With no secondary school in the southern half of the Isle of Mull, children must leave home for the mainland at the age of eleven, living in a youth hostel during the school week. It’s a system that has existed for generations—but what does sending children away so young do to a community? Fernando Pinho gently follows the families who must navigate this rite of passage, and explores the political decisions that have kept this structure in place.
You know that Monday morning dread, she said, when you hate your job and you can’t face going back? The children get that on a Sunday.
Sunday is the day of washing, drying and ironing, because the clothes that came home on Friday have to be packed again for Monday. And then the bag sits at the bottom of the stairs. You come down, and you see it, she said, and it’s this little reminder of what’s coming.
Sometimes there’s an invitation, a barbecue at someone’s house, all of them welcome, just a couple of hours, you’ll be home in time. But her son doesn’t want to leave the house on a Sunday, and she won’t leave him. How do I say I can’t go, she told me.
Pat Caldwell is 69 years old and, as Chris Stanton gushes in this uproarious Q&A, “a legend to IMAX nerds.” Caldwell loves Vision3 film stock, hates Joker: Folie à Deux, and has discovered more than one dead body in a movie theater. His decades-long career as a projectionist includes a stint at a Tennessee porn theater with “very good equipment,” and he once spent half a year screening Lawrence of Arabia four times daily. When Stanton reached out to Caldwell on the occasion of The Odyssey, he may have landed the year’s most entertaining interview.
So Sam taught me how to run the projectors, and he got drunk, passed out on the couch. And after the concession stand in the box office closed, I would go up and run the rest of the movies for him. This went very nicely until one night there’s a knock at the door. I opened the door and here’s this old man standing there. And I said, “Well, who are you?” He says, “I could ask the same question. Who are you? I’m the business agent of the local projectionists’ union.” I explained what was going on. He woke up Sam, chewed him out. And the next day they made me an apprentice. I trained for a year with no pay at all the local theaters in Nashville.
A Chinese man hired a Florida surrogate, then didn’t pick up his kids because of visas issues, sparking a custody battle that could upend the lucrative, largely unregulated industry. Emi Nietfeld spent more than a year reporting this rollercoaster of a feature. One particularly harrowing turn involves the father hiring people to retrieve the babies for him:
As the men continued knocking on her door, Simpson’s phone convulsed with notifications. Zhou messaged her nonstop. He called 53 times. “If you don’t give my babies to us, we have to report to the police. And you will be arrested immediately,” he warned. Then came pleas—or were they threats? “Think about your daughter,” he wrote, referring to Simpson’s 5-year-old. “I don’t think you want to have her be live without you for several years!”
Halfway across the world, Zhou paced in his apartment, chest seizing in panic. Over and over, he’d tried to explain his predicament to Simpson. He was still waiting for his visa interview; without her help, he couldn’t get his kids home. Running out of money and options, he’d hired the handlers as a last resort. Now, as his calls and messages went ignored, he feared she’d fallen in love with his children and would never let them go.
Award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv recently published a collection of essays about the relationships between mothers and daughters. She talked to Lucy McKeon about her longstanding interest in stories about families and about revisiting old topics through new lenses:
LM
You write in the preface about your own experience of this. Not only in your relationship to your own mother, which I want to ask you about, but you describe revisiting some of these stories, years after first reporting and writing them, now as a more experienced writer, and a mother yourself. Through new insight, and in some cases encountering details you’d previously overlooked, you decided to make some revisions. I wonder how it felt to look back on this work by a younger version of yourself.
RA
I think I was most surprised by how one’s curiosity changes—by the moments where I realized I had failed to be curious. And where my present-day self would have identified a particular episode or trauma as foundational, I had breezed past it [back then]. It was about age, it was about being a different kind of writer, maybe. I kept noticing that I had omitted lost babies or dead babies—in three different stories. It fundamentally wasn’t registering to me as a significant life event. Those are some of the things that I felt newly attentive to, that I couldn’t just leave be. I felt I needed to address [them].
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One of the most vivid memories of my childhood involves an ice cream. My mother and father kept a relatively treat-free house, with desserts reserved for special occasions, but their standards loosened during summer vacations. During a visit with relatives we didn’t see very often, my parents decided to make the day even more special; they gave my sister, my two cousins, and me money to buy something from the ice cream truck that made a regular circuit around the neighborhood. Thrilled by this rare indulgence, I rushed down the sidewalk, delighted to finally take part in this classic summertime ritual, eating dessert in the middle of the afternoon!
I can still remember the thrill of holding that much-anticipated cone, taking my first lick . . . then watching the scoop roll off its biscuity throne to the sidewalk.
Perhaps that is why, as an adult, my freezer is always stocked with at least two flavors of ice cream, which I eat year-round. It’s my go-to way to reward myself after a productive day, or to make a bad one better. While I tend to keep things simple (and have been known to eat directly out of the carton), I love ice cream for its versatility. It can support a piece of apple pie or be the main event in a fudge-slathered sundae. Its near-infinite variety of flavors offers something for everyone, from no-frills vanilla to chef-inspired gastronomic experiments.
That ability to shape-shift has made this humble dessert a mirror of sorts, reflecting cultural changes. It even goes back to the founding of the country: Thomas Jefferson was the first known American to write down an ice cream recipe (though it’s only fairly recently that historians have begun to acknowledge his problematic relationship with the enslaved workers who produced such delicacies for his guests). A century later, advances in refrigeration transformed ice cream from a luxury good to a mass-market phenomenon. As immigration surged in the US, peddling ice cream on the street became a way for new arrivals to grasp the American dream. During World War II, the dessert symbolized the country’s can-do attitude: Despite the many logistical obstacles, the US government shipped it to troops as far away as the Pacific.
In our current Age of Ozempic, while celebrities get ever slimmer and our screens fill with physical-optimization hacks, desserts may seem like an endangered species. But I believe it’s more important than ever to take guilt-free pleasure in food that brings you joy. And if you still feel a twinge of hesitation before digging into a bowl of your favorite flavor, multiple studies over the past 20 years have shown that ice cream actually has real, measurable health benefits (see David Merritt Johns’s piece from The Atlantic below). No less an authority than Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a prominent bioethicist and oncologist, titled his most recent book on healthy living Eat Your Ice Cream.
So go ahead and have a scoop. Think of it as doctor’s orders.
This entertaining account traces ice cream’s transformation from an expensive luxury to an all-American dish in the early 20th century, when advances in refrigeration made it more widely available. Prohibition played a part, too: When alcohol was banned nationwide in the 1920s and early ’30s, some breweries switched to making ice cream instead, “a decent substitute for alcohol for the drowning of one’s emotions.”
But what really stands out in this story is the role ice cream played in World War II, when it became a symbol of American patriotism. Siegel weaves together historical anecdotes that show the enormous effort the US military put into embedding ice cream throughout its supply lines. Why go through all that trouble? Siegel makes a compelling case that getting ice cream halfway around the world, under such difficult circumstances, was a way of putting American exceptionalism into action. If we can do this for our soldiers, we can do anything.
By the time World War II came around, ice cream . . . had become inseparable from the American way of life, an emblem of American comfort, freedom, and democracy. The rest of the world went back to banning ice cream as part of its rationing efforts (with Great Britain adding salt to the wound by endorsing carrots on sticks as the official wartime substitute for ice cream bars), but the United States doubled down, building pop-up ice cream factories on the front lines; delivering individual ice cream cartons to foxholes; spending more than a million dollars on a floating ice cream barge that roamed the Pacific delivering ice cream to Allied ships incapable of making their own; and distributing 135 million pounds of dehydrated ice cream base in 1943 alone.
This engaging survey of popular ice cream flavors is filled with trivia-night-worthy fun facts: that vanilla is consistently the best-selling flavor worldwide; that chocolate ice cream may actually have been created first (cocoa being more readily available than vanilla); and that mint chocolate chip got an international popularity boost when a British culinary student created the dessert “Mint Royale” to celebrate the marriage of England’s Princess Anne in 1973.
But such is the nature of culinary history that not all lineages are straightforward. I appreciate the way Barron analyzes all the possible origin stories, even when they contradict. While some flavors have a single known inventor—such as the Grateful Dead fan who suggested “Cherry Garcia” to the hippie entrepreneurs Ben & Jerry’s—others resulted from experimentation over time. Some even have shameful associations: Butter pecan, for example, became popular in the American South, where the nuts were plentiful and used to dilute vanilla ice cream when serving it to Black customers.
Rocky Road could be considered the ice cream world’s first mix-in flavor, blending creamy ice cream with crunchy and chewy additions. According to legend, its creation dates back to 1929, when ice cream maker William Dreyer and candy maker Joseph Edy teamed up in Oakland, California. During the Great Depression—a “rocky” time for America—Dreyer supposedly invented the flavor by using his wife’s sewing scissors to cut marshmallows into a chocolate ice cream base studded with walnuts. The duo mass-produced the new flavor, giving the country a bit of sweetness and humor during a bleak decade.
But the name “Rocky Road” may have existed long before. In the mid-1800s in Australia, settlers used the term for a confection of sweets, nuts, and dried fruit; essentially, a proto-trail mix. And just down the road from Dreyer’s and Edy’s, Fentons Creamery also claims to have invented the flavor, swapping walnuts for almonds in their signature version.
Brianna Wellen had one overarching question when she visited the Chicago outpost of The Museum of Ice Cream: What is this place? I had the same thought as Wellen when it started showing up on Google Maps as a must-see attraction in my hometown—is this “an influencer’s paradise? A children’s playground?”
The answer, it turns out, in her snarky-but-fair review, is both. A privately owned chain with five locations in the US and one in Singapore, it started as a pop-up “experience” in New York, with an aggressively pink aesthetic that bridged the line between kids’ party and Instagrammable photo op. If you’re looking for “an anthropological look at the history and cultural impact of ice cream,” she writes, this isn’t it. (Though I’d happily visit that museum.)
It’s more fun to write a scathing review than a positive one, but Wellen doesn’t take the easy route and go full hater. She acknowledges that the people around her are having fun taking pictures in the giant pool of faux sprinkles, and that the unlimited ice cream samples may be worth the price of admission for some, even if the Chicago hot-dog-style signature treat looks better than it tastes.
What she points out so effectively is the chasm between the museum’s ethos of lighthearted escapism and its grim reality: It is housed in a building that used to be the headquarters of the prestigious Chicago Tribune newspaper, now given over to an ephemeral, commercial experience dependent on overworked, demoralized employees.
There’s something extremely dystopian about these bright, colorful, somewhat functionless installations popping up inside closed businesses, which is how the project started. And seeing Chicago’s iteration in the storefront of the now empty Tribune Tower, which once housed some of the most influential journalists the city had to offer, was disappointing, signaling that while the media industry is on its deathbed, people will form a line down the block to snap a photo with a plastic sprinkle.
There was something about the staff’s demeanor that led me to believe they weren’t as excited to be there as their oft-repeated scripted banter made it seem. The logistics of certain experiences seemed like a mess; the large, unending crowds needed to be endlessly wrangled; and the loud music meant that their faux cheerful taglines needed to be screamed right into the ears of visitors to be heard. Smiles were pasted on as impatient guests asked why they couldn’t just go into the Ice Cream Lab already. When Angela and I kindly told one worker that there was no rush in letting us into a particular room and then complimented her ice-cream-themed hair clips, she reacted with such graciousness at our attitudes that I thought she was about to start sobbing.
I still remember my visceral reaction on reading this Atlantic story a few years ago: Is ice cream actually good for me?
In this exhaustively researched and reported piece, Merritt Johns explains how a statistically significant finding can be pushed aside when it doesn’t fit an accepted narrative. For more than 20 years, nutritional studies have shown that diabetics who eat half a cup of ice cream a day have a lower risk of heart problems, and people who eat two or more servings of ice cream a week had a significantly lower risk of developing diabetes in the first place. Yet those findings seemed so contrary to public health advice that alternate explanations kept being pushed instead—it’s just dairy that’s good for you, especially if you choose low-fat milk or yogurt. “As academia’s public-relations machinery came to life,” he writes, “nuance went out the window.”
Poor ice cream never got its due—until now.
Every day brings another health story about a so-called “superfood,” but Merritt Johns’s relentless focus on the facts sets this one apart. Rather than relying on an academic study or two, he tracks down all the key researchers involved in what I like to call the Great Ice Cream Cover-up: “I wanted to know what happens when consensus makers are confronted with a finding that seems to contradict everything they’ve ever said before.” Some refuse to be interviewed (more proof of a conspiracy?), but most seem relieved to finally admit that seemingly set-in-stone advice about what’s good for us is more malleable than we think.
In 2004, the English epidemiologist Michael Marmot wrote, “Scientific findings do not fall on blank minds that get made up as a result. Science engages with busy minds that have strong views about how things are and ought to be.” Marmot was writing about how politicians deal with scientific evidence—always concluding that the latest data supported their existing views—but he acknowledged that scientists weren’t so different.
The ice-cream saga shows how this plays out in practice. Many stories can be told about any given scientific inquiry, and choosing one is a messy, value-laden process. A scientist may worry over how their story fits with common sense, and whether they have sufficient evidence to back it up. They may also worry that it poses a threat to public health, or to their credibility. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from the parable of the diet world’s most inconvenient truth, it’s that scientific knowledge is itself a packaged good. The data, whatever they show, are just ingredients.
Who thought foie gras ice cream was a good idea? And more importantly—what does it taste like? Amy Ettinger took on these pressing questions with a visit to Humphry Slocombe, a “kid-unfriendly” ice cream shop in San Francisco. Chef and co-owner Jake Godby admits the controversial flavor is only rarely on the menu (it’s too expensive and takes too long to make), but the debate surrounding it has been good for business. Hardcore foodies rush to buy it when they can, while the protests of animal-rights activists only raise the shop’s profile.
More than a food review, Ettinger explores why people make and eat extreme flavors. She argues that American palates have expanded over the decades; we’ve gotten used to ordering Korean barbecue tacos and sushi burritos, mash-ups unknown (and unthinkable) to our great-grandparents. To grab attention—and prove your chops as an out-of-the-box culinary thinker—you have to raise the stakes: “One person’s gross-out experience seems to be another person’s gleeful experimentation.”
As I took another bite, I couldn’t help but feel a thrill. There was something decadent in eating a treat that so many people would be upset about. The wrath I could incur by simply opening my mouth, chewing, and swallowing made me feel powerful. And maybe that perceived transgression is itself a flavor enhancer, much like artificial coloring can ramp up our experience of “lime” or “banana” in some mass-produced, neon-colored taffy or gum.
Is that why Godby put it on the menu—so he could wield that kind of power? Why continue making food that would anger people? Was it to get attention?
Who knew the simple ice cream truck had such a dramatic backstory? As an avid collector of historical trivia, I devoured this account of ice cream’s mobile history, starting with 19th-century immigrant street peddlers through controversies over the trucks’ music, cleanliness, and supposed ties to organized crime (the notorious Glasgow Ice Cream Van Wars ended with six people killed in a fire).
What gives this piece a lovely personal touch is the way Potts weaves this past with her own memories of growing up in an English seaside town, where she and her father would pick up ice cream treats in the summer: “An unspoken secret between us, given that Mum had dinner waiting on the table when we arrived, and would have been appalled to know that a mere seven minutes earlier, we were driving along the seafront, car top down, the salty air whipping my long hair into the ice cream and sticky sauce.”
As she interviews ice cream van owners whose vocation goes back generations—along with the entrepreneurs adapting their vehicles to new technologies—she is struck by how many people in the business are following a family tradition. “It’s an industry that remains strong, with an uncanny ability to adapt to changing times,” she writes. “I am fascinated by its survival.”
While it may be more common now to see an ice cream truck at an event or on TikTok, we still crave those summer days when jaunty chimes call us out to the street. The odds can feel stacked against the old-school icey men, with legislation that limits their movement, environmental and nutritional campaigners who demand more and more restrictions, rising pitch rents, the price of vans, the difference, even, in the way children play outside. But they’re still there, still clinging on. Why?
This portrait of master gelatiere Andrea Soban oozes with admiration for its subject—and had me craving his signature mandarin orange flavor. From his base in Valenza, Italy, halfway between Milan and Torino, he continues a family tradition that goes back at least five generations: creating the most flavorful, creamy gelato free of artificial ingredients or colors.
The word gelato—Italy’s lower-fat, lower-sugar version of ice cream—literally means “frozen,” but making it at Soban’s level involves science-whiz levels of knowledge. Zwingle shows the intricate steps he takes to get the right balance of ice crystals, fat droplets, and air bubbles. While he sources ingredients from around the world, most of his favorites come from specific parts of Italy; the best pistachios, for example, are grown in one small Sicilian town.
This story gave me a new appreciation for the effort that goes into making a seemingly simple dessert—when the person making it wants to be the very best, that is. Anyone want to join me on a field trip to Valenza?
“Try this,” Andrea said, as he handed me a tiny spoonful of a just-made mandarin sorbetto. Sensations of cold, and a smooth wave of extraordinary citrus flavor, blended into a faultless harmony as the whole combination swept up to my brain. It tasted juicier than the juice of the fruit itself. And then it simply disappeared. No loading my tongue with a mass of flavors jostling together, struggling for dominance, leaving assorted clinging aftertastes as my stomach braced itself. It left only the desire for more.
Suddenly I understood the hidden power of fine gelato. It doesn’t aim only for my mouth, and my stomach is really of no interest. It aims for the dopamine reward system lurking in my brain, the part that says, “You don’t need this, but you’ve got to have it.” We did these little teaching-tastings intermittently all morning. I paid close attention to everything he said, but the voice in my head kept crooning incoherently about what was happening in my mouth.
Elizabeth Blackwell is the author of While Beauty Slept, On a Cold Dark Sea, and Red Mistress. She lives outside Chicago with her family and stacks of books she is absolutely, positively going to read one day.
Stormy Morse lost two partners to gun suicide. She didn’t know that the second one, Lewis Tabler, had made the National Rifle Association the beneficiary of his retirement savings through its planned-giving program. In this feature, co-published with The New Yorker, Mike Spies describes what happens when the NRA, which has long denied a connection between access to guns and suicide rates, comes to collect:
Fisher, the NRA’s planned-giving director … e-mailed Applied Industrial, pointing out that Tabler had been dead for two months, and that “accounts with properly designated beneficiaries” are “generally available for distribution within 7–10 business days.” He went on, “We want to do whatever is needed to make this a smooth process.”
Meanwhile, multiple debt collectors had filed claims against Tabler’s estate, and the register of wills informed Stormy that she also owed an inheritance tax, since she was now the sole owner of the home.
As a favor, a neighbor of Stormy’s who was a lawyer spoke to the NRA’s assistant general counsel, Sarah Gervase, on her behalf. The neighbor raised the possibility that the organization might give up some of the money, according to Gervase, who recounted the exchange in an e-mail with Applied Industrial in early June. Gervase wrote that she “informed” Stormy’s neighbor that the “NRA is not willing to settle this.” Tabler’s cause of death did not seem to have any bearing on the organization’s position.
There’s nothing like walking into a pub and sitting down at an empty stool where your regular order awaits you. You have been seen; it’s a singular feeling of camaraderie and community. Club 2101, a dive bar in Oakland California, opens around 8 am each day. For The Oaklandside, Azucena Rasilla profiles a 16-hour-day in the life of the 80-year-old haunt, a story as colorful as the dedicated regulars who frequent the establishment, many of them captured in evocative photos by Sarahbeth Maney.
Another regular, Steve Powell, puts on the jukebox’s first song of the day, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Texas Flood,” and just as Vaughan’s guitar solo builds, another Breakfast Club member walks in: 71-year-old Kurt Meyer. Perez says Meyer had a health scare a few months ago; Perez is happy to see Meyer get back to his routine of hanging out with the crew.
By 11:30 a.m., the ice chest is in need of a refill and the bar starts to settle down. There are about a dozen people inside, some playing pool, others chatting or reading the newspaper. A few attentively watch the horse races now playing on the TV screens.
George is the first of the early morning crew to call it quits and catch the bus home. Winn and Altamonte follow shortly after.
“All of these regulars are not just customers,” Perez says. “They are friends and family.”
Ahead of the 40th anniversary of Stand By Me, Alec Joyner takes up Rob Reiner’s classic film and considers it from a few dozen angles. It’s a canny piece of critical writing on time, memory, masculinity, and tenderness, forces that often work against each other. (Joyner doesn’t raise the subject of Reiner’s violent death last year, though he pauses briefly on Chris, a character “freakishly knifed to death . . . trying to break up a fight.”) Stand By Me‘s two days of summer are a “vital pause” in the life of its characters, a “portal . . . into the expanse of time.” Here, Joyner illuminates that pause, and captures some of its elusive grace.
Stand by Me was slapped with an R rating, for the boys’ profanity, as well as the prominence of child abuse and death. This may have hampered ticket sales, but it also made it the first R-rated movie that many ’80s and ’90s kids saw. It made it a fitting rite of passage.
Still, there’s something lamentable in the verdict, the MPAA telling a faulty story much like the fictional adults of Castle Rock. How many blockbusters have promoted horrendous violence, only to make the PG-13 grade because they feel safely unreal? Stand by Me was received as dangerous because its horrors and its dirt live at home.
Sam Roberts | Longreads | August 11, 2026 | 4,862 words (20 minutes)
This is an excerpt from Are They Dead Yet? by Sam Roberts, which was published on August 11, 2026, by Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
Tuck Everlasting is a cautionary tale about a family of the same surname who, by inadvertently discovering the proverbial Fountain of Youth, is forced to reconcile with eternity. When I was assigned to write the obituary of the book’s author, Natalie Babbitt, I wondered whether she had continued pondering immortality herself. It turned out she had. Not surprisingly, her own take on eternal life echoed that of the fictional family patriarch, Angus Tuck. “I think that living forever would be a terrible thing,” I quoted her as saying in her Times obituary. “It would be boring, sad and lonely.” Babbitt died when she was 84. But Tuck and her other novels endure as Babbitt’s legacy for readers. So does my obituary, which in 2016 revealed her motivation to become an author: She was inspired to write Tuck, she said, when her four-year-old daughter woke from a nap crying because she was scared of dying. Babbitt had intended to become an illustrator, not an author, but pivoted after taking one writing course in college. She had enrolled because her husband hoped to become a novelist and she wanted to understand the challenges he faced.
Back at the Daily News, obituaries weren’t the best way to achieve immortality. We mostly ran one-paragraph squibs for members of the paper’s family, of printers, pressmen, and their immediate relatives. Instead, like most tabloids, the News thrived on the reported details of murders, assassinations, and suicides. Few news stories generated more of a sensation than death in all its dimensions. No less an authority once defined “news” than the ancient newspaper deliverer—a beloved man known as Bo Gee, who was decades too old to be described as a newsboy—weaving up Second Avenue with a wire shopping cart brimming with Chinese-language newspapers, calling out the headlines as he delivered the papers to Chinese bars and restaurants on Manhattan’s East Side. He began his route in Chinatown, where the papers were printed. Subscribers on Manhattan’s Upper East Side were often a day or two behind the headlines because the last stop on his evening route depended largely on the number of drinks he had finagled from bartenders along the way before he was too wobbly to walk any farther. When a colleague of mine, the columnist Jimmy Breslin (who described him as “a small, thirsty man”), asked him which headlines sold the most papers, he responded unhesitatingly. He didn’t need a public opinion poll or a focus group of readers or a real-time digital analysis of clickbait: Two were surefire circulation boosters. One was war! The other: big guy dies!
Taken separately, obits constitute an individual’s legacy. In aggregate, they can capture the social and cultural currency of an era. Which people are worth remembering? Which values are worth celebrating? How do we measure success and failure, good and evil, achievement and defeat, social rank and professional standing? How many of the one hundred thousand people now immortalized in the periodically printed historical compilation Who Was Who were deemed worthy of obituaries at the time of their death? How many of the more than 33,000 contemporary notables included in the latest editions of Who’s Who will get obituaries when they die? (That the titles of those reference books don’t include question marks suggests that the listings themselves are indisputable, a questionable supposition when the price of inclusion by some publishers seems to be for the “whos” to buy at least one copy of the book. An entry for Michael Fowler Cullis, a former British diplomat, describes his recreation as “writing obituaries for friends.”)
People want to be remembered, and we want to remember them, or, at least, we do. “Obituaries commemorate a life at the point where it is completed by death. Yet the completion is also depletion, in the sense that the life is constructed as meaningful precisely at the point where it stops,” Professor Clare Brant, who teaches literature and culture at Kings College London, has written. “They act as the first version of a biography—sometimes the only one, although Wikipedia has closed the gap with each life story seemingly waiting for a death sentence.” But as valuable as Wikipedia can be, the New York Public Library notes, “Obituaries provide an important tool to researchers by offering biographical information on individuals that may not be readily available elsewhere. In many cases, the obituary supplies the only biographical data extant on a person.” Philip Sutton, a genealogy librarian at the library, told Legacy.com, the self-proclaimed world’s largest commercial provider of online memorials and guest books, that obituaries may reveal the married name of a daughter identified years earlier in the census only by her maiden name; that by identifying an immigrant’s specific birthplace, obituaries can also invigorate research on a family’s roots.
Obituaries are a reminder that when you die, someone else gets the last word on your legacy—or, at least, the first of the last words.
Especially in small towns and midsize cities, local newspaper obituaries bond one generation to the next. By recalling where the deceased went to school and whom they married and who survived them, those obits provide the frames that form a moving picture of continuity, a narrative of cohesion. They describe whether, and how, the departed outpaced their parents in personal and professional achievement, their legacy to contemporary readers, and the promise of their progenitors—grandchildren or great-grandchildren who are still blank slates with the potential to add to the story.
To me, obituaries evoke the heartrending backstories of the characters in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, the unfulfilled promise of Joe Crowell, who got a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated first in his class: “Goin’ to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France. All that education for nothing.” Emily is dead, too, but so consumed by nostalgia—before being persuaded that “live people don’t understand, do they?”—that she descends from the town’s cemetery and wants to return to her past life in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, until the Stage Manager reminds her, “You not only live it but you watch yourself living it. And as you watch it, you see the thing that they, down there, never know. You see the future. You know what’s going to happen afterwards.” “When I think of an obituary, it’s as objective as journalism can be, a story on someone’s life,” Holly Shreve Gilbert, a journalism instructor at Oakland University who was the interim president of the Funeral Consumers Information Society, told Molly Birnbaum of Atlas Obscura. But “hyper-local journalism is dying, and so is the obituary of the local person.” Gilbert added, “Now, if it’s on Legacy.com or Facebook or a blog, we’re basically whitewashing everyone’s lives. We’re all happy. Everyone is happy.”
Well, not everyone.
Obituaries are a reminder that when you die, someone else gets the last word on your legacy—or, at least, the first of the last words. And for all the beloved and respected and cherished and valued that punctuate paid obituaries, don’t forget that families can try to perpetuate irreverent descriptions unilaterally to settle scores when one is no longer in a position to retaliate or respond. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Malcolm declaims of the repentant Thane of Cawdor, who was executed for treason, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” If the Thane got the benefit of ambiguity, Florence Harrelson of Chelsea, Maine, had no such luck when she died in 2024 and her daughter, Christina Novak, placed a paid obituary in the Kennebec Journal. Wasting no words, the four-line obit read that the 65-year-old Henderson died “without family by her side due to burnt bridges and a wake of destruction left in her path.” It continued, “Florence did not want an obituary or anyone including family to know she died. That’s because even in death, she wanted those she terrorized to still be living in fear looking over their shoulders. So, this isn’t so much an obituary but more of a public service announcement.”
In 2023, Gayle Harvey Heckman took the trouble to announce the death of her mother, Linda Lernal Stull, in her Michigan hometown newspaper, the Three Rivers Commercial-News, even though they hadn’t spoken in 24 years. “As a mother, Lernal was violent, hateful and cruel,” Heckman wrote. “She physically, mentally, emotionally, verbally and financially abused Gayle.” After going into excruciating detail, the obituary concluded, “Gayle and her family forgive Lernal and hope that she has found peace. They also hope to find peace within themselves. Lernal will not be missed by Gayle or her family. They all understand that the world is a much better place without her.”
Blunt isn’t always bad. If writing can be a cathartic, it can also offer an object lesson. In 2015, a nine-hundred-word paid obituary in Maine’s Bangor Daily News (down-easters seem less inhibited about publicly evaluating their kin) began, “Coleen Sheran Singer (born Coleen Sheran Clark) would have turned 33 this August 31, but she died in Lewiston in an unsuspecting suburban professional couple’s home of a heroin overdose on the morning of December 25, 2014.” The obit was written by Singer’s former husband. It detailed her considerable assets—intellectually gifted, creative, and spirited—without concealing her hefty baggage as a woman who was addicted and suffering from borderline behavioral disorder. Brent Singer attributed the life his former wife led to her broken childhood home but blamed her death on Maine’s governor for denying her access to the methadone clinic she had relied on to stay straight.
In 2008, the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming reported that Jim Adams died at 53. Weary of soppy obituaries of patients who had courageously struggled against one disease or another until the bitter end, Adams went through his son to provide an unvarnished premortem verdict on his abbreviated life. And he had no compunctions about belatedly exercising personal responsibility and admitting that he lost his battle for less inspiring reasons entirely: “It was primarily as a result of being stubborn and not following doctor’s orders or maybe for just living life a little too hard for better than five decades.” He did lament, however, that he “was sadly deprived of his final wish, which was to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a date.”
In 2019, the family of Joe Heller (not that one) playfully celebrated his life in the Hartford Courant. They described him as “a frequent shopper at the Essex Dump” who “left his family with a house full of crap, 300 pounds of birdseed and dead houseplants.” Heller was so practiced a consummate napper that “there wasn’t an occasion too formal or an event too dour that Joe didn’t interrupt with his apnea and voluminous snoring.” The obituary added, “The family is seeking donations to offset the expense of publishing an exceedingly long obituary which would have really pissed Joe off.” (It then appealed generously for contributions to the Seabee Memorial Scholarship Association.)
The Hellers weren’t kidding. Those paid “obits” aren’t cheap. The New York Times doesn’t accept paid obituaries, but their paid death notices, depending on the edition and the day, cost about $1,000 for a bare-bones nine lines of type and $50 for each additional line, which verbose encomiums and fervent eulogizing can raise into the thousands of dollars. (In memoriam notices in newspapers that wish the departed “Happy Birthday in Heaven” remain a testament to the enduring value of print advertising.) While radio and television have generally fallen short in memorializing the dead, there are blogs, zines, and commercial websites devoted to dying, and personal web pages and online videos have all helped democratize death. So far, though, it’s one area in which even a buzzworthy website can’t always live up to its name (such as when Michael Jackson’s death was announced on MichaelJacksonLive.com).
The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina used to publish brief obituaries of local figures for free—until executives discovered that printing a full page of them daily was costing $350,000 annually for newsprint alone. When the paper imposed a fee, readers revolted; the editors relented in some editions. MyGoodbye.com was started by Stephen Miller (definitely not that one), who grew up next to a cemetery and, after escaping from his bank’s eightieth-floor office in 2 World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, decided to become an obituarist full-time. Legacy.com partners with hundreds of newspapers and thousands of funeral homes worldwide to account for about 70 percent of the deaths in the United States alone. A prototype called EPOCH—Electronically Preserving Obituaries as Cultural Heritage—created by the Orange County, Florida, Library System enabled people to publish an obit online for free. Another website, MyObits.com, also lets anyone publish a free memorial. Facebook even allows users to designate an executor to manage their profile after they’ve personally logged off this mortal coil for good.
While radio and television have generally fallen short in memorializing the dead, there are blogs, zines, and commercial websites devoted to dying, and personal web pages and online videos have all helped democratize death.
Paid death notices have been wielded as much to ward off the living as to get the last word on the dead. In the early 1920s, Audrey Munson, America’s first supermodel, became so fed up with fame that she tried to fake her death by paying to run a phony death notice in her local upstate New York newspaper. Her gambit failed; she was so celebrated that the clerk she approached refused to accept the advertisement because he recognized her. Rudyard Kipling may have done her one better: When a newspaper reported his death prematurely, he wrote to the editor, “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.”
Six months before Oliver Sacks died of cancer at 82 in 2015, the London-born neurologist who lived in Manhattan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that amounted to an auto-obituary. Sacks was galvanized, he wrote, by the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, who, learning he was mortally ill at 65, penned a short autobiography in a single day in 1776. “I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective,” Sacks wrote. “There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at ‘NewsHour’ every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.” He explained that his shifting priorities were influenced less by passion than perspective: “This is not indifference but detachment—I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future.”
Kelly McMasters, the author of The Leaving Season: A Memoir, started writing her obituary when she was 12; she has refreshed it almost annually since then. Her ritual was inspired by an assignment her mother was given while training as a volunteer at a local hospice. “I usually end up with a gentle accounting of the year, held against all the past ones,” McMasters wrote in a New York Times opinion essay. “I found many of the accomplishments that felt precious one year were hardly worth a mention the next.” Her private accounts produced an album of verbal snapshots, unreachable versions of herself that seemed as good as the dead about whom obituaries are otherwise published. “It seems dreadfully unfair that we wait until after our deaths to write them and never get to read them ourselves,” McMasters wrote. “Writing your obituary while you’re still alive can offer clarity about your life and, mercifully, if you find something lacking, you still have time to revise.”
By inspiring the “Portraits of Grief” series of intimate minibiographies of the victims of 9/11 in the New York Times, the attack by fanatical al-Qaeda suicide bombers on the World Trade Center in 2001 may inadvertently have made the obituary more egalitarian than any event since the Civil War. These 200-word vignettes with thumbnail photographs weren’t standard obits or news stories. Volunteer reporters interviewed families and friends of the victims and the missing to sketch some 2,500 hundred profiles. Overseen by Jon Landman and Christine Kay on the Metro Desk, the portraits were published over nearly five months. “Terrorism rather than the internet democratized the obituary,” Professor Clare Brant wrote. Roy Harris wrote for the Poynter Institute of the project, “The portraits identified one aspect of life—a woman gardening, a man taking his daughter to ice-skating lessons, or perhaps indulging in a fondness for cigars.” The obituarist Nigel Starck said, “Each day’s pages would renew a sense of the tragedy’s scope, while the individual portraits made each person intimately real.” Our exercise in mining the unremarkable found a larger-than-life common denominator, one that challenges the novelist W. P. Kinsella’s conclusion that “the lives of ninety percent of the population are so dull that no one would care in the least about them, the lives of the remaining ten percent are so bizarre that no one would believe them.”
Some of the deaths in those “Portraits of Grief” were preceded by chivalrous acts of courage and self-sacrifice. Those heroics worked their way into news articles. The portraits were not about how people died, not about their last moments of life, no matter how gutsy, but how they lived and what their loss meant to their family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. The gruesome, grisly details were superfluous, unlike an earlier obituary style in which the how sometimes seemed to predominate over the who, what, when, where, and why.
When Louisa May Alcott died in 1888, for example, the New York Times explained in the first paragraph of her obituary, “For a long time Miss Alcott had been ill, suffering from nervous prostration. Last Autumn she appeared to be improving and went to the Highlands to reside with Dr. Rhoda A. Lawrence. She drove from there into town to visit her father on Thursday last, and caught a cold, which on Saturday settled on the base of the brain and developed spinal meningitis.” The first five paragraphs of Teddy Roosevelt’s Times obituary in 1919 left nothing about the cause of death to the reader’s imagination: “His physicians said that the immediate cause of death was a clot of blood which detached itself from a vein and entered the lungs.” In 1892, reporting the death of Caroline Harrison, the wife of President Benjamin Harrison, the Atlanta Constitution described her corpse in clinical detail: “She shows in her emaciation the effects of the long wasting illness of eight months that has reduced her large, matronly figure to a thin, frail form.” Then again, as recently as 2000, the paper, now called the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ran an obituary by Kay Powell of a local church-choir tenor, who had also written a manuscript on the philosophy of religion, beginning this way: “David Robeson Morgan was a brilliant man whose future looked good, until he had a frontal lobotomy in 1947.”
“A writer may bear the same name as the subject of his memoir, but he is hardly the same person,” Robert W. Fuller, the former college president and self-styled dignitarian, surmised in the epilogue to his own memoir. “He has long since morphed into the subject’s successor, and then the successor of the successor.” Bridget Fowler, a sociology professor at the University of Glasgow and the author of The Obituary as Collective Memory, wrote, “The auto/biography as such is under the expressive control of its author and is thus as profound (or simplistic) as he or she is. In contrast, one characteristic of the obituary is that these lives are selected as particularly memorable, distinguished, or newsworthy.” She adds, “The obituary offers the rare accolade of public recognition, the first step toward posthumous memory. Yet it is not just a store of value, it is also a measure of value: the obituary as a biographical form illuminates the social reality of dominance and distinction, whilst only rarely shedding light on the world of subordination.”
The onset of the AIDS epidemic presented editors with a sensitive dilemma: Merely having the virus implied vulnerable behavior—either drug use or homosexuality—that society was far from accepting. In 1986, the fashion designer Perry Ellis died of AIDS at age 46, as stated in his obituary in the Washington Post. In the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, his cause of his death was reported to be viral encephalitis. In early May 1987, Charles Ludlam, a playwright, parody actor, and admired figure in New York’s East Village underground arts scene, withdrew from the New York Shakespeare Festival’s scheduled Central Park production of Titus Andronicus. On May 28, Ludlam’s publicist announced that he had died of pneumonia. The New York Times‘s Jeremy Gerard assumed correctly that the pneumonia was a complication of AIDS, and believed the refusal to acknowledge the disease compounded the tragedy of Ludlam’s death by validating the stigma attached to gay people, who were among its most prominent victims.
As Leah Rosenzweig reported in Slate, for hours Gerard desperately tried to persuade Ludlam’s parents to confirm the actual cause but failed. “They were working-class Catholics from Long Island; as far as they were concerned, their son had died a shameful death,” Gerard recalled. But fifteen minutes before his deadline, the family’s lawyer called back. The Ludlams agreed to confirm the cause. On May 29, 1987, Gerard’s obituary of Charles Ludlam was the first that identified AIDS as the cause of death in the Times, on the front page.
“Obituaries contribute to national myths or collective memories of contemporary heroes by symbolically ‘reflecting what, in death, was most valued about the lives of individual citizens,'” Janice Hume wrote. “An obituary distills, publishes, and thus legitimizes something more abstract than mere facts. It also reveals values, highlighted in the attributes of the deceased, and should be examined not just as an indifferent chronicle but as a commemoration, a representation of an ideal, with its own distinct contribution to the understanding of history. Those ideals, part of obituary coverage, become safeguarded by their publication.”
To quantify those values, Lux Narayan, a social media analyst, conducted a statistical survey of some 2,000 New York Times news obituaries that were published in 2015 and 2016. Not surprisingly, the fields of academics, science, politics, film, theater, music, dance, and art predominated among those deemed worthy. On average, they achieved the thing that made them worthy of a Times obituary when they were 37 years old—athletes more likely in their twenties, politicians in their forties. The prototypical obituary subject lived to be 81, which meant 44 years had elapsed between the accomplishment and, in the cases of the many obscure and quirky characters, their public aggrandizement. “Talk about having to be patient,” Narayan said. In a TED Talk, he explained his obsessive reading of the daily paper over scrambled eggs this way: “If you think about it, the front page of the newspaper is usually bad news and cues man’s failures. An instance where bad news cues accomplishment is at the end of the paper, in the obituaries.”
What were the most common denominators among those obituarized, and what do they suggest society—or, more to the point, the Times—valued? If your name was John, you didn’t necessarily have a better chance of being the subject of an obituary, but it was more likely that a man whose first name was John would appear in one. That’s not so surprising, given that John (along with James, Robert, Michael, and David) has been among the most popular names for American men born in the last 100 years. Narayan was struck by another commonality, though. The language-processing program revealed that the one word that leapt out everywhere was help, as a noun or verb. The most universal value, it seemed, that elevated the famous and not-so into those the Times editors considered worthy of obituaries was how much people helped. “They made a positive dent in the fabric of life,” Narayan said.
For a family member, an obit represents an imprimatur, validation by association, a keepsake that maintains their heritage and, perhaps for a generation, prevents their own legacy from vanishing like a walnut in the batter of eternity.
Journalists understand, or should, that statistical surveys of subjective material are fertile ground for as many question marks as answers. Patrick Nolan, a sociologist at the University of South Carolina, wondered whether the cult of celebrity has blossomed over the last century, as the anecdotal evidence suggests. Has the public become so starstruck that somebodies in less glamorous professions have been overshadowed? One way to measure the trajectory of society’s fascination quotient, he figured, was to enlist New York Times obituaries as a cultural barometer. Nolan’s canvas was every “notable death” that was published in the Times during the entire twentieth century.
“Most striking are the simultaneous increases in celebrity obituaries and declines in religious obituaries,” Nolan and Timothy J. Bertoni reported in the journal Sociation Today. “They document the increasing secularization and hedonism of American culture at a time when personal income was rising and public concern was shifting away from the basic issues of survival. The magnitude of these trends is seismic. While the Greeks may have looked to their gods for guidance and entertainment, we’ve turned increasingly to our celebrities—entertainers and athletes.” After dividing the century into quarters, Nolan and a doctoral student, Timothy Bertoni, randomly selected 20 days from 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975, and 2000 and ranked the professions of the dead by the number of obituaries run.
The number of obits of entertainers and athletes, grouped together, rose, from seventh most in 1900 to fifth in 1925, third in 1950, and first in 1975. By 2000, they remained in first place and accounted for 28 percent of obituaries. In 2000, the researchers didn’t find a single notable religious figure who was memorialized. The category had plummeted from fourth place when the 20th century began to last when the millennium ended. During the same period, the number of obituaries of notable individuals from the fields of business, finance, manufacturing, and industry declined by half. Americans, Janice Hume has written in her study of grief, “value each other and, indeed, value life for collective reasons. They value a long, robust, and full life, a life that is uniquely American, and a life that ensures social preservation. A typical Victorian obituary would carry the statement, ‘in life we are in the midst of death,’ but as this study suggests, at least on the obituary pages of historic mainstream American newspapers, in death we are in the midst of life.” Nigel Starck, too, argues that obituaries provide a glue that bonds society not in grief but in an aspirational reevaluation of our own lives.
“There is nothing inherently gloomy about the newspaper obituary page,” he writes. “Done well, it should capture life rather than wallow in death.” Clare Brant recalled her euphoric reaction to reading of the death of Martin Wells, the grandson of the English writer H. G. Wells, in the Guardian in 2009. He was an 80-year-old biologist with a passion for cephalopods and was also a novelist, painter, and yachtsman. “Though marine biologists don’t have dry lives in a literal sense, and people who love octopus usually have a sense of play, he was really lively,” Brant wrote. “I rejoiced that an academic could have such a full, happy and entertaining life—there’s hope for the rest of us! It wasn’t that I wanted to know him or even to have known him, but I was glad he’d existed, and I still want not to forget the implications of his existence.”
And that was an obituary about a total stranger. For a family member, an obit represents an imprimatur, validation by association, a keepsake that maintains their heritage and, perhaps for a generation, prevents their own legacy from vanishing like a walnut in the batter of eternity. “The greatest investigative piece I ever wrote when I thought I was really important never survived more than a few weeks in terms of being kept around,” said Jim Nicholson, the Philadelphia journalist who regularly chronicled deaths of the common man, the nobodies, as he put it. “But these obituaries, they’re laminated. They’re put under glass. They’re hung on walls or in family Bibles. In fact, they’re even put into the inside coat pocket of the deceased. And, yeah, they’ll be around long after you and I are gone.” Nicholson’s obituaries were indelible. “My words give readers thousands of moments to remember of little lives lived well,” he said. “Perhaps I even gave them the secrets of how to live one well.”
What readers cherish about obituaries, Casey Cep wrote in the New Yorker, is “the opportunity to celebrate one’s own good fortune at still being alive, to keep tabs on death—who it comes for, at what age, and how much we have in common with the deceased—and also to trace an immensely compact narrative arc. So much of the news is ongoing and unsettled, but obituaries by definition have a kind of alluring finality.” In the two weeks after Victoria Chang’s mother died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2015, the Los Angeles–based poet feverishly wrote seventy poems. Her goal: to recast the newspaper obituary to identify what had been lost (“civility, language and the future,” she wrote) and death’s cultural impact on the living. She described writing an obituary as a wake-up call. “This person is dead,” Chang wrote. “You’re alive.”
Sam Roberts, a fifty-year veteran of New York journalism, is an obituaries reporter and formerly the Urban Affairs correspondent at the New York Times. He has hosted the New York Times Close Up on TV and the podcast Only in New York, anthologized in a book of the same name. He is the author of The New Yorkers, A History of New York in 27 Buildings, A History of New York in 101 Objects, Grand Central, and The Brother, among other books. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, Foreign Affairs, and Air Mail. Before joining the Times in 1983, he was the youngest city editor of the New York Daily News. He lives in New York with his wife.
When Saeed Jones gets a Lyft ride with Mister Anthony in New Orleans, he has no idea he’s in for brief but deep connection that will occupy his mind long after the trip is over. Anthony is a Black elder originally from Mississippi, “old enough to be retired but still taking gigs.” As the man recalls the racism he experienced in the Magnolia State, Jones is reminded of his own experiences, his own trepidation. In all his travels, Jones reveals that Mississippi is the only place he has ever felt scared for his safety as a Black man.
Maybe to distract myself from the question of loneliness, I’m working to chart the depths of my ride with Mister Anthony. I’m interested in how people unexpectedly find one another. I refuse to romanticize the labor conditions and racial terror, for example, that played a role in introducing him to me. If America was doing right by someone like Mister Anthony, I would not have met him today. I know that fact like I know the blade of his laughter. But I am grateful I met him. Maybe it’s easier, especially for men of his generation and journey, to set one’s burdens down with a receptive stranger. Or maybe Mister Anthony is just like that with everyone and I happen to be a poet riding co-pilot with deep feelings. I want to save Mister Anthony’s life. I want to make his life better. Writing about him won’t do either, but I bow before him all the same.
You don’t have to live in El Cerrito, California, or have ever used Nextdoor, for this essay to resonate. For Oakland Review of Books, Amy Brown recounts buying her first home in the East Bay city and swiftly becoming the villain of her local Nextdoor—after her uncharitable Bluesky posts about the seniors opposing a library tax made their way back to her neighbors. Honest and funny, Brown’s essay explores being locally online—that weird, often uncomfortable place between online and IRL—and shows how (not) to talk to people you’ll run into at the grocery store.
Still, I spent multiple nights lying awake, thinking that everyone in this town must know I’m a bitch now. My son is supposed to start TK at the public school in the fall. What if his classmates’ parents use Nextdoor? What if the nice lady across the street who organizes a monthly dinner for our block uses Nextdoor? What if my neighbor already told everyone that the woman who moved into the house on the corner is an asshole? Does everyone I see on the street think I’m an asshole? Can they tell I don’t belong here? Do I have to go crawling back to my hometown and get a job at the car seat manufacturing plant?
Midway through Boyce Upholt’s mind-boggling dispatch, one of his sources sums up the central challenge of the Gulf Coast canid: “Why is there not just a simple explanation for what this thing is?” The “wolfy coyotes” of southeastern Texas hold genetic traces that may link them to red wolves, which were declared extinct in the wild in 1980. But a lack of data makes it challenging to define the species—or, for that matter, to determine whether a private company has cloned the red wolf or something else entirely. Upholt doesn’t deal in simple explanations; the pleasure, here, is in the complexity.
The concept of a “species” is less sturdy than your high school biology teacher might have led you to believe. The most familiar definition is that a species consists of animals that can produce fertile offspring. But that’s a rule various species of canids violate all the time; it’s long been clear that North America’s soup of Canis genes is something less like a family tree and more like a river—one that’s broken by islands and sandbars into many braided channels that split and merge and re-split.
Next to rubble and pictures of the deceased, people in Gaza are still getting married. Athar Abu Samra reports on why couples are refusing to delay their nuptials. With so much already lost, and so much still under threat, families in Gaza are seizing moments of joy wherever they can. Marriage ceremonies are no longer what they once were—nor do they express hope in quite the same way—but they have become powerful testaments to resilience.
As I worked on this story, I came to understand that the war has not only transformed weddings in Gaza. It has transformed people’s relationship with time itself. Before the war, marriage followed a familiar sequence. People finished their education, found work, built or rented a home, saved enough money and only then began planning a wedding. Families often postponed marriages until those expectations had been met. But now no one has that luxury — the luxury of time.
I spoke with one mother who had lost several of her children during the war, yet hurried to arrange the marriage of her youngest son. She told me she had always dreamed, like any mother, of watching all of her children grow up, get married, and fill her home with grandchildren. The war had taken much of that dream away, but she was determined not to lose what remained.
Ready to test your knowledge of hue, value, and saturation? Rivka Galchen’s latest for The New Yorker is a trove of fascinating details about our understanding of color. Galchen opens with the buzziest tidbit: an experiment conducted by a vision scientist who used a laser to stimulate a selection of his own cone cells and glimpse a color unknown outside of his laboratory. From there, she roams—through philosophy and art history, from studios to pigment shops—complicating our understanding of perception with each new turn of her titular question.
In the children’s novel “The Midnight Fox,” by Betsy Byars, the main character daydreams about digging in his back yard and coming across a “brand-new color.” A friend of mine remembers being captivated by this scene, and trying to picture the color. “I felt like I could conceive of it, but I couldn’t see it,” she said. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume considered at length whether a person who had seen every shade of blue except for one would be able to picture that one un-experienced shade; he concluded that the answer was yes. In my youth, I spent an afternoon wondering if I would have been able to imagine the fluorescent yellow of highlighter markers if I’d never seen it.
Holbrook Mohr and Mitch Weiss | The Atavist Magazine | July 2026 | 2,284 words (8 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 178, “Toxic Lies.”
January 3, 2026
In the isolation ward of a hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, a nurse approaches Ron Fowler’s bed, cell phone extended in her hand.
“You have a call,” she says.
Fowler’s eyes flutter open. He tugs off his oxygen tube and, with trembling fingers, accepts the phone.
“Thanks,” he whispers, before turning his attention to us—the callers.
From his voice it’s clear that something is very wrong; he sounds nothing like his usual self. He’s due the next day to meet us for an interview in Paducah, Kentucky, where he and his friend Chuck Deuschle worked at a uranium-enrichment plant that helped fuel America’s nuclear arsenal. Years ago they blew the whistle on the government and its contractors for poisoning thousands of atomic workers. “Can’t make it,” Fowler chokes out. “Blood clots. Hospital. They may have to remove some toes—if those clots don’t reach my heart first. If they do…” He trails off, the terrible ending hanging in the air.
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Fowler, soon to turn 77, is desperate to talk before it’s too late—to pull up the memories one more time and commit them to the historical record. He and Deuschle had both moved to Kentucky to work at the nuclear plant, only to discover a grim secret: The facility was exposing people to dangerously high levels of radiation and toxic chemicals, and had concealed the truth about it from employees and the surrounding community. This went on for decades. Faced with a choice—either walk away or stay and sound the alarm—Fowler and Deuschle returned to work, day after day.
More than thirty years later, lying in the hospital with cancer, Fowler is certain that the plant doomed him to a slow, painful death. At 83, Deuschle is also fighting a serious health issue: an unexplained autoimmune disease. They believe their fellow whistleblowers—Deuschle’s wife, Kay, and their friend Garland “Bud” Jenkins—succumbed to illnesses caused by the plant. Still, they’d do it all again. Someone had to reveal the callous disregard the government and the plant’s operators had shown their own people.
Fowler and Deuschle have never shared their story in full—the details of what it was like to live, breathe, and possibly die from their commitment to the truth. But they want people to know, particularly in light of recent news reports: In August 2025, more than a decade after the plant was shut down, a private firm announced that it planned to revive uranium-enrichment operations there. To Fowler and Deuschle, it seems wrong to begin a new chapter in Paducah’s nuclear story. Many former employees are still seeking compensation for their exposure to radiation. Will future generations of workers be any safer?
Fowler struggles for each breath.
“Time’s up,” the nurse says gently, reaching for the phone. “You need to rest.”
Fowler grips the device tighter.
“Call tomorrow when you meet with Chuck,” he implores. “I’m staying alive until then.” He pauses for a moment. “Just make sure Chuck’s with you. Promise me.”
We promise.
1.
One morning in late 1991, Ron Fowler stood in front of the bathroom mirror, parting his hair to the side and noting the first strands of gray at his temples. His beard was neatly trimmed, his black slacks and white dress shirt crisply pressed. He was ready. Today would be his first day at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a uranium-enrichment facility about ten miles outside Paducah, Kentucky. This was more than just a job—it was the start of a new life.
Fowler was a health physicist, an expert in the science of radiation protection. For years he’d traveled the country to train workers at nuclear plants in safety protocols. The pay was great, but being on the road weeks at a time had worn him down. When he moved to Paducah in his early forties, Fowler had already lived in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Arkansas. Paducah promised stability: the perfect place to settle through retirement. His wife’s parents even moved from Illinois to be nearby.
After eating breakfast—a sausage patty and a scrambled egg—he kissed his wife, Sandi, goodbye and slipped out the door. He steered his green Oldsmobile Delta 88 through the country roads outside Paducah and let his mind drift back to his childhood in Florence, South Carolina. Life there had been simple. His father, who dropped out of school in the fourth grade, supported the family by working on the railroad. Florence was a place where men had jobs, women tended to the home and children, everyone went to church, and neighbors helped neighbors who fell on hard times. Paducah felt just as close-knit. Folks looked out for one another, and honest labor was rewarded.
Situated on the Ohio River where it meets the Tennessee, Paducah owes its origins to trade; it was founded in 1827 by William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition and named for a powerful Native American tribe. The area is naturally beautiful—the city is surrounded by rolling hills and sprawling plains dotted with ponds. For Fowler, a keen fisherman, it was paradise. Paducah had about 27,000 residents when he arrived. It was big enough to have all the right shops, yet small enough that restaurant owners knew whether regulars preferred barbecue or fried catfish, the local staples.
As Fowler drove, the plant appeared in the distance. It spread over some 3,500 acres—750 of them secured by fences and gates—and sat amid modest homes and farms. The community was proud of this place because of its long history supporting the military. Originally, it was a TNT munitions factory, built during World War II. Later, as Cold War tensions escalated, officials scouted locations for a uranium feed facility to supply weapons-production sites in Piketon, Ohio, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with the material required to make nuclear bombs. Paducah native Alben Barkley leveraged his position as Harry S. Truman’s vice president, campaigning aggressively to repurpose the munitions factory in his hometown. He recognized that the project likely would inject billions into the local economy and transform living standards for the region’s blue-collar workforce.
Construction of the nuclear plant began in 1951. By the following year, it was enriching uranium for atomic bombs and the Navy’s nuclear fleet. Rising from the countryside, the gleaming buildings looked like modern marvels, and the economic windfall lifted Paducah residents’ spirits. Meanwhile, employees at the plant—everyone from nuclear technicians to welders, cooks, and janitors—were united in patriotic pride. Their jobs paid well, and the workers believed that they were helping fend off communism. It was no wonder Life magazine printed a photo spread of the site.
As the Cold War thawed, the mission changed but the jobs remained. The plant began recycling materials—gold, among other things—extracted from dismantled atomic weapons while continuing to enrich uranium, now for nuclear power plants instead of bombs. Wages allowed families to buy homes and cars and afford vacations—the American middle-class dream. The plant operated like a self-contained town for its 1,700 employees: It had its own security force, fire department, library, post office, and health clinic. A shuttle service ferried employees around the plant’s grounds. Workers participated in golf leagues and fishing tournaments. The Uranium Enrichment News kept everyone informed about goings-on at the site.
Though the plant was owned by the Department of Energy, it was run by contractors. Union Carbide initially oversaw operations, followed by Martin Marietta, which later merged with Lockheed to become Lockheed Martin. Management changed, but to employees that just meant a different name on their paychecks. The people on the ground were like family—fiercely loyal to one another and to the plant they called the Atomic City.
Fowler smiled as he drove through a security gate into a sprawling lot. He parked by the administrative building and checked in with a secretary, who called someone to escort him to his department. From there he would lead health and safety training sessions. The federal government had known as early as 1944 that radiation was hazardous and had issued policies to limit worker exposure. It was Fowler’s job to help ensure that regulations were enforced, to protect both employees and the surrounding community from contamination.
He had barely settled in when a coworker poked his head in.
“Want to see the place?”
The complex was huge—more than five hundred buildings connected by nearly twenty miles of access roads. Fowler was impressed until, as he rounded a corner on his tour, a yellow triangular sign with the radiation symbol caught his eye. There was no step-off pad in sight. In a nuclear facility, a step-off pad is a buffer zone between a hazardous area and a clean one. Workers at the Paducah site were supposed to remove radiation-tainted clothing and footwear before crossing through these zones to ensure they didn’t unwittingly transfer dangerous materials to other parts of the plant or transport it home with them.
Fowler flagged down a worker leaving the building where the warning sign was posted. “You don’t have a step-off pad down here,” Fowler said. The worker shrugged and said there was nothing to worry about.
“That sign says otherwise,” Fowler said. He explained that protocol required a pad and training for workers so they knew how to use it.
The worker’s expression was unchanged as he walked away.
Fowler’s pulse quickened as he imagined invisible particles on boot soles spreading throughout the plant or, worse, tracking onto kitchen floors or into rooms where children played. He hurried to his division manager’s office. The supervisor listened, then leaned back in his chair and tapped a pen on his desk calendar. He said he’d call a meeting about the issue.
That night at home, Fowler sat at the kitchen table watching Sandi cook. Normally, he’d have been joking with his wife about her limited culinary range—she often made breakfast for dinner—but tonight his mind was elsewhere. The sizzle from the stove filled the silence between them.
Sandi knew something was wrong. In the years since they first met at a bar in Joliet, Illinois, she’d become attuned to her husband’s moods. Despite his imposing frame—six foot two, 245 pounds—Fowler had always been the gentle sort and quick to laugh. Their courtship progressed quickly, and within four months of meeting Fowler had moved in to her family’s home in Aurora. They married there so her father, a former school principal paralyzed from a stroke, could attend.
“What is it, Ron?” Sandi asked, spatula in hand.
He sighed. “Something’s not right at work.”
“What do you mean?”
“The way they treat radiation—like it can’t hurt them. No precautions,” Fowler said.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Sandi replied, frowning.
“I know.” Fowler shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Uranium is a silvery-white radioactive metal. More than 99 percent of it found in nature is U-238, and the rest is U-235, an isotope that can sustain the chain reactions needed to fuel nuclear power production and atomic weapons. Enrichment is the process of increasing the concentration of U-235 in a supply of uranium. At different points, enrichment produces one powder Paducah workers called black oxide—not to be confused with the coating of the same name applied to some metals to improve corrosion resistance—and another, uranium tetraflouride, that’s known as green salt. Eventually, uranium hexafluoride, a colorless crystalline solid, is heated into a gas that’s pushed through microscopic porous barriers. This process, called gaseous diffusion, separates U-235 from U-238; at plants like the one in Paducah, it’s done hundreds of times in a cascade until the desired enrichment level is reached.
Uranium enrichment is hazardous business. Fowler knew that any leak, spill, or accident at the Paducah plant could damage kidneys and lungs, irritate skin, and increase cancer risk. More insidiously, simple mistakes or oversights by workers could have that same result. During his first few weeks on the job, Fowler explored the plant on his own, and what he found unsettled him. Employees worked in radioactive areas without protective suits or masks. Some couldn’t read and might not understand warning signs. People left the site after their shifts without changing clothes or showering, likely conveying radioactive dust home to their families. Some workers even warmed their lunch on top of machines in hazardous areas.
Fowler knew that things needed to change, and quickly. He took his concerns to the plant manager, Steve Polston, who heard him out and then called a meeting about step-off pads—the very issue Fowler had flagged on his first day. At the meeting, Fowler outlined the safety gaps he’d observed at the plant, but it seemed to him as though the senior managers in the room could barely feign interest. He heard what would become something of a refrain: “We’ve been doing it this way for years.” He was also told that Department of Energy officials visited the site regularly and hadn’t raised concerns.
More worried than ever, Fowler spent the next several months developing new safety protocols. He beamed with satisfaction as he handed the plan to Polston. In the period that followed, however, he became frustrated with how officials implemented the measures. Even when company-issued safety equipment was made available, Fowler noticed that much of it was obsolete. And he watched in disbelief as employees poked holes in respirator masks to smoke while working.
“I’m not making progress,” he told Sandi one night between sips from a can of Miller Lite. “No one is listening.” He likened his work to “scooping water out of the ocean.”
Sandi, who had studied his training manual to understand his work, gently touched his arm. “Be patient,” she suggested. “Maybe you just have to get to know the people better.”
Fowler’s shoulders dropped. “It seems like more than that,” he said.
When Jessica Black was 16 years old, she told a story to North Carolina police detectives that helped convict five friends of murder. Decades later, she’s still trying to correct the record. Matthew Bremner’s feature for Financial Times is a brisk tick-tock of efforts by Black and her incarcerated friends to overturn criminal convictions they claim were built on disturbing intimidation tactics.
The investigators do not accept these firm denials. To them, they seem likely to be the initial stories of a group of boys who know more than they are saying. As officers move in and out of interview rooms, carrying information from one interrogation to the next, the pressure intensifies. They tell the teenagers that their friends are already telling their side of it, that they should too. Under North Carolina law in 2002, police are permitted to exaggerate, even to suggest they have evidence they do not possess. There is no rule requiring a parent or other adult to be present while 14- and 15-year-olds are questioned. For most of their time in these rooms, the five boys are alone. When I interviewed him in late 2025, Tolliver told me that a detective asked him to hold out his arm. “That’s the vein,” he told him. “This is where the lethal injection would go.”
For China Books Review, Zhang Er reflects on growing up in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, and how she owes her love of reading to Auntie Zou, a librarian who stripped banned books of their covers and any pages marked with the library seal of the Workers’ Club, smuggled them home, and secretly loaned them to her. Even amid the chaos of that era, Er remembers this part of her childhood as magical, a time “where characters sprung from their pages and interwove with each other’s lives,” and she imagined worlds far beyond the one she lived in.
By the time I was 12 or 13, I could read fast enough to finish the weekly book loan in two days, so I had time to spare before returning it to Auntie Zou. By then I had made a good friend, Yu Ping, who loved reading too. Her home was three blocks from mine. I would bicycle to her place and deliver the book to her. Yu Ping would read day and night to finish the book and return it to me before the due date. We would keep the book wrapped in old newspapers, so that we could read in class without getting into trouble, while our teachers repeated the same quotations from Mao, week after week.
In this harrowing, incredibly reported story co-published by Science and Retraction Watch, Brendan Borrell uncovers how “Mei,” a 6-year-old girl in China, died a week after an experimental gene-editing trial went wrong—and how her medical team, led by neuroscientist Zilong Qiu, downplayed the risks to her parents, did not publicly disclose her death, and has faced no real accountability.
On 23 March 2025, the day before the procedure, the family settled into a shared room inside a crowded pediatric ward. When the other girl in the room broke into tears, Mei handed her one of her favorite stuffed animals: a blue bird. “She liked to give things to other kids,” Jason said.
The next day Mei put on a brave face as she was taken to the procedure room. Yu’s handpicked doctor inserted a needle between two vertebrae on her lower back and withdrew just over a teaspoon of spinal fluid to create space for the drug. Then, he swapped syringes and gently pressed down on the plunger, filling her spinal canal with viruses.
Forced disappearances have plagued Mexico for decades. In 2019, something remarkable happened: Twenty-one disappeared people were found, alive. They had been toiling in narco-slavery camps, an under-covered aspect of Mexico’s illicit drug trade. But there wasn’t a happy ending. (This story was originally published in Spanish by Quinto Elemento Lab):
Freedom had not been kind to the captives. Few had been able to regain even the wretched standard of living that had pushed them into the arms of the cartels in the first place. Many were scarred by paranoia, trapped in addiction or suffering mental illnesses. Some had been abandoned by their partners or families. More than one, we learned, died after being rescued, some by their own hand. We came to feel that these men had been triply betrayed: first by the narcos who had lured them into the mountains, then by the government that failed to look for them, and finally by a society that refused to welcome them back into its fold.
We are telling their stories not because we hope to secure justice, but simply to establish the truth. This was a modest ambition shared by one of our interlocutors, Andrés. He told us that many of the survivors’ accounts had been doubted. He’d even read criticisms on social media: That’s what they deserve for being shiftless and lazy. “Those people should try thinking before they speak, because they don’t know when they might suddenly find themselves in a similar situation,” Andrés said. “They might be lucky enough to be rescued, or unlucky enough to die out there. I decided to give this interview because this situation’s not going to change. In Mexico, there’s sexual slavery, human trafficking, forced labour. This didn’t start yesterday; it’s been going on for many years.”
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