didn’t want it to be over. Williams’ mother and the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams were born a few months apart in Louisiana in 1953, though this is no mere profile of Lucinda or a survey of the author’s personal history. Williams traces her voice through his life from childhood car rides to porch evenings spent listening to her songs with his mother, songs that evoke the “idea of Louisiana,” a waterlogged place slowly being washed away, populated by people trying to get by despite poverty, abuse, and alcoholism. What captivated me about this piece is that Williams by no means comes to terms with his mixed feelings about his home state, even after a deep study of Lucinda’s work, saying, “But if you asked for an explanation why I love this place, the only answer would be just the same as why I hate it.” What you end up with is a profound portrait of a place and a family, where if you look hard enough, beauty still resides if you choose to see it. —KS

5. “I Shall Not Be Moved”: Inside a New York City Sumo Wrestling Club

Jackson Wald | GQ | September 13, 2023 | 2,725 words

When you first meet James Grammer, the central character of this underdog sports tale, you’d be forgiven for thinking something along the lines of this again? The seeming disconnect of a white sumo wrestler, or any athlete in a sport that tradition (or racism) has deemed “not theirs,” has fueled many a glib fish-out-of-water piece. Thankfully, Jackson Wald’s story fully ignores that trope, and Grammer becomes one of the most interesting people I met this week. While sumo has grown in the U.S. over the past few years, it’s still a curiosity; when Grammer and his fellow enthusiasts began practicing in a Brooklyn park, they had to deal with onlookers asking to join or even betting on their matches. Grammer wants to be a champion, but the charm of his story lies less in his quest for greatness than in his human complexity. Before a match, most sumos think about their opponents’ weakness. Not Grammer. “As a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism,” Wald writes, “he believes in a series of deities, including ones that are fierce and wrathful, and that as he’s staring his opponent directly in the eyes, he imagines he and his opponent as two forearm hairs on one of the evil deities, blowing against each other in the wind.” Yes, you’ll find the hallmarks of a good niche sports piece—a giant boa constrictor, a guy who seems to want to be a samurai, Wald sparring with the 340-found Grammer to predictable results—but it’s Grammer himself you’ll remember, and particularly the man he is outside the dohyo. —PR

Audience Award

The story our audience loved this week:

In that instant, Blanchard unlearned everything she had been taught in nursing school about drug addiction. “We’re taught drugs are bad, ‘Just Say No,’ deputy dog, D.A.R.E. That’s the kind of stuff we were taught. That’s not realistic,” she said. “We were taught, ‘Well, you did it to yourself.’ That was the mantra. For some reason, that didn’t feel right to me. I was often deemed a soft, bleeding-heart pushover. I thought I was just being nice.”

After that, Blanchard became involved in harm reduction. “I didn’t want her to die. This whole thing—every fucking thing I do is about her not dying. Then about her and her homie not dying. Now it’s about the entire town,” she said.

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I recently recommended a novel to a friend with my highest form of praise, one I assumed would make her take it from my hands without hesitation. It moved me to tears, I said, holding the book in my palms like a sacred offering.

Crying has accompanied some of the most profound moments of my life. An airport farewell with no promise of reunion. Getting accepted into my dream university. Heartbreak. Daydreaming about the future. Losing a pet. Adopting a new one. 

When I say that a book has made me cry, what I’m really saying is: This is part of the canon of some of the most profound moments of my life. 

And that’s why, when my friend didn’t want to borrow the book based on my recommendation, it hit me like a sucker punch.

But Rachel, you cry at everything, she said with the same matter-of-fact-ness that one might use when saying the sky is blue.

She has a point. I am a bit of a crier. While crying has featured in some of my most life-defining moments, I can also be set off anywhere, anytime, by almost anything. In the last week alone, I’ve cried looking at a social media account of a husky puppy and older cat (who are best friends), watching a sports documentary about a basketball team I don’t even like, and retelling the ending of my favorite zombie movie.

But so what if I sometimes put on a sad playlist so that I can dance around and cry the big ugly tears? So what if I replay Aragorn’s speech before the big battle in The Return of the King (it always gets me)? Does that make my tears less meaningful? 

While my emotions tend to be close to the surface, there are social codes even I hate to break. I’ve tried on sunglasses while shopping post-breakup to shield my puffy eyes from strangers. I’ve pretended to have something stuck in my contact lens when heading to a scary doctor’s appointment. And I’ve lost the ability to speak in front of my Ph.D. supervisor, all too conscious that standing my ground would open the floodgates. Crying can be cathartic in some settings; in others, it’s just plain embarrassing.

I’ve curated this reading list because I want to unpack our cultural and personal attitudes toward crying. Do our tears mean less if they’re free-flowing? How valuable are the movies and books that move us to tears? From where do we develop our attitudes about crying? How do our cultural upbringings, race, gender, and sexuality factor into our individual and collective relationships with emotional expression? What does it mean to cry in communion with others? Can tears be understood through a lens of rebellion and power?

So gather ’round with a box of tissues—then read ’em and weep, fellow criers. 

For Crying Out Loud: Both Personal and Political, Wailing Disrupts the Social Order (Renee Simms, Guernica, November 2020)

“The usual occasion for public wailing is death,” Renee Simms writes for Guernica. While funerals are ostensibly a time for communal grieving, my own experiences have largely consisted of suppressing emotions to avoid making people uncomfortable. When a sob escapes someone’s chest, it echoes throughout the building unanswered, the rest of us politely averting our eyes from the sobber. At funerals, we share in the knowledge that we are all grieving, and yet, within my own communities, there are limits to how much grief is socially acceptable to display in front of fellow mourners.

In this essay, Simms recounts her uncle’s funeral, where expectations of suppressed grief were punctuated by her auntie’s wailing. As the “disgraced first wife,” as Simms refers to her, Simms’ auntie was expected to suppress her pain. Instead, she grieved aloud, wailing so that no one could pretend otherwise. Other women soon joined in. Situating her auntie’s piercing sobs against the backdrop of anti-Black racism and trauma, Simms explores how individual grief is tangled up with collective trauma, and how the vulnerability of public wailing can repair communal ties along with providing personal catharsis. Simms draws from Black feminists like Patricia Hill Collins and Audre Lorde, scenes from Spike Lee films, and religious traditions to explore public wailing as ritual and disruption.

In hindsight, my aunt’s act of wailing at the funeral was an assertion of her standing within our community. She dared to speak about her love for her ex-husband when everyone wanted her silent. Despite attempts to shame her about her failed marriage, she publicly mourned her loss. Her cries proclaimed that what had been done to her had been done to all of us. By piercing the silence of the church and daring to be vulnerable, she made us feel our connection to each other. Within minutes, other mourners began openly weeping or talking, and embracing my aunt. They acknowledged her pain and belonging. Through vulnerability, she asserted her power and reestablished the communal ties that sexism and racism had torn apart.

Crying, a Dissertation (Éireann Lorsung, Memoir Land, April 2023)

What does it mean to exist both as a scholar and as a feeler? Can you even be both, or do emotions and intellect not mix? In this personal essay, Éireann Lorsung reflects on her years as a Ph.D. student—a period when she cried regularly—and wrestles with the claim that there’s an “either/or” when it comes to thinking and crying. She writes:

My tears seemed like a sign that I was unsuitable for serious scholarship. But that isn’t quite right. In my experience, crying was not divorced from knowing; it was simply farther out, past the language I had at the time. I knew; I just couldn’t talk about it yet. 

While Lorsung’s essay resonates with me because I had a similar Ph.D. experience (lots of tears and tissues, lots of justifying human emotions in academic writing), her observations and insights extend beyond academia. In everyday life, people find ways to invalidate emotions, dismiss feelings as irrelevant to knowledge, and ultimately disempower feelers altogether. This is especially true for those of us who are marginalized in some way. Have you ever had an argument and been told you were too emotional? Has someone ever said that you should be more objective? That people would take you more seriously if you weren’t so hysterical? I hope Lorsung’s essay gives you the same permission it did for me—to embrace those parts of yourself that are moved to tears as your most sacred sources of knowledge.

There’s a long tradition of thinking about intellectuals as somehow disembodied, ideal minds that can have ideas about things without being affected by those ideas, or without their ideas affecting the things they think about. Of course, no such person exists: it’s just that certain kinds of people—well, white, educated, cisgender, straight, relatively wealthy, generally Christian men, to put a point on it—get to walk into literature and history and philosophy as if they are that ideal mind. This isn’t about laying individual blame; it’s that if everyone around you speaks like you, you probably won’t notice that you have an accent, but you’ll be able to hear the accents of anyone whose ways of speaking are inflected by some difference in place or family or language. You get the picture. If the model for being a serious thinker is someone who never cries, well, what happens to the person for whom tears are always close to the surface? 

Crying Shame (Carl Wilson, Slate, June 2014)

Droves of teenagers fled to the cinema in 2014 to watch The Fault in Our Stars (TFIOS)—not for fun-filled popcorn parties, but to have an ugly cry. Critics referred to the film as a “tearjerker with genuine emotion” and “exploitative … yet sincere.” 

In this piece of cultural criticism for Slate, Carl Wilson pushes back on the implication in these takes: That movies that make a deliberate attempt to elicit tears are cheap, manipulative, or disingenuous. Wilson asks, “What might we imagine the teens are seeking, and why with this movie in particular, and how if at all do we factor its power as a tear-delivery system into its value as an artwork?” In a challenge to this idea that tears diminish art’s worth, Wilson explores how emotional responses like crying can factor into value. 

You might say that the teen weepie picture is cathartic of all these adolescent anxieties, but theorists are increasingly dubious about whether or not catharsis exists, at least where tears are concerned. Do you actually purge emotions when you cry over art? Perhaps instead you acquire some emotions you’ve never had before, in response to unfamiliar situations, as if in a kind of rehearsal—for instance, for the eventual experience of losing someone you love. Maybe screen sorrow provides practice at both feeling and channeling feeling.

After all, a teenager is at best a few years past phases of childhood when crying fits weren’t something she could consciously manage. What a pleasure, then, to choose to cry, perhaps along with your friends, and then have the movie end and come slowly back to neutral. And then do it again. It might relate to potential emotional trauma the way a climbing wall or a roller coaster can act upon a fear of heights, as a kind of exposure therapy.

While I’ve never seen TFIOS, I’m no stranger to crying in a cramped, dark theater (perhaps one of my favorite places to cry). Most memorable was the time I saw the kid-friendly animated film Inside Out with my mom; with one look at each other, we completely lost it. Good thing she always carries tissues.

Crying While Reading Through the Centuries (Pelagia Horgan, The New Yorker, July 2014)

Inspired by the debate about the merit of Young Adult novels happening at Slate (including the discourse surrounding The Fault in Our Stars), Pelagia Horgan asks in this essay for The New Yorker, “What does it mean to cry over a book?” When I recommended a novel to my friend on the basis that it made me cry, what I was trying to say was that the book was profound, and that’s why she should read it. My friend, on the other hand, took my crying over a book as something about me (namely that I’m a boo-hoo kind of gal).

Beginning with the 18th-century sentimental novel, Horgan approaches the question of what it means to cry over a book through the lens of literary history. 

Tears have had a surprisingly prominent place in the history of the novel. Readers have always asked about the role that emotion plays in reading: What does it mean to be deeply moved by a book? Which books are worthy objects of our feelings? In different eras, people answered those questions in different ways. In the eighteenth century, when the novel was still a new form, crying was a sign of readerly virtue. “Sentimental” novels, brimming with tender and pathetic scenes, gave readers an occasion to exercise their “finer feelings.” Your tears proved your susceptibility to the suffering of others. 

Ultimately, Horgan argues that the books that make us cry reveal something about ourselves, whether that’s who we are or who we want to be. “Talking about what makes us cry is also a way of talking about ourselves,” she writes. I think that’s why others connecting with the same books we do resonates with us; it’s a way of seeing and feeling seen. And it’s why you hope that your friends might click with the books you’re moved by. It’s not because it suggests a shared taste in literature, but rather a mutual understanding of who we are—and who we love and what we fear—in the real world.

Crying in Public (Esme Blegvad, Rookie, February 2016)

A friend once joked that they wanted to make a map of all the places they’d cried in public to create a personal geography of tears. My own geography of tears would use so much ink on the page for Oxford, where I’ve lived for the better part of a decade, that it would look more like a coloring book than a map.

There’s the High Street (voice-noting a friend about an emotional meetup), outside and inside the Sheldonian Theatre (looking enviously upon people in graduation gowns as I applied for another degree extension; then, years later, when donning the scarlet and blue robes myself), my favorite café (probably just hormones), some public toilets (wouldn’t recommend), and on the bus ride home (wearing a mask makes tears easier to hide).

In this tender 13-page comic for Rookie, Esme Blegvad shares her experiences of crying in public—anywhere from the city bus to the nail salon to the bagel shop—in order to contemplate the virtues and hazards of public crying. Blegvad acknowledges that crying is always somewhat public, given that it’s “an outward display of anguish.” So, why does doing it in front of others feel so embarrassing? And why does watching others cry in public make us feel so uncomfortable? Although crying among strangers can be a humbling experience, Blegvad admits that there’s also something freeing about letting go when you’re surrounded by other people but are still anonymous, and ultimately, alone. 

Sometimes it feels like that ‘stark reality’ itself actually facilitates these ‘public displays of anguish’ – there is something a bit liberating about really feeling your shit in front of a bunch of strangers, because despite being physical surrounded by other bodies, you are in fact still technically alone, and totally anonymous. Like sometimes moping quietly to myself among the tangled limbs of rush-hour commuters on the G train … feels like I’m safe and cozy in a sheltered glen in an enchanted forest, or something! Quite the comfy place for a cathartic cry …

I love Blegvad’s sketches, which add a rawness and surrealism to her words. And given my own propensity for crying in public, I’m inclined to agree that there’s something liberating and rebellious about committing this faux pas. Cry, baby, cry!

The Pain and Joy of Rediscovering My Trans Tears (Dawood Qureshi and Editors, gal-dem, February 2022)

Initially, I wanted to curate this reading list to destigmatize crying and demystify the shame that accompanies letting it all out. Crying, to me, feels like a natural outpouring of expression when words are insufficient. Something elemental, natural, even animalistic.

But what about the people who can’t—or don’t—cry? What does this inability say about them?

“Tears are a gift I feel I’m forever watching others granted,” Dawood Qureshi writes in this deeply personal essay for gal-dem. Qureshi, who was socialized as a boy in a South Asian Muslim family, is now exploring their identity as a trans Muslim and grappling with their difficulty performing femininity in the way that cisgender, white women do: Expressing emotions and crying with abandon is a vulnerability (and a privilege) that Qureshi can’t access so easily. They grapple with the question, “If I cannot cry, and I struggle to show my deepest emotions, and if I am only able to rip this sadness from within myself when I am alone…does this make me less…feminine?” 

All these years later, as I explore my identity as a trans Muslim, I am plagued by the harsh words from the men of my past. The identification of crying as a ‘feminine’ trait, and the links this has to being vulnerable, are particularly damning. If I cannot cry, and I struggle to show my deepest emotions, and if I am only able to rip this sadness from within myself when I am alone…does this make me less…feminine? Am I so infected by the male toxicity of my youth that I can never hope to be feminine in the way I choose? Will I ever learn to dance freely through my emotions as I see women on TV and in books do? As I see my white, cisgender friends do? This is as much a race issue as it is a gender issue; people of colour often grow up with a premature set of responsibilities thrust upon them, and this can create a barrier between them and the freedom at which they express themselves.

Qureshi’s essay shatters the illusion that crying is inherently natural and divorced from the ways in which we are socialized. In exploring their personal struggle to cry freely through the lens of gender, race, and religion, Qureshi illustrates how tears are entangled with femininity and whiteness. Ultimately, it is a privilege to access vulnerability. Still, Qureshi doesn’t believe that crying should only be reserved for people with various social and systemic privileges. The real question, then, isn’t why some can’t cry; instead, we should ask, if we live in a world where not everyone can cry freely, what does that say about the world we’ve built? And how can we foster a world where expressing vulnerability feels safe for everyone? 

Rachel Dlugatch is a UK-based writer, researcher, and crier. She holds a DPhil in anthropology from the University of Oxford, and she publishes a newsletter that explores the intersection of power, culture, and the self.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copy Editor: Peter Rubin

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American children who are ripped away from their families. The people who run for 24 hours. The dark side of an ancient city. A man who treats water like wine. A surprising response to a bad trip.

1. They Followed Doctors’ Orders. Then Their Children Were Taken Away.

Shoshana Walter | The New York Times Magazine and Reveal | June 29, 2023 | 7,167 words

I’m not sure that there’s anything more American than making it difficult for a person to be a mother. I don’t mean physically giving birth—thanks to anti-abortion zealots and the Supreme Court, many states are now literally forcing people to do that, with horrific consequences. I mean being a person, with everything that alone entails in a country defined by inequality, precarity, and prejudice, who also has a child. Exhibit A: As Shoshana Walter found in a feat of investigative reporting, people swept up in the opioid crisis, who’ve done exactly what they’re supposed to do—who got clean and take prescription drugs to stay that way—are now having their babies seized by the government. “They don’t want you on illicit street drugs,” one of Walter’s subjects says, “so here, we’re going to give you this medicine. But then if you take this medicine, we are going to punish you for it and ruin your family.” The injustice doesn’t end there. “We also found women who were reported after taking antidepressants, anxiety and ADHD medications and even over-the-counter cold medicine during pregnancies,” Walter writes. “Some women were reported after testing positive for the fentanyl in their epidurals.” The emphasis is mine; my jaw dropped at the Helleresque insanity of that detail. —SD

2. Running Wild

Stephen Lurie | Slate | July 1, 2023 | 4,505 words

You might not think a 24-hour race run around a 400-meter track would make for a compelling longread. It sounds grueling and monotonous. Dangerous, even. Everyone runs at their own pace. How can you even tell who’s excelling? Enter reporter Stephen Lurie who crafts a fascinating story by describing the tiny details of the racer’s experience in Pennsylvania’s Dawn to Dusk to Dawn ultramarathon. He takes a sport most know nothing about and puts the reader on the track, alongside the runners. “Gagz had been running for 17 hours and 20 minutes when he made it to the southeast corner of the loop,” he writes. “He’d already chugged past this spot 370 times, but on his 371st lap, he started walking across the lanes. He reached the edge and laid down, propping his tattooed legs up against a waist-high chain-link fence, long gray beard falling toward the damp red track. He planned to sleep for exactly five minutes.” Before you read this story, you might question the point of this ultra-endurance experience. But as Lurie shows us, anyone who has pushed themselves hard to do something challenging—regardless of what that something is—understands the invaluable education the very act of endurance gives you about you: the important subject of all. —KS

3. The Horrors of Pompeii

Guy D. Middleton | Aeon | July 4, 2023 | 4,000 words

Although I have not been to Pompeii, I have visited Herculaneum—a city that fell to Mount Vesuvius on the same day almost 2,000 years ago. Wandering the miraculously preserved streets, I imagined the lives of its residents, whose footsteps would have echoed on the stone so long before my own. Guy D. Middleton does more than imagine in this piece; he pulls in research, clawing away any romanticism to paint a picture of the brutality of Pompeii, a place where slaves would have endured sexual assault and violence, “being owned and being used,” as Middleton puts it. A pithy piece of wall graffito advertising sex is his jumping-off point: “Eutychis, a Greek lass with sweet ways, 2 asses.” (Clearly, we share a penchant for drawing on walls—and sex—with ancient Pompeiians.) Middleton smartly uses this line to turn detective and, in trying to uncover who Eutychis was, displays Pompeii’s wider underbelly. It makes for a dark story, but one deftly told. —CW

4. Waterworld

Katherine LaGrave | AFAR | October 28, 2020 | 4,042 words

People who have fascinations tend to be the most fascinating people. For AFAR, Katherine LaGrave profiles Martin Riese, America’s first water sommelier, a man who has been obsessed with water since he was four years old. This piece could easily have devolved from profile into caricature, but it’s LaGrave’s restraint that keeps you reading. (Ok restraint and the wonderful water puns and wordplay sprinkled throughout.) “Riese is taking cues from the element he considers most beloved, going with the flow and flowing where he’s able, taking opportunities as they come, and sharing why we should care about water with anyone who cares to listen,” she writes. Take the plunge and read LaGrave’s piece. You’ll not only be awash in new knowledge of sustainably sourced high-end water, but you’ll also satisfy your thirst for a well-written piece on a little-known topic. And that’s something I can raise a glass to. —KS

5. Meet the Psychedelic Boom’s First Responders

Chris Colin | Wired | June 29, 2023 | 2,924 words

Recent psychedelics coverage tends to focus on four primary categories. There are the drugs’ benefits and/or dangers, as well as stories focusing on their creators and wielders: those who use them to help people and those who seek to profit from their use. Chris Colin’s fascinating Wired feature skirts that tetrad, instead tracing the evolving norms around supporting a person when their inward journey goes to dark places. From the opening graf, you know it’s going to be a fun read: “Everything was insane and fine. The walls had begun to bend, the grain in the floorboards was starting to run. Jeff Greenberg’s body had blown apart into particles, pleasantly so. When he closed his eyes, chrysanthemums blossomed.” Using Greenberg’s trip, his own psilocybin experience, and a solid dose of cosmic-cowboy history, Colin shows how the way we respond to a person’s “psychic distress” speaks volumes about how we respond to one another in general. That we’re in the midst of a psychonautics surge is not surprising; that we’re responding to the moment with care and common sense is. —PR

Audience Award

Here’s the piece that bowled our readers away this week.

Most people do not run. Most people who run do not run long distances. Most people who run long distances do not run extremely long distances. And most people who run extremely long distances do not decide to do so on a 400-meter track for 24 hours straight. But this year, at least 36 people did, enough to fill the high school track field in Sharon Hills where D3 was held in mid-May.

My death occurred while playing beer-league hockey at the Winterhawks Skating Center in Beaverton, Oregon. My signs of life—breath, heartbeat, movement, the ability to perceive and form memories—left me. When I came back, I became fixated on the period I’d lost, what had happened to me and where I’d gone. It turned out there was more out there than I bargained for.

This is the forgotten story of my forgotten death.

My memories were wiped by luck, ketamine, fentanyl, midazolam, and propofol. I had passed through the pain and terror that haunted other survivors and emerged brain and wicked wrister intact. But what I’ve realized is that watching myself die was liberating, like watching the death of my stand-in, who was later reassembled as a new version of myself.

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The dark side of the transmigrante industry. A meditation on the true meaning of public safety. Staggering new health recommendations around alcohol consumption. Insight into the writers’ strike and an ode to the beauty of bees. For more great reading, be sure to check out our editors’ picks.

1. A Trucker’s Kidnapping, a Suspicious Ransom, and a Colorado Family’s Perilous Quest for Justice

Chris Walker | 5280 | May 2, 2023 | 5,292 words

Through a special visa program, transmigrantes are able to drive goods and vehicles from the U.S. to Central America via Mexico, without paying for high import and export fees. These truckers, many originally from Central America, are able to connect with their home countries through this line of work, while the industry as a whole transforms America’s excess items into valuable goods abroad. In 2014, one trucker, Guatemalan-born Enrique Orlando León, took a contract job from a Colorado employer to deliver a truck, apparently full of furniture, to his homeland. It was a journey he’d taken many times before, but this time, it all went horribly wrong. Chris Walker recounts the kidnapping, explores the unknowns around Orlando’s capture that still plague him, and describes how this terrifying ordeal has affected his entire family. Through this one man’s story, Walker exposes a dark side of the transmigrante industry. —CLR

2. “Why You Talking to a Bum?”

Katie Prout | Chicago Reader | April 20, 2023 | 2,890 words

I was going to pick a different story this week, but then a man named Jordan Neely, a beloved Michael Jackson impersonator, was killed on the New York subway. He was unhoused, hungry, tired, distressed. He said as much to a car of people. In response, another passenger put him in a choke hold until he died. The best thing I’ve read about this appalling crime is a short, poignant piece in Defector. As a companion, I recommend this essay by Katie Prout, who recently spent time on Chicago’s public transport system talking to people who live there because they don’t have much other choice. Prout interrogates what politicians, the media, and many American citizens mean when they talk about public safety. Safety for whom, and from what? Who counts as part of the public, and who is cast aside? Jordan Neely should still be alive. He deserved better. America owed him more. —SD

3. Pour One Out

Tim Requarth | Slate | April 23, 2023 | 4,656 words

Not so long ago, a glass of red wine with dinner was considered a health benefit. Apparently there was research to back this moderate approach to tipple. New guidelines from the World Health Organization, the World Heart Federation, and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction tell us something anyone who imbibes, even just a little, already knows: Alcohol is essentially poison. (Did they really have to gang up on us?) “’Mainstream scientific opinion has flipped,’ said Tim Stockwell, a professor at the University of Victoria who was on the expert panel that rewrote Canada’s guidance on alcohol and health. Last month, Stockwell and others published a new major study rounding up nearly 40 years of research in some 5 million patients, concluding that previous research was so conceptually flawed that alcohol’s supposed health benefits were mostly a statistical mirage.” For Slate, science writer Tim Requarth does a great job investigating what led to this staggering discovery. (For more Tim Requarth, be sure to check out “The Final Five Percent,” his award-winning reported personal essay on traumatic brain injury.) —KS

4. Why Are TV Writers So Miserable?

Michael Schulman | The New Yorker | April 29, 2023 | 2,085 words

For the first chunk of adulthood, I thought about my TV-writer friends as having hit some sort of lottery. Here I was, writing about real people and real events like a chump, while they were sitting around a table with their friends, eating junk food and making up stories — and earning ungodly amounts of money (or so I imagined) in the process. Finish a season, go to another show, climb the ladder, rinse, repeat. Then streaming came to town, and my friends’ dispatches from the front started to change. Uncertainty. Anxiety. Short-term gigs with no sense of security. All of a sudden, TV writing started to sound a lot more like the journalism game than I’d thought. Michael Schulman’s recent New Yorker piece bears out that suspicion with a clear, anecdote-driven explanation of exactly how streaming accelerated the devaluation of the creative act. The writers’ strike that began this week isn’t solely about residuals and streaming, of course — AI’s ever-advancing inroads are maybe even more existentially concerning — but after reading this piece you’ll realize that the Final Draft crowd isn’t different from any other labor force whose bosses are privileging profits over people. Seeing your name on a screen doesn’t necessarily pay the rent. —PR

5. Hive Mind

Celia Bell | Texas Highways | May 2, 2023 | 2,847 words

Celia Bell’s warm descriptions make bee society sound lovely, with her bees visiting “flowers or the quiet creek, or, on the hottest days, hang[ing] in clusters like elderberries on the outside of the hive, waiting for a breath of cool air.” The pleasure she finds in their world is not taken for granted. After entering beekeeping during the pandemic, Bell is conscious of how it grounds her and keeps her present. A video game fan, she draws thoughtful comparisons to the rendering of the natural world in gaming. While appreciating the artistry of game developers, she feels outside of her body in their virtual landscapes, whereas sweating in an apiary her body calls out its needs, forcing her to connect with her physical self. Although online life can creep in — a buzzing phone is never far away — the bees open up “the wonder and specificity of the world.” This reflective essay will make you consider which reality you choose to spend your time in. —CW

Audience Award

Do you hear timpani? Here’s the piece our readers loved most this week:

The results live in all of our heads: There’s nothing wrong with a glass of wine with dinner every night, right? After all, years of studies have suggested that small amounts of alcohol can favorably tweak cholesterol levels, keeping arteries clear of gunk and reducing coronary heart disease. Moderate alcohol use has been endorsed by many doctors and public health officials for years. We’ve all seen the Times headlines.

Now, 25 years later, you’re likely feeling a fair bit of whiplash. According to new guidelines released in recent months by the World Health Organization, the World Heart Federation, and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction, the safest level of drinking is—brace yourself—not a single drop.

As piano echoed over the sound system, they began to dance, their bodies matching effortlessly, limbs stretching in identical lines, torsos coiling. With their arms wrapped around each other tightly, they unfurled to spin around in endless motion. Improvisation became choreography, and they alternated between carving across the ice and laughing at a botched move. Over and over, they practiced a Fred Astaire–style dip until it was easy. Cheek to cheek, then far apart with just a single push, the pair forged a new routine.