The dark side of the seafood industry. The morality of mortality. Memory versus belief. The flying cowboys lighting up the skies of the West. The food-service secrets of a tableside firestarter. All that (and more!) in this week’s edition.

1. The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat

Ian Urbina | The New Yorker | October 9, 2023 | 9,573 words

Where does your seafood come from? Who caught and handled it? The more I read about overfishing, illegal industry practices, and horrific work conditions, the more it stinks. Each year, China catches more than five billion pounds of seafood, much of it squid, through its distant-water fleet. These ships roam all over the world, often in unauthorized areas; analysts believe the country disguises some of them as fishing vessels when they’re in fact part of a “maritime militia” surveilling the sea, looking to expand control over contested waters. Onboard, workers are abused and held against their will. Ian Urbina, who runs The Outlaw Ocean Project, spent four years visiting the fleet’s ships and investigating their conditions. (To communicate with fishermen on ships that prohibited him on board, he tossed up plastic bottles, “weighed down with rice, containing a pen, cigarettes, hard candy, and interview questions.”) He also tracked where squid caught irresponsibly would end up: first to plants in China, some employing Xinjiang labor, and then continuing on to the very places we buy our seafood, like Costco and Safeway. This is a massive report on how China has become a fishing superpower, but Urbina also weaves within it an emotional, devastating story of an Indonesian worker who joined one of these ships in order to give his family a better life. Extraordinary reporting that’ll make you reconsider your next plate of calamari. —CLR

2. We’re More Ghosts Than People

Hanif Abdurraqib | The Paris Review | October 16, 2023 | 3,922 words

Looking back at the last few months of my selections for this newsletter, I realize that I prize writing that escapes the presuppositions of its genre—or, rather, writing that escapes your presuppositions of its genre. Take this essay from the great Hanif Abdurraqib. When you first find your way to it in The Paris Review, you might notice the rubric “On Games” and see a screenshot from the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, and decide then and there to keep browsing. Would I begrudge you that decision? Probably not. But I’d also know that you were unwittingly denying yourself something marvelous. From the very first sentence—”I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven”—the piece thrums with a keen melancholy that never tips into sorrow or indulgence. When Abdurraqib writes about the futility and powerlessness of playing to save the doomed, he’s of course writing about something larger, and he has no hesitation in drawing the line for you: this is about real redemption. About the sins of youth and the circumstances that absolve them, or don’t. About the love we extend to others but not ourselves. About how we face our own ever-shortening lives. The word “spiritual” is a slippery one, used as it is to mediate our own discomfort with the unknowable, but there’s no better word to apply to this essay. Abdurraqib’s spirit shimmers here, its full spectrum diffracted through his 19th-century avatar; that it does so in the service of what some might flatten to “game writing” only proves my point. This is something special. —PR

3. Mere Belief

Sallie Tisdale | Harper’s Magazine | October 16, 2023 | 6,222 words

In my earliest memory, I’m peering under my uncle Raymond’s bedroom door. He lives with me and my parents in the second bedroom of the duplex we all share. My mom’s given me his mail and I’m flicking the envelopes under the door, watching them spin over the parquet floor and disappear from view after crossing a patch of bright sunlight. I am not yet 5 years old. This is an autobiographical memory, according to Sallie Tisdale and her fascinating piece on memoir and memory for Harper’s Magazine. As a memoirist, Tisdale trades in remembering, but this is no romanticized account of an unlimited well of perfect recall that fuels her writing. She looks at the science behind what we remember and how memories morph, shifting in shape and color in the liminal spaces of our brain, while she wrestles with the conundrum of her own evolving identity, and how what seems like fact can become blurred. “It is tempting to substitute today’s psychological truth for history. Memory is wet sand,” she writes. “This is what I want to interrogate: the slipperiness, the uncertainty.” Is there nothing more beautiful—and more human—than searching for truth in the blurry spaces of our memory? —KS

4. Winging It with the New Backcountry Barnstormers

Brad Rassler | Outside | October 18, 2023 | 10,300 words

Off-airport pilots. Strip baggers. Flyboys. The recreational bush pilots in this piece sport many names. But are these social media-savvy flyers bringing new people into an exciting sport or just “boys with pricey toys” who clog up the skies and take reckless risks? Brad Rassler is dedicated to his discovery mission—even braving some terrifying maneuvers while in the passenger seat of planes that weigh no more than a golf cart. I love meeting big characters, and this piece is jam-packed with them, all sporting varying amounts of facial hair, from “a thick soul patch ornamenting [a] chin” to “a ginger-brown beard that doesn’t quite attach to the mustache part.” (One lucky exception has a “handsome face smooth of whiskers but strong of jaw.”) You cannot fail to be impressed by such a range of beard-related eloquence. Culminating in a chaotic rally in the evocatively named Dead Cow Lakebed, Nevada, this feature is quite the ride. —CW

5. Confessions of a Tableside Flambéur

Adam Reiner | Eater | October 11, 2023 | 1,553 words

Adam Reiner’s short but sweet Eater piece on food as entertainment is perfectly satisfying. For three years Reiner worked as a captain at a Manhattan chophouse called The Grill, where he prepared food tableside, including Dover sole and Bananas Foster, the flaming pièce de résistance. Reiner serves more than stories of boorish patrons as seen from behind the gueridon. (The fancy trolley containing cooking ingredients and utensils.) He gives us a taste of food-as-performance at his restaurant and others, such as Papi Steak, where the $1,000 wagyu ribeye’s reveal is meat theater—complete with special effects that could rival Taylor Swift in concert. “The steak even has its own designated entrance music that blares in the dining room to announce its arrival,” he writes. Reiner also reveals the perils of performance, and the very real anxieties that go along with it. For every Bananas Foster or cherries jubilee, there’s always the potential that the flambé is a flop, “like striking a book of matches in the rain.” Steak entrances and fancy flaming bananas aside, it’s Reiner’s writing that will keep you coming back for more in a story that’s less about the food and more about his uneasy relationship with the distastefulness of restaurant showmanship. —KS

Audience Award

What was our readers’ favorite this week? Drumroll, please!

It has always been easier for me to convince myself that the sins I’ve been immersed in and the average time I might have left to make up for them simply don’t align. I’m a better person now than I have been in the past, though I’ve also dislodged myself from binaries of good and bad. If there is a place of judgment where I must stand and plead my case for a glorious and abundant afterlife, I hope that whoever hears me out is interested in nuances, but who’s to say. I don’t think about it, until I do. Until I get sick and wonder if I am sick with something beyond routine, or until I swerve out of the way of a car on the highway and feel the sweat begin to bead on my forehead. It’s all a question of how close I feel like I am to the end.

Kids have been trying to play video games on school computers for as long as computers have cropped up in schools, but decades ago, they jumped through those hoops in a dedicated computer lab, or secretly downloaded homemade games to their TI-83 calculators while pretending to crunch equations. But these days, computers are deeply intertwined into education, and many school age children have regular access to a computer, usually a Chromebook or iPad, as early as 1st grade, when kids are only six or seven years old.

What exists now is an escalating game of whack-a-mole between students, teachers, and IT departments, as kids hopeful to do anything but school work try to find a way to play games.

By January 2023, Chess.com reported hitting over 10 million active players in a single day—more than the daily average of World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, and Among Us combined—leading the site’s servers to crash. Its online schedule now features a who’s who of chess grand masters who provide content for users almost 24 hours a day. A new class of chess celebrities, like sisters Alexandra and Andrea Botez, who recently surpassed 1 million Twitch subscribers on their joint account, and international master Levy Rozman, who has over 3 million YouTube subscribers, regularly appear on Chess.com.

An unjust police killing. Nature reclamation in the fossil fuel era. Surviving a bear attack. The underbelly of the antiquities trade. And for a well-earned dessert, the legacy of the world’s first breakout video game.

1. Police Killed His Son. Prosecutors Charged the Teen’s Friends With His Murder

Meg O’Connor | The Appeal & Phoenix New Times | March 14, 2023 | 7,576 words

It’s been nine years since Laquan McDonald was killed by police in Chicago, shot in the back while walking away. It’s been seven years since Philando Castile was killed by police in the Minneapolis suburbs, shot while his empty hands were raised during a questionable traffic stop. And it’s been four years since Jacob Harris was killed by police in Phoenix, seconds after he emerged from a car, his back turned. You’ve likely heard less about Harris’ death than you have McDonald’s and Castile’s, but Meg O’Connor’s thorough investigation makes clear that you won’t forget it. The gross miscarriages of justice are plentiful: the circumstances of Harris’ killing and the shifting police statements around it; the money and valuables police took from Harris’ father’s home before informing him his son was dead; the fact that Harris’ friends are currently serving decades-long prison sentences for his death, while the officers who pulled the trigger (and unleashed an attack dog on his prone body) walk free. We’ve heard far, far too many names like McDonald’s and Castile’s and Harris’ over the past decade, and nothing makes me think we won’t continue to hear many more. That’s what makes this sort of journalism so necessary — not because it can bring these young men back to life, but because it makes brutally clear how unjust their deaths are, and how broken policing is. —PR

2. What Survives

Lacy M. Johnson | Emergence Magazine | March 9, 2023 | 3,724 words

We’re starting to see the massive environmental repercussions that the fossil fuel industry’s surge has wrought on coastal areas of the United States. At Emergence Magazine, Lacy M. Johnson reflects on the Baytown Nature Center, a portion of land restored after oil drilling and water extraction caused the land to sink, making the executive Brownwood subdivision vulnerable to storm surge flooding with more frequent and violent storms caused by global warming. As Johnson catalogues the decades of destruction in disappearing land and animal habitat — all in a bid to fuel vehicles and serve an ongoing war effort with the petroleum-based building blocks of explosives and rubber — you have to wonder, is it really worth it? If you ask Johnson, the answer is no: “It’s normal to want to repair what’s broken, folly to repair what breaks us and keeps on breaking.” P.S. For a Louisiana perspective on fossil fuel, havoc, and the human cost of repeat devastation, read “Great American Wasteland” by Lauren Stroh. —KS

3. The College Wrestlers Who Took On a Grizzly Bear

Ryan Hockensmith | ESPN | March 10, 2023 | 5,900 words

I have never seen a grizzly bear, but I have seen its tracks: Impossibly huge imprints squelched deep into the mud, tips of long claws cutting in even further, an echo of the power that passed before. Ryan Hockensmith’s piece made me all too aware of what it would be like to encounter that paw firsthand with his chilling, graphic description of a grizzly bear attack on junior college wrestlers Brady Lowry and Kendell Cummings. Although Hockensmith does not shy away from the horror, he leaves plenty of room for the other aspects of this story, whether the friendship behind Cummings’ act of bravery or an understanding of the bear’s actions. (As he sets out, she was likely just protecting her cubs, with the young men fairly blaming themselves for being “in its house.”) The piece details the months following the attack as well, becoming a testament to the boys’ resilience, Hockensmith tracing their road to recovery without overindulging in sentiment. I came out of this gripping feature with great respect for Cummings and Lowry. —CW

4. Crime of the Centuries

Greg Donahue | New York | February 13, 2023 | 5,508 words

The uber-wealthy never cease to amaze with their shamelessness. Case in point: Michael Steinhardt, billionaire investor, noted philanthropist, and, ‘twould appear, someone who for much of his life had exactly no problem buying stolen art. A lot of it. Steinhardt amassed one of the biggest private antiquities collections in the world, including an array of “fresh” objects, straight from the earth and unlikely to pass through above-board trade on their way to Steinhardt’s Upper East Side penthouse. “Steinhardt bought an object so fresh it had to be cleaned by the dealer in a hotel bathtub before being delivered to his apartment,” journalist Greg Donahue writes. The guy once kept a stone skull dating back to 7,000 B.C. on a side table in his living room — we know this because the object appears in real-estate listing photos saved by the Manhattan district attorney’s office that investigated Steinhardt. Wild. “As an investor, mastering risk had brought him wealth and prestige,” Donahue points out, placing Steinhardt’s shady dealings in the context of his wider existence. “Why should antiquities be different?” The piece also subtly raises the question of whether the antiquities market is beyond repair. Steinhardt might be among the worst offenders, but he’s also a symptom of the market’s problematic status quo, shaped as it is by privilege, greed, and colonialism. —SLD

5. ‘It Changed the World’: 50 Years On, the Story of Pong’s Bay Area Origins

Charles Russo | SFGATE | March 9, 2023 | 2,809 words

Charles Russo tracks the beginnings of the modern video game industry, which has its roots in a “scrappy Silicon Valley startup” now known as Atari. Its founders, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, had previously created the world’s first coin-operated video game, a futuristic yellow machine called Computer Space. Under Atari, they developed Pong, a simple yet engrossing arcade game that became an instant hit with the American public when it was released in March 1973 — and is now a beloved classic. This is a delightful dive into the video game industry’s “big-bang moment,” accompanied by fun images from the ’70s. My favorite is a photograph of a massive retro Atari arcade game at the Powell Street BART station in downtown San Francisco, surrounded by people with bell-bottoms. —CLR

And the Audience Award Goes to…

The Haunted Life of Lisa Marie Presley

David Browne | Rolling Stone | March 10, 2023 | 8,295 words

In this piece, David Browne gives a respectful account of the frantic life of Lisa Marie Presley. Although there is some attempt to analyze how growing up in the spotlight affected her, this is more of a faithful narrative of her world and tragic death. —CW

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All told, Atari was in many ways the early embodiment of the modern Silicon Valley narrative: groundbreaking innovation, unconventional business strategy and — most notably — the profound impact of integrating technology into our lives (namely in the form of the culturally ubiquitous Atari 2600 home gaming system).

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Maria Zorn | Longreads | March 7, 2023 | 3,373 words (12 minutes)

In middle school, I would hide behind a giant oleander bush when it was time for the bus to leave for track and field meets and then, once it left without me, I’d walk to Panda Express and eat chow mein in blissful peace. This was also my strategy for grieving you. I thought I could, like a rapacious vole, burrow myself into the branches of the quotidian and the bus of mourning would pass me by altogether. 

This is not to say that I didn’t ever experience a sense of loss. It was always there, a constant drip. Sometimes I’d think about the scene Mom came upon when the locksmith finally got your apartment door open and feel as though my kneecaps were going to crumble into ash beneath me. I wondered if there were claw marks on the floor from where you tried to stay as you felt your heart stop beating, or if you slid easily away like a clump of lint and dog hair into a Roomba. In these moments I wished to be vacuumed whole. 

Sophie works at the post office in Saanichton, British Columbia.* She is tall and sinewy with thin, bony shoulders. Her body could be drawn using only straight lines, just like yours. Her hair is jet black and always pulled back into a low ponytail that nestles into the nape of her neck. She appears to be more at ease when she is behind the counter than when she is in front of it, exposed. Her voice is low and quiet and when she gets flustered she holds her elbows close to her rib cage and her hands near her shoulders like an adorable T. rex. Her mannerisms are what initially drew Mom to her, what first reminded her of you. But then she saw her protruding clavicle and her thick top lip and her round doe eyes and she couldn’t unsee the physical resemblance. She wants me to help her think of a way to befriend Sophie that doesn’t begin with: You remind me of my dead son and I would do anything to spend time with you. I just don’t know what to tell her.

Perhaps the better metaphor is that my grief for you stalked me like those ghosts in Ms. Pac-Man. I was chasing dots with my mouth wide open, trying to outrun you. The dots were moments I still felt some semblance of myself in a world without you in it, they were anyone and anything that could drain me of all of my energy and attention, they were being able to feel light enough to giggle, they were attempting to Irish dance while waiting for my tea kettle to whistle. The ghosts were you, at 8, declining to go on a playdate because you were afraid I wouldn’t have anyone to play with; you, at 16, threatening to hit the boy who broke my heart with your car; you, at 22, telling me we were soulmates with tears in your eyes at the Molly Wee pub; the ghosts were you, you, you, you with pastel sheets over your head, cutouts for your big Bambi eyes. 

Mom gets butterflies in her stomach before she goes to the post office. She’s glad for once that she has a P.O. box, that the mail carrier doesn’t come to her mossy, rural strip of the Saanich Peninsula. She blow-dries her light blonde hair until it falls in cascading curls around her face and blinks on mascara. She pulls on her stylish brown leather boots and steals one last look at herself in the mirror. She takes a deep inhale that tickles the pain in her chest. Mom wants to be more than friends with Sophie, but not in the traditional sense of the phrase. I loved you like a soulmate, but not in the traditional sense of the phrase. These loves are fluid, these loves are nonbinary. 

The dots I chased were Chris, because every emotion I felt with him was neon.* We slept glued together like spider monkeys, and when I woke up before him I would be completely still and study him worshipfully — his toffee-colored skin that was softer than a kitten’s ear, his charcoal ringlets. We watched videos of Thom Yorke dancing for hours at a time, we did a special little jig when we bought a bottle of puttanesca sauce. When I was sad, he’d get out a Japanese sword that was left at the bar where he worked and throw watermelons in the air for me to slice like a fruit ninja. He could make anything fun, could make anything a game — but he was always the team captain. I was never certain whether it was our 14-year age gap or simply his personality, but he felt as much like a coach as he did a boyfriend. I thought he shut me down when I disagreed with him and I knew he blew his nose in our dirty laundry, and these things both made me furious. Two years passed and we morphed into ever uglier versions of ourselves. We yelled at each other outside of Joe’s Pizza by the Slice, he was a gargoyle and I was a swamp lizard and then we were two terribly sad people who didn’t talk anymore. For months after we broke up, I lay in bed every night, crusty with dried tears and snot, and my ribs felt loose. I imagined Chris playing Radiohead songs on them like they were piano keys while I tried and failed to fall asleep. I was convinced that if I concentrated hard enough on my heartache for him that I would not notice how hollow I felt from your goneness. 

You wore six-inch platform creepers and voluptuous shaggy Mongolian lamb coats, Rick Owens pencil skirts and black leather fingerless gloves. You ordered a floor-length sheer dressing gown with sleeves trimmed in feathers. When Mom said she liked it but it looked like something one would wear over a négligée, you earnestly replied: But I don’t have a négligée yet! Before I moved to New York with you, I came to visit and had to use my tube top as a pillowcase since you owned only one. I cleaned your apartment while you scoured town for a fake ID for me, an even trade. After sweeping the 600-square-foot space I had a chinchilla-sized pile of dust and boa fragments and sequins and dirt and I felt like Cruella de Vil’s housekeeper. You made a fool of the words “feminine” and “masculine” — you were neither, you were both. You called yourself an alien frequently, and even got one tattooed on your right arm. You felt like you were so different from other humans that you were extraterrestrial. No one we knew used they/them pronouns, no one we knew used terms like “nonbinary,” like “gender-fluid.” You knew you didn’t identify with other men, but you also knew you didn’t feel like other women. I wonder if you would have felt like such an alien if you knew you didn’t have to choose. I wonder if you would have tried snorting heroin that night if you didn’t feel like such an alien.

My dots were my budding career at a tech startup that I thought was so much more impressive than it actually was. I worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. then came home, ate noodles, propped my laptop on the pudge of my lower belly, and kept working in bed until I fell asleep. I tried dating during this phase, but I got more pleasure from telling men I was busy and then later breaking things off than I did from going to dinner with them.

My eyes began to tolerate all of the computer work I was doing less and less until it felt like all that occupied my sockets were two purple bruises covered in fire ants. After trips to six different ophthalmologists, I was diagnosed with non-length dependent small fiber polyneuropathy and ocular rosacea and told that a career that involved “excessive screen time” was probably not in the cards for me. The doctor looked at me with a very serious expression that was made less serious by a small piece of avocado that clung to his mustache. I was such a people pleaser that in this moment all I could think of was making this a smooth experience for him so that he didn’t go look in the mirror after our conversation and feel like an idiot for having a dirty ’stache. This was a time in my life when if someone gave me a ride, I’d offer them a kidney. I jammed the shock and anguish I felt into the depths of my pockets alongside pennies and crescent-shaped nail fragments, I arranged my face into an awkward smile and said: No worries!

I quit my job and the online college courses I was taking and returned to bartending with the enthusiasm of a wet tube sock. An overly cheerful woman with a hair growing from the mole on her chin asked me to surprise her with a drink and I poured well rum and apple juice into a pint glass with no ice then charged her $13 for it. I didn’t talk to my friends who were graduating and starting careers, I stopped dating. I closed in on myself and got smaller and smaller until, like a Shrinky Dink, I could be pierced and worn on a string as a hideous pendant. 

I had moved back home to Arizona after you died because I couldn’t stay in New York City without you. The ghosts were too speedy there, but the dots were too far apart in Phoenix. I needed to get out. I applied for a sales position in Denver that promised not to involve the computer, packed my belongings into my beat-up red hatchback and took myself to Colorado. Driving through mountain passes, I felt an indelible sense of hope that this change of scenery would make me better, whatever that meant.

I watched the video you recorded six months before you died yesterday, the one where you’re drinking Veuve with your friend Michelle and explaining what you want done with your ashes if anything ever happens to you. You throw your head back to cackle between your outlandish requests and I stare at your pale throat. Some ashes stored in a Ming vase, some made into diamonds, some shot out of a cannon with glitter. Mom and I looked into the cannon, but all we could find was some silly handheld thing called the “Loved One Launcher” that appeared to be used primarily at memorial services held next to creeks and swamps, judging from their marketing material. It definitely wasn’t the right fit. 

We didn’t know how to “memorialize” someone who felt as essential as a limb. In our indecision, we landed on taking a trip someplace beautiful every year on the anniversary of your death. We’ve been to Cabo San Lucas, Aspen, Copenhagen, Sooke. We split a bottle of rosé and hold hands and your absence is outlined in chalk on the picnic blanket we sit on. Once, we hiked 13 miles to a beautiful alpine lake to scatter some of your ashes and I carried them on my back. I had only your remains and a bottle of wine in my pack but the straps dug into my shoulders until they were pink as salmon. We sang “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” by the Hollies and laughed and cried at the same time. When we dumped your ashes in the water they shimmered in the sun like the glitter you wore on your eyelids and cheeks during your teen raver years. I wanted so badly to look up at the sky that was the same blue as your eyes and feel unadulterated solace, but instead I felt nothing at all. 

This year on May 30, I think Mom is going to take me to the post office. 

My dots were jobs, jobs, new jobs every few months. I worked as a kiosk wench for HelloFresh, a sales manager for StretchLab, a preschool teacher at a country day school, a fitness instructor at Life Time, at a physical therapy clinic, at a Pilates studio. I went back to school to become an art teacher, then quit that and took a yearlong nutrition course, then decided I never actually want to talk to anyone about what they eat. I remembered once hearing the phrase “throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks” and I imagined myself doing parkour off the furniture at each of my jobs, shooting noodles and marinara out of my fingertips and watching the pasta bounce off of the reformers, the little children, the clinic walls like rubber. I had eaten all of the dots in the maze and was left aimlessly bumping into its corners with a jaw ache, desperately trying to avoid a ghost pileup. 

​​I had a dream that I was walking around a city map, but the map wasn’t made of paper — it was a black iPhone, the glass so shattered it looked like it was filled with streets and boulevards. All the roads filled with white powder until I couldn’t move my legs anymore. The phone was yours, and it sat next to a full pour of wine, murky reddish-black like blood. You died sitting up — bony ass on the floor, back against the side of your bed, pale slim fingers wrapped around your glass. How did you manage not to spill one drop? Why did you think heroin was a suitable nightcap after cocaine, Adderall, alcohol?

I remember sitting on the back porch of Mom’s house with you every night one summer, talking and smoking hookah for hours until the metal patio chairs branded the back of our sweaty legs with checkers. Even at 10 p.m. it was over 100 degrees in Phoenix. I’d feel droplets of sweat crawl from my armpits down my sides and settle into the waistband of my boxer shorts. We’d put a splash of milk in the water pipe because you were convinced that would make the smoke cloudier, more fun to blow O rings with. You confessed one of these nights to smoking black tar heroin once during your sophomore year of high school, when you were a self-proclaimed “mall goth.” I whapped you with the wooden hookah mouthpiece, hard, right in the solar plexus. I thought about the time we gobbled up so many of Dad’s prescription drugs and drank so much prosecco that we blacked out an entire journey from Amsterdam to Phoenix, including a three-hour layover that was apparently in Detroit, judging from the translucent blue lighter we bought that said Motown City and the greasy Little Caesar’s receipt that sat cross-legged in the bottom of my purse. I was not prudish about getting fucked up, but with this anecdote you crossed a threshold into territory that scared me. You took a sharp inhale and raised your dark eyebrows, fighting back a laugh. You said: Obviously that was dumb and I’ll never try it again. I made you promise with a pinkie, even though you were 19 and I was 17. Your recklessness with your life produced in me a worry that sat like a small, hard stone in my belly.

You’d hate the way dying from a heroin overdose sounds. You’d have me let everyone know that you were “trying to buy opium.” That you were supposed to go to a wedding in Greece in two months, New York Fashion Week in three. That you didn’t mean for it to happen this way.

The dots were gone, but I became so adroit at ghost evasion I no longer needed them — I was eating strawberries, oranges, bananas, cherries. I found a drug that makes my eye condition more tolerable, a job I like well enough, a dog who constantly wants to shake my hand. I found a partner with Reptar green and caramel eyes who gives me grace like a daily train ticket, who calls you Tomm, not “your brother,” whose calm demeanor lowers my blood pressure and provides a certitude that life is allowed to feel good. I thought Jack’s love was a fuzzy sweater I could don and become whole. I saw no portents of a more substantial ghost, one that could swallow me entirely. I fell into the mouth of a ghost as though it was a shoddy manhole cover; it took me by surprise and then devoured me until I was wholly in its maw and could not see a single shred of light through its incisors. My grief developed its own physical presence, its own pulse. I feared that it was going to burst through my bones like the Kool-Aid man at any moment and take me over completely. My first instinct was to wrestle it to the ground, to mash my teeth into its ears and give it a noogie, since I was always the brute of the family. I knew you’d try to reason with it, to write it a letter using your shiniest vocabulary like the ones you’d send to Mom and Dad to convince them to raise our allowance, to get a pet sugar glider, to let you get your ears pierced, to legally change the “Jr.” that follows your name to the more sophisticated and chic “II.” You’d arrange all of your best arguments like toy soldiers followed by rebuttals of anticipated counter-arguments, then sign: Please don’t be mad at me. As a card-carrying atheist I didn’t know who to write a letter to. The universe? You?

My therapist recommended I try ketamine for treatment-resistant depression and I had my first session this week. I thought of you because the first time I heard the word “ketamine” was when you snorted it in ninth grade and then came out to Mom, and the first time I heard the term “treatment-resistant depression” was after I talked about you to my therapist, seven years after you died. I filled out a questionnaire that tests for suicidality and it was only then that I realized my sadness had become life-threatening. I had a primordial urge to go wherever it is that you are. I’d sign my note to Mom and Jack: Please don’t be mad at me.

The nurse anesthetist injected the drug into my shoulder and it felt like a gentle bee sting. There were colors and textures and sounds that I can’t explain, but what I remember most of all was you. Your hair was dyed platinum blonde and a thin white shirt hugged your angular frame. You were resplendent. You were laughing and reaching out for my hand, and I chased you across tiles that lit up under our feet as we stepped on them. We knew you were not alive but we also knew that you were not gone. Looking at you, for the first time in seven years, didn’t feel like gazing directly into a car’s headlights at night; you didn’t singe my delicate eyes with your brightness. You hugged me the way you always did, so tightly that your upper ribs jabbed into my torso with a titty-puncturing ferocity, like you were holding on for dear life, and I felt an ineffable sense of something inside me being cauterized. Later I’d recall a mathematical concept from high school in which two lines get very, very close together but never actually end up touching and wonder if, for me, this would be the closest I’d ever get to feeling peace about your death. As I began to regain consciousness, your face became pixelated and the crinkles around your eyes started to smoothen and fade. The first part of my body that woke up was my mouth, and I could feel my chapped lips pressing together with alacrity to form a small smile. Before you disappeared completely, you said: What if it’s all true at once? You held those words up like a trophy and I unzipped my chest and put them inside. 

Maria Zorn is a writer and visual artist currently living in Denver, Colorado.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Copy-editor: Krista Stevens

We read a number of stories across the web this week, and you can always visit our editors’ picks or our Twitter feed to see what you may have missed. Among this week’s #longreads, here are five standout pieces that we recommend.

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1. A Plane of Monkeys, a Pandemic, and a Botched Deal: Inside the Science Crisis You’ve Never Heard Of

Jackie Flynn Mogensen | Mother Jones | June 23rd, 2022 | 6,566 words

In May 2020, a plane full of monkeys intended for COVID-19 research was supposed to depart Mauritius. But it never did. Who purchased the monkeys? Where were they supposed to go? When Jackie Flynn Mogensen looked into the failed flight, and began to investigate the secretive global trade of research monkeys, she found there was an even bigger story: The U.S. is experiencing a primate shortage, and there aren’t enough monkeys for research across many areas of medicine. Primate research has led to life-saving discoveries over the decades, but it remains controversial, with no guarantees, despite animal testing guidelines, that animals are treated properly. “But no matter how you or I feel about it,” Mogensen writes, “it’s clear the practice has saved—and is saving—human lives.” This is a fascinating dive into the monkey trade and the players within it, like Matthew Block, who’s been a target of animal rights groups for years and, as you’ll read, is the owner of the company who arranged the flight. Mogensen also reports on a few alternatives, like lab-grown organs, but we’re still a long way from a world without animal testing. —CLR

2. Jason Brassard Spent His Lifetime Collecting the Rarest Video Games. Until the Heist.

Justin Heckert | Vanity Fair | June 27th, 2022 | 5,900 words

I can count on my hands the number of video games I’ve played in my life, and the only way I ever won a round of Mario Kart in middle school was by shoving my friend off the couch in the den where she kept her console. But even as an uninitiated reader, it was impossible not to become invested in this story of a man who amassed an impressive collection of old and rare games, only to have them stolen in one fell swoop. A satisfying true crime tale, much more Knives Out than Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, this piece features quirky characters who work at game stores with names like Grumpy Bob’s Emporium. It’s also a poignant meditation on nostalgia and how we assign value to objects that speak to our past. I needed a distraction from the barrage of terrible news this week, and Justin Heckert delivered. —SD

3. One Woman’s Wholesome Mission to Get Naked Outside

Gloria Liu | Outside | June 13th, 2022 | 3,100 words

It may come with being British, but growing up I was very prudish about nudity. A communal changing room meant an elaborate wiggle dance under a towel, into a swimming costume that would have met with Queen Victoria’s approval. Upon moving to the Pacific Northwest, I found more liberal attitudes toward nudity, and I relate to Gloria Liu as she discusses her jealousy of “friends who were less inhibited, so comfortable in their own skin.” Liu takes us on a gentle journey as she attempts to emulate these friends, and go naked outside. Spoiler alert: She makes good progress and ends up describing a beautiful nude night hike, where “Taking my clothes off with others wasn’t the exercise in courage or cutting loose that I thought it would be. It was an exercise in faith. To be naked, I had to believe that the world could be good. And tonight it feels like it can be.” This essay starts by considering nakedness — but ends up reflecting on friendship and the importance of building memories. —CW

4. How the Yurok Tribe Is Bringing Back the California Condor

Sharon Levy | Undark | June 22nd, 2022 | 3,433 words

Condor 746, on loan from a captive breeding program in Idaho, traveled to California in spring 2022. He’s the first California condor in over a century to reach the ancestral land of the Yurok Tribe, and made the journey to mentor four young birds in a condor facility in Redwood National Park. Condors are very social, explains Sharon Levy, learning best and benefitting from being under the wing of an elder. In this piece, Levy beautifully traces the journey of the species, and the incredible efforts of the tribe to ensure the bird’s successful reintroduction to the wild. It’s an insightful look into what it takes for captive breeding programs to work over time: creative solutions, dedicated biologists, and — in the condor’s case — monitoring for lead poisoning. (And a bonus: there’s an amazing photo of a chick next to a hand puppet — the first condors reintroduced were reared by puppets!). —CLR

5. The Confessions of a Conscious Rap Fan

Mychal Denzel Smith  | Pitchfork | June 28th, 2022 | 2,287 words

Hip-hop has had subgenres nearly as long as it’s had the spine of a breakbeat, but at some point it was riven by a more seismic distinction: mainstream vs. underground, and specifically the rise of “conscious” rap. Mychal Denzel Smith was one of the many people who internalized that stance, who viewed hip-hop as a vessel of liberation and awakening to a degree that became an identity of its own. That was then, though. Now, with the 2022 return of Black Star and Kendrick Lamar — both avatars and resurrectors of conscious rap — Smith interrogates his onetime fandom, as well as the evolution (or lack thereof) of the music itself. “I was artificially limiting my perspective,” he writes, “in the name of some grand vision of consciousness that never cohered into anything other than my own sense of intellectual superiority.” This isn’t a discussion about art vs. artist. It’s a coming to grips with our own reductive tendencies, our willingness to flatten ourselves in the name of aesthetic belonging. If you’ve found that the backpack fits a little bit differently these days, this piece will help you notice where the straps are chafing. —PR

By early 2021, Walsh had gathered ample evidence to prove that esports could bring in as many as 20 ­student-athletes per year and boost the college’s brand among potential applicants who’d been weaned on Fortnite and NBA 2K. Still, some of the school’s administrators scoffed at the idea that gamers deserved the same respect as, say, members of LCCC’s well-regarded rodeo team. “They’re not athletes, because an athlete, by definition, manipulates their body and muscles in a way to interact with some object,” Walsh recalls an administrator saying. “And I said, ‘You just described esports.’ And they’re like, ‘Well, no, they’re not moving.’ And I go, ‘They’re moving their wrists and their fingers with dexterity. And they’re using their brains in such a quick and decisive way. How is that not a sport?’”