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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:

It’s not uncommon for animals to escape from zoos, and all zoos have protocol to deal with this eventuality. The precise response, however, depends on which animal has escaped. In 2022, a king cobra escaped from its enclosure in the reptile house at Skansen Aquarium, a zoo in Stockholm. The week-long hunt for the snake involved calling in X-ray operators from Stockholm’s main airport, who used equipment typically used to scan suitcases for narcotics to X-ray the reptile house for the shape of a snake hiding in pipes or air vents. (The cobra, now renamed Houdini, returned to its enclosure on its own, in the end.)

Seven chimpanzees on the loose require a very different approach. Chimpanzees are big and smart, they are adept climbers and can move at up to 25mph. For the humans catching the chimps, the experience can be emotionally challenging, even existentially confusing, in a way that returning an escaped cobra to its cage is not. Great apes, the name given to large primates like chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas, are so like us. They hold hands, embrace and kiss one another, and the meanings of these gestures seem to be the same as when we do it. They express fear, delight, surprise, affection. And yet they are not us. The Dutch zoologist Frans de Waal, who has more than 50 years of experience with chimpanzees, suggests in his seminal book Chimpanzee Politics that we cannot help but feel a sense of unease around the animal. How should we relate to them, these creatures we know to be wild, but who look like we do? Last month, I stood with a zookeeper at a zoo in the south of England, watching a group of chimpanzees sun themselves in their enclosure. “I find them terrifying,” she admitted. “They’re so human. Who is looking at who?”

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In this week’s installment:

• How Canada is failing its most vulnerable citizens.
• Teju Cole considers the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
• The toxic workplace culture behind the hit TV show Lost.
• A piece highlighting Succession‘s excellent writing.
• The enduring popularity of Guinness World Records.

1. Have Assisted Dying Laws Gone Too Far?

Meagan Gillmore | The Walrus | May 30, 2023 | 5,422 words

What does it say about a country where it’s easier to request medically assisted death than it is to get support for a disability? Tarra Carlson lives with autism and ADHD. Her provincial disability benefits ceased because her husband earns too much money. She receives about $800 CDN per month from the Canada Pension Plan. “If her husband dies before her, she may have no way to access financial support,” writes Meagan Gillmore for The Walrus. “She’ll lose her biggest advocate and support system—and her home.” We already know that Canada has explored expanding the Medical Assistance in Death (MAiD) program to include those with disabilities, angering disability advocates. Gillmore’s terrifying piece reveals that some with disabilities facing poverty from the margins of Canadian society may choose MAiD, failed by a crumbling and byzantine Canadian health care system. For the government of Canada, what started as a program to allow the terminally ill to die on their own terms is starting to become a way for the government to legally rid itself of those they have failed: their most vulnerable citizens. —KS

2. Seeing Beyond the Beauty of a Vermeer

Teju Cole | The New York Times Magazine | May 25, 2023 | 3,212 words

I’ve wrestled with what to emphasize about Teju Cole’s excellent essay on Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, the subject of a museum exhibition so popular that Vogue compared the clamor for tickets to Beyoncé fans reacting to news of the Renaissance tour. I could talk about Cole’s evocative language. (“Vermeer tightens his cord of suggestion around us.”) Or his argument for why it’s imperative to “look for trouble”—meaning, the influence of brutality—in classic European paintings. (“It opens them up, and what used to be mere surface becomes a portal.”) Or his ability to capture the feeling of looking at Vermeer’s quotidian scenes. (“Our breath as viewers is collectively held because we don’t want to interrupt whatever this is.”) But no—my favorite part of Cole’s essay is his quiet indictment of mass appreciation and art-world dogma. He considers both the marketing of and response to the Vermeer exhibition. “That it represented a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience was taken as gospel,” he writes. “(And yet, how many of our best encounters with art have happened in a minor museum on a quiet day? What moment, fully inhabited, isn’t ‘once in a lifetime’?)” In Cole’s telling, interfacing with art is a singular act, defined by the quiddities of context and a viewer’s existence, and to suggest otherwise is to miss the point of what art can do to us, and for us. It’s fitting that he ends the piece by describing a Vermeer painting in which the subject looks out of the frame, seeming to single out each individual who passes before it. “This gaze has held yours for centuries,” Cole writes, “suspending time on your behalf.” —SD

3. Lost Illusions: The Untold Story of the Hit Show’s Poisonous Culture

Maureen Ryan | Vanity Fair | May 30, 2023 | 8,682 words

Characters of color sidelined to secondary storylines. Writers punished for standout scripts. Casual racism. Bullying. In Maureen Ryan’s piece for Vanity Fair—which is an excerpt from Burn It Down, her new book about power and complicity in Hollywood—she digs into what went wrong behind the scenes of Lost, particularly in the writers room. Onscreen, the hit TV show had a diverse set of characters, but its workplace culture was extremely toxic. Drawing on years of conversations with some of the show’s actors and writers—including Harold Perrineau, the Black actor who played Michael—Ryan paints an ugly picture of a show loved by many, me included. While reading this, it’s hard not to recall the things that didn’t sit quite right when I first watched the show: What happened to Michael? Why, despite the international cast, did the show never fully feel inclusive? How, after such a promising start, did the show eventually devolve into a battle between two white dudes? Lost changed TV as we knew it, placing brilliant writing and showrunners in the spotlight. But these “genius” minds—Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof—enabled this toxic environment, while their responses to these allegations today are disappointing yet sadly unsurprising. —CLR

4. The True Power of ‘Succession’ Comes From Writing Inside the Box

Katie Baker | The Ringer | May 31, 2023 | 2,415 words

Yes, Succession has run its course. Yes, you might be tired of talking or thinking about the beloved HBO drama. You might even wonder why, having edited a whole reading list about the show that we ran last week, I’m including yet another piece about it. The answer is because it’s exactly the kind of writing TV criticism deserves. It’s not yet another recap, not another piece about the show’s #iykyk costuming choices or grandiose real-estate porn. Instead, it takes on the show’s fundamental substrate: the writing. Much has already been made of Succession‘s Veep-level profanity, but Katie Baker dives past the f-bombs (and the deceptively circular plotting) to praise how creator Jesse Armstrong and the rest of the show’s writers capture the inconsistent cadences of actual human communication, hyperarticulate one moment, elliptical the next. Even the stage directions, she points out, breathe life into the show: “Alongside all the unforgettable quips that viewers have heard and chuckled at and turned into fancams or memes, there are also lots of lasting turns of phrase—ones written between the lines—that represent conversations not between the show’s characters, but between the show’s writers and its actors. And some of that language might be the most illuminating of all.” So sure, you might only enjoy this piece if you watched the show. But even if you didn’t, the fact that you’re reading this shows you care about good writing—and good writing about good writing is some of the best good writing of all. —PR

5. The Strange Survival of Guinness World Records

Imogen West-Knights | The Guardian | May 25, 2023 | 5,775 words

I grew up watching people break world records. Not because I am from a family whose skillset includes spinning basketballs on toothbrushes or sticking spoons to their chest (actual records), but because I watched a show called Record Breakers. It was all very wholesome: Enthusiastic presenters oversaw members of the public trying to earn a place in the book of Guinness World Records. The upbeat theme song confidently declared that Dedication is all you need. Perhaps it is. In this piece, Imogen West-Knights writes that her failure to beat the record for the longest time standing on one leg blindfolded “was not because I was incapable of doing it. It was because I didn’t want it enough.” She meets plenty of people who do want it (and want it a lot), her delightful account peppered with humans who have caught the most marshmallows fired from a homemade catapult in one minute or jumped the most consecutive cars on a pogo stick. But in recent years, things at Guinness World Records have become a little less joyful and a little more corporate. West-Knights explains how GWR Consultancy now helps brands to find a way to break a record—for a fee. (Perhaps unsurprising in the TikTok age.) But even if record-breaking is not what it once was, it is lovely to know that diehard record-breakers are still out there on their pogo sticks “celebrating achievement in the abstract.” —CW

Furman keeps his GWR certificates, more than 700 of them, in a clear plastic box in his wardrobe. He has so many that he has stopped even applying for the certificates when he breaks a record. This is a man who knows precisely how many forward rolls will make you throw up, which brand of eggs are easiest to balance on a flat surface and which muscles in your feet fatigue first if you stand on a yoga ball for too long. He pulled out his copy of the first Guinness book, evidently well-thumbed, and read me the quote in the foreword about turning heat into light with the reverence an evangelical might quote a passage from the Bible.