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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:

To many rudderless men who feel at sea, toxic masculinity seems like a safe harbor. Ed Mylett, a prominent speaker, told me, “The easiest lane to get big right now is right-wing politics and hypermasculinity. Show ’em your Lambo, show ’em your mansion, show ’em your muscles, and scream at ’em.” Though seventy-five per cent of the life coaches in North America are female, women are vastly underrepresented among the best-paid motivators. Of the seven speakers on the poster for the Forward Event, six were men. “I am so often the token female at these dude events,” Jen Gottlieb, a podcaster and speaker, told me.

Itzler’s masculinity is relatively evolved, but he does dwell on grievances. When a lone detractor called him “pampered” in a reply to Itzler’s Instagram post about an Ultraman (perhaps because he’d brought a team of six to film, hydrate, and Theragun him), Itzler groused about it for weeks: “I will never forget that!” But he generally uses grudges as fuel for the next race, then discards them like an empty bottle of Muscle Milk. “Something must have happened in my childhood where I thought I had something to prove,” he told me. “I’d have to spend a lot of time on the couch to figure it out.” Any plans to? “Nope!”

Here are five standout pieces we read this week. You can always visit our editors’ picks or our Twitter feed to see what other recommendations you may have missed.

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1. Kate Price Remembers Something Terrible

Janelle Nanos | The Boston Globe Magazine | July 28th, 2022 | 11,329 words

I would be remiss if I didn’t start by noting that Janelle Nanos’s story contains graphic details of childhood sexual abuse — some readers may want to proceed with caution, or not at all. Should you choose to click through, you will find a feat of narrative journalism, as propulsive as it is compassionate. As an adult, Kate Price, an authority on child sex trafficking, began to remember being abused by her father, grandfather, and other men. But no one believed her. Even she wasn’t sure she could trust her memories. So, in collaboration with Nanos over roughly a decade, Price went looking for evidence of what her brain told her had happened. I won’t reveal what they found; readers should experience it in the context of Nanos’s excellent prose. I’ll just say that the piece took my breath away. Twice. —SD

2. Where There’s Smoke

Paloma Pacheo | Maisonneuve | June 24th, 2022 | 5,764 words

Although no wine connoisseur, I have been to the Okanagan Valley — a wine region in British Columbia — several times. I enjoy sitting on a vineyard patio, cockily swirling a big glass round and round while I pretend to detect oaky notes or hints of grass (all I smell is the reassuring whiff of alcohol.) The last time I was there, the air was also sadly filled with the smell of smoke as wildfires burned across the region. Although I feared for properties in the area, it never crossed my mind to consider the wine itself; but for those who can taste the difference between a cab sav and a merlot, the tinge of smoke is a growing concern. In this essay, Paloma Pacheco persuades several Okanagan winemakers to discuss the threat of “smoke taint” — still quite a taboo topic outside the industry. The taint occurs when compounds in woodsmoke bind to sugars in a ripening grape’s skin, and with wildfires growing in intensity each year, the risk of wine tasting, in Pacheco’s words, “like you’re licking the bottom of an ashtray,” has grown in many wine regions. Wine is a low priority in the many challenges of a burning world, but Pacheco points out that “the solutions that winemakers and growers have adopted represent a form of resilience many of us can learn from.” A riveting read. —CW

3. Code Snitching

Radley Balko | Nashville Scene | July 28th, 2022 | 8,219 words

Nashville isn’t the only American city to have seen a recent spike in both population and gentrification; it’s also not the only city to have a byzantine set of zoning codes governing what can and can’t happen on a person’s property. But when you put those two things together, as Radley Balko explores in this investigation, you get a perfect storm of bureaucracy-perpetuated inequity. Real-estate developers and property-value-minded neighbors anonymously call the Metro Codes Department on longtime residents, many of whom are older, Black, and poor — and almost none of whom (Balko included) can fight the compounding deluge of citations. That’s not even considering the bloated city council that’s uniquely susceptible to lobbying from housing associations, and thus not exactly disposed to address this syndrome at the root. Yet, in this case, change may be in the offing: Nashville Scene has already published a follow-up story detailing the ensuing uproar, which includes mayoral pledges and a whole lot of neighborly strife. Every time a hedge fund guts a local paper or alt-weekly, it jeopardizes the future for pieces like this. —PR

4. Moral Panics Come and Go. Sex Bracelet Hysteria Is Forever.

Claire McNear| The Ringer | July 29th, 2022 | 3,000 words

I remember laboring over sociology essays on classic moral panics such as the Mods and Rockers (two British youth subcultures, supposedly rather fond of beating each other up.) However, I never learned about parents getting flustered over colorful jelly bracelets. Luckily, Claire McNear is here to fill me in with this captivating essay on why seemingly innocuous bands became labeled as sex bracelets and banned from schools across the U.S. McNear explains, in far more entertaining terms than any of my turgid tomes on the topic, how the fear behind a moral panic is a “perception problem.” In this case, people assuming “the generation or generations behind them are more salacious.” There is little evidence that middle schoolers in the early 2000s were actually busy snapping bracelets to indicate sex acts — it was all far more Brady Bunch than the grown-ups would ever have suspected. —CW

5. Sam Taggart’s Hard Sell

Tad Friend | The New Yorker | Aug 1st, 2022 | 9,497 words

Where do I even begin to endorse Tad Friend’s safari into the world of modern-day door-to-door salespeople? First, I guess, would be the disclaimer that this sort of subculture piece is catnip for me. I’m a sucker for industry argot, from “bageling” to “tie-downs” to the BOLT system. I’m a sucker for play-by-play annotations, as when Friend details the conversations that Taggart — would-be king of the “knockers” — has with the folks unlucky enough to answer the door and expose themselves to his white-toothed psychological siege. I’m a sucker for anything that plumbs the depths of alpha-bro “performance” thinking, foreign as it is to my character. But that’s only the starting point. What Friend delivers here is a portrait of the want that plagues so many of us, a want for success that’s really a want for redemption. It fuels the cold calls, the seminars, the mind games. “Failure is abhorrent because it can induce a contagious loss of faith in the whole enterprise,” he writes. That was likely the case in the days of Fuller brushes and vacuum cleaners, and it’s certainly the case today, with the knockers peddling home-security systems and high-commission solar panels. Somehow as devastating as it is entertaining. —PR