Mary Austin was the woman behind Freddie Mercury, quietly supporting him for decades, from their intense early romance to the long years they remained close friends after accepting that he was gay. The vast legacy he left her—his home, much of his fortune, and his most personal belongings—has been a mixed blessing that she has spent her life trying to navigate with loyalty and discretion. As Simon Hattenstone explores Austin’s life in this interview, the unresolved emotion of the shared past with Mercury is still palpable.
Did the piano change him? “Yes, there was much more purposeful energy. He would sit at the piano, play the odd key, hum a bit and he looked very happy. Transported.” By now they were spending less time together. When she was working at Biba, he would often be sleeping. When she returned home, he would be preparing for a gig.
They’d been living together for four years when Mercury said he had something to tell her. He struggled to get the words out. He said, ‘I think I’m bisexual.’ I said ‘No, Freddie, I think you’re gay.’” He didn’t argue. Was that a huge upset? “No, it was a huge relief, because I wasn’t sure whether we were travelling in the same direction any more. Some time earlier I saw a dress and thought, that would be a really nice wedding dress. I asked Freddie, is it worth me buying it, and he looked at me and shook his head. So I knew from there on …”
What do privilege and accountability look like for an AI agent on the wrong side of the law? Evan Ratliff rounds up a collection of challenging cases in which AI agents have functioned as co-conspirators in criminal acts, offered courtroom statements on behalf of deceased victims, and perpetrated deeds that, for humans, are considered to be illegal. Legal teams have already sought to seal their clients’ chats with AI agents, likening the exchanges to conversations with an attorney. Ratliff’s feature is an omnibus, and you’ve likely encountered one or two of his stories via other outlets. Here, the concerns he gathers together reveal the breadth of challenges facing the American legal system.
AI chatbots are already serving as confidants and co-conspirators, assisting and even encouraging humans acting on their darkest impulses. They’re occupying ersatz roles as therapists and lawyers, relationships our legal system typically shields with confidential privilege. They’re producing new kinds of criminal evidence and offering up the beguiling possibility of preventing crime before it happens. And as they’re given more autonomy across our digital and physical systems, they’re even gaining the ability to commit crimes themselves, absent specific human instruction — and, perhaps, in defiance of it.
The White House ballroom project is wildly unpopular. Donald Trump doesn’t care. Ben Terris reports on Trump’s obsessive bid for architectural immortality, which is now barreling toward completion, and captures the breathtaking sycophancy required to work for this president:
“We had asphalt going into here,” Trump says, standing on the pathway leading to the residence of the White House. “Now you have the best stone.” He points at a pile of square-cut granite—the type being used to replace the asphalt walkway—and looks to his communications director, Steven Cheung, who is accompanying us on this impromptu tour of the White House grounds en route to the construction site.
“That’s some stone, huh, Steven?” he says.
“It’s incredible,” Cheung concurs.
“Look at the thickness of it,” Trump says. “Normally, you use one inch, as thin as you can. It’s the White House—I said, ‘Fuck it, what’s the best you have?’ They said, ‘We have one that’s four inches.’”
“You’re restoring glory to the White House,” Cheung says, shaking his head in apparent awe.
Dave Masters watched as his father’s house careened into a telephone pole and split in two, after Hurricane Frances lifted it from its foundation in 2004. Hayward County, in Western North Carolina, bought the house and declared the patch near the town of Clyde “permanent open space under a federally funded program to reduce the risk of future loss of life and property damage.” Not all homes were treated equally, though, in the aftermath of distaster. Hurricanes Frances, Ivan, and Helene, along with Tropical Storm Fred, all brought heavy rains and flooding to the nearby Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park. They’re “part the result of a gap in disaster policy that allows mobile home residents to be put in harm’s way again and again.” For The Assembly, in a piece produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, Ren Larson explains why.
The federal government’s programs to buy out disaster-prone buildings are “the cornerstone of the Nation’s system for emergency management,” according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But the program was developed with traditional homeowners in mind, and mobile homes, the country’s largest source of affordable housing, are often left out. Trailers, even when they become immovable and lifelong homes, aren’t typically considered real estate but instead personal property, like motorcycles and boats.
That still leaves people living on flood-prone land. For the state to actually buy that land, mobile home park owners have to take the buyout, and FEMA’s program offers little incentive for them to do so: They can’t collect from the government for lost rent or for the value of the mobile homes on top of the land.
Some park owners say the payouts are not high enough to allow them to relocate; others aren’t even aware of the buyout program. So park owners regularly allow new trailers to move into the vacant spots. Art and Lynne Heinmiller, who own the Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park, did not respond to questions — which were emailed, texted and mailed via certified letter — about allowing trailers and campers to move back to where they’d washed away
Jake Edmiston, a business reporter for the Toronto Star, thinks highly of his mustard chicken recipe. So when one batch goes over like a lead balloon, he checks his namesake ingredients and finds that his usual glass pot of Maille Dijon Originale is extraordinarily spicy—a fact he confirms, good reporter that he is, by conducting a blind test with a professional taster. In no time, Edmiston is on the floor of one of Canada’s largest mustard mills, trying to stay dry and avoid mustard dust burns(!), and peppering Unilever, Maille’s owner, with questions. This isn’t exactly a case for Benoit Blanc, but Edmiston’s investigation takes a few surprising turns and drops some serious knowledge on glucosinolates on the way. Every ingredient is in harmony here.
“Do a little dollop,” she said, then turned her back so I could do my work in secret.
I spooned the mustard from my jar onto a plate, and some from another jar of Maille I found in the grocery store that morning. She tried the sample from my jar first and sputtered a little.
“It’s quite spicy,” she said.
I asked her how much spicier it was than the control jar.
On the evening of December 22, 2013, an armored van packed with cash made its rounds through the regal streets of Vienna. The city’s elegant Baroque buildings were trimmed with glinting strings of lights; Christmas markets sold spiced glühwein on cobbled squares. A little after midnight, as the festivities quieted, the van, operated by the security company Loomis, stopped at a walk-up ATM on a desolate stretch of storefronts. Two guards stepped out, entered a room-size vestibule behind the machine, and commenced replenishing the ATM with cash. A minute later, two figures wearing black balaclavas and carrying handguns emerged from the shadows and followed the guards inside.
The pair ordered the guards onto the ground and handcuffed them. After snatching the keys to the armored van, one of them unlocked the vehicle and began stuffing crisp bank notes into black duffel bags. The thieves then checked the street for witnesses and disappeared into the night with nearly three million euros.
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It was the largest armed robbery in Austrian history. The heist had been near perfectly executed, revealing intimate knowledge of Loomis’s anti-theft procedures—perfect, that is, except for one small oversight. The thieves didn’t realize that the ATM had a security camera that automatically took photos of the street whenever it was being restocked. The images were blurry, but they revealed that the perpetrator who climbed into the van was short enough to stand upright without hitting their head. Detectives decided that it was almost certainly a woman.
They soon homed in on a former Loomis employee, Tamara S., who, when she worked for the company, had scheduled the routes and was only five feet three inches tall. On the morning of January 10, 2014, federal police raided Tamara’s apartment and arrested her. Initially she denied any involvement in the robbery, but eventually she confessed. Investigators were stunned when she named her accomplice. The man she claimed had masterminded the job was one of their own: Gabriel E., a former officer in the city’s WEGA unit, the Viennese equivalent of SWAT.
The next day, a team that included some of Gabriel’s former colleagues raided his upscale apartment and placed him under arrest. Unlike Tamara, Gabriel confessed right away. When detectives asked why he had committed such an audacious crime, he replied that he hadn’t stolen the money for himself. He’d done it for the children of Africa; he planned to build an orphanage there.
It sounded absurd—the kind of desperate lie a thief might invent to deflect blame or ameliorate punishment—but it was very much the truth.
“Wouldn’t it be right,” Gabriel asked, “to steal something from a bank and give it to the poor?”
Austrians have a reputation, even among themselves, as scrupulous rule followers. In Vienna it’s rare to glimpse people jaywalking, and the city’s subway runs on an honor system. An Austrian friend suggested that this predilection had its roots in the country’s imperial past. From its power center in Austria, the Hapsburg monarchy ruled enormous portions of Europe for six centuries with the help of a dizzyingly complex bureaucracy. The compulsion to follow rules even a hundred years after the Hapsburgs lost power, my friend explained, was like the twitching of empire’s phantom limb. (Austria is also a very private country; the media don’t report the full names of people involved in criminal cases, a practice I’m abiding by too.)
As a police officer, Gabriel had been an enforcer of rules in a rule-bound society, making his crime all the more perplexing. His family told me that he was staunchly law-abiding, and had never incurred so much as a speeding ticket. In retrospect, however, they realized that there had been hints of where he was headed. He always loved to give things: presents to his three children, donations to charity, food to people begging in the street. After leaving the police force and starting a private-security business, he became wealthy, only to grow conspicuously ascetic, donating increasingly large amounts of money and possessions. By the time he was arrested, he’d sold his Audi and his Rolex, and he was down to almost his last suit. When police raided his home, they found bags filled with clothes purchased from H&M that Gabriel planned to give away.
*The Atavist is using pseudonyms for Gabriel’s family members.
Gabriel’s son Florian* recalled that the summer before the Loomis heist, his father had posed a curious hypothetical. “Wouldn’t it be right,” he asked, “to steal something from a bank and give it to the poor?” Florian, who was studying to become a police officer himself, disagreed, and his father dropped the issue.
Still, to idly philosophize about such a crime was one thing. To actually do it—to fashion oneself into a twenty-first-century Robin Hood—was another.
After his arrest, Gabriel was remanded to Vienna’s largest and most forbidding jail, Josefstadt. When I visited him there in 2014, I expected to encounter someone solemn and morally serious—a grim-faced saint. But when Gabriel entered the room, he radiated the warm excitement of a Labrador retriever. A tall, fit man of 50 with fetching salt-and-pepper stubble, Gabriel was wearing a cerulean-blue hoodie, clear-plastic-rimmed glasses, and a beaded necklace. He looked less like a former law enforcement officer than a hip Los Angeles dad. We sat down, and without hesitation Gabriel, still the inveterate benefactor, offered me exactly what I wanted: an explanation of how he’d gotten into this mess.
Gabriel’s childhood, he told me, had been shaped by “gruesomeness.” He was raised in Tyrol, Austria’s bucolic eastern province, by an alcoholic father given to punching his two sons. Gabriel and his elder brother eventually came under the care of their grandmother, who as punishment would regularly lock them in a darkened closet. “I had a very fucking childhood,” he told me in emphatic, accented English, omitting an adjective but still making the point. (After our first encounter, I would meet with Gabriel several times in the ensuing decade and communicate with him by letter, phone, and email.)
The two siblings both went into law enforcement, Gabriel in Vienna, where he hoped to help others in desperate situations, and his brother in the state police. Athletic and competitive, Gabriel quickly made the famed Wiener Einsatzgruppe Alarmabteilung (WEGA), the Vienna police department’s most expertly trained unit. Despite his severe upbringing, Gabriel was by nature cheerful. Every WEGA operation, as he saw it, was a new problem to be solved through hard work and an upbeat attitude.
One afternoon in 1994, Gabriel told me, his WEGA squad was tasked with busting up a drug deal in Vienna’s Fifteenth District, which at the time was the city’s seediest neighborhood. When the team moved to make an arrest, the seller, an African immigrant, bolted. Gabriel pursued him, shouting for the man to stop and firing his pistol in the air. As he closed in, the suspect turned and pulled out his own handgun. The two men exchanged fire, hitting each other in the thigh. Gabriel tackled the dealer and, following a short, bloody wrestling match, overpowered him. The pair shared an awkward ambulance ride to the hospital.
The shooting put Gabriel’s relentless positivity to the test. He endured months of physical therapy to regain the use of his leg. When he returned to work, he transitioned out of WEGA. After a brief, unhappy stint as a traffic cop, he left the force entirely. In 2001, he started his own private-security company, specializing in investigations of corporate theft. He gave it an English name: Service of Secrecy. The early years were lean as Gabriel struggled against larger competitors, but as word of his talents spread, the business thrived.
Gabriel occasionally found himself thinking about the man who’d shot him. He saw him only one additional time, in court, and knew little of his past—not even which country he was from. But at some point, Gabriel learned that the man was an asylum-seeker, as were so many African immigrants in Austria. They’d begun arriving in the country in the 1990s, fleeing civil wars and ailing economies. Gabriel wondered what the man’s life had been like back home, what he was running from.
In 2006, Gabriel told me, he had an opportunity to visit Africa himself; a client had recommended him to authorities in the Central African nation of Gabon, which was interested in creating its own version of WEGA. He told me he flew down for an interview with the defense minister, Ali Bongo, the son of the country’s notoriously corrupt authoritarian president, Omar Bongo, and was offered a lucrative multiyear consulting contract. Gabriel didn’t love the idea of working for a despot, but he had a family to support. And at the end of the day, someone was going to train the country’s police. Why not him? Gabriel accepted the job.
He commuted between Gabon and Austria every few weeks. During his trips to Gabon, he told me, he spent much of his time touring the countryside, where Bongo wanted to establish an array of military bases. The poverty Gabriel witnessed shocked him. By African standards Gabon was wealthy, mainly due to its coastal oil reserves. In the capital, Libreville, a former French colonial port, supermarkets stocked expensive Bordeaux and Roquefort cheese. But the wealth was unequally distributed. “People lived in huts without ANYTHING,” Gabriel wrote to me in 2015. “Yet merely one hundred meters further I could see pompous buildings with inconceivable luxury.” The experience, he added, “completely overwhelmed me.”
Gabriel began to feel guilty about the money he made, which had bought him a posh apartment and car. He responded to his unease with an energetic program of handouts. Gabriel had been raised Catholic and later joined a Pentecostal church. He told me that charity was an important part of his faith. He decided to give money to destitute Gabonese. There was no formal plan; when he encountered someone in need—particularly single mothers and people requiring medical care they couldn’t afford—he gave them whatever cash he had.
Back in Vienna, Gabriel’s family was growing. Following an amicable divorce, he had remained close with his first wife, Sabine, with whom he had two children, Julia and Florian. He remarried a woman who taught French—helpful for his work in Gabon, where French is the official language—and, in 2012, she gave birth to his third child. Domestic life was good. But the feeling that plagued Gabriel abroad persisted at home. Soon he began filling the trunk of his car with clothes, toys, appliances, and other items, then driving east to Romania, where he’d stop in poor villages and give it all away. Sometimes he took his two elder children, who by then were teenagers and growing concerned about Gabriel’s haphazard giving. (So was their mother.) But the donations, and the astonished smiles of the people who received them, never failed to make Gabriel happy. It felt more than good, he told me once. Then he paused, searching for the correct English word. “It was,” he said, “mandatory. My duty. My obligation.”
In 2009, Omar Bongo died, and his son left the ministry of defense to run for president. The new defense minister, Gabriel told me, declined to renew his contract. Although the lost income was regrettable, Gabriel was by then so consumed by his mission to help Gabon’s people that he didn’t mind. While making his ad hoc contributions to everyday Gabonese, Gabriel had begun to dream of something bigger—something that, to his mind, would be truly consequential.
His difficult upbringing had made him empathetic toward children in dire circumstances, particularly those without parents. He wanted to instill in a frightened child a durable sense of safety and security—a feeling that, growing up, he had been denied. Before leaving Gabon at the end of his consultancy, Gabriel began drawing up plans to build an orphanage there. It was to be a whole complex, in fact, where every child would have their own lodgings, painted in bright colors, and where all their needs would be met. He named the imagined community Blue Sky Village.
Back in Vienna, Gabriel began soliciting donations to make Blue Sky Village a reality. He estimated that he’d need nearly a million euros to begin the project, and he wrote dozens of letters to aid organizations and philanthropists requesting help in financing the plan. Soliciting charity, Gabriel found, was much tougher than handing it out. He received few responses. The people who did reply politely suggested that, given his lack of experience in the aid space, he donate to existing groups. But investigating corporate theft hadn’t done much for his faith in how companies managed their money. What’s more, Gabriel thought that a lot of groups wasted money on lavish fundraisers—the Viennese have a long tradition of philanthropic balls—rather than spending it on people in need. He grew angry when he thought about money being used for frivolities when children were starving and scared. “This makes me so… hateful,” he told me. The only way to know that orphans in Gabon were being saved, he thought, was to save them himself.
As he struggled to get his project off the ground, Gabriel received a call from an old WEGA colleague named Heinz, who was now working in security for Loomis. The company had suffered some recent employee thefts, and Heinz wanted Gabriel to help its Austrian branch sharpen its embezzlement protocols.
In a bleak irony, Heinz had been fired from the Viennese police in 2006, after he was accused of beating a Gambian immigrant resisting deportation. Gabriel told me that he’d heard about Heinz’s case in the media. Despite what Heinz had allegedly done, Gabriel found it easy to rationalize taking the Loomis job: The more money he earned, the more he could give away to those in need. He agreed to come on as a consultant, and the two men became friendly. Soon, Heinz introduced Gabriel to a Loomis employee named Tamara.
A man named Donald Liebenberg tops eclipse-chaser-log.com with a whopping 2 hours, 27 minutes, and 41 seconds of darkness from 27 total eclipses—stats I didn’t even know people tracked until I read Rudi Zygadlo’s piece. It turns out there’s a dedicated subculture of umbraphiles logging every second of totality. Zygadlo meets a veteran British couple who’ve built their lives around these fleeting events, then travels to Spain in August 2026 to see his own first total eclipse. Adding 1 minute 38 seconds to the board earns him a place near the bottom, but judging by the awe he feels in those brief moments of darkness, he may be moving up the league yet.
There are various eclipse-chasing guests in our hotel. You can identify many of them from themed caps and T-shirts. The largest party is an alumni group from UCLA. We meet several by the pool. A couple from Minnesota, a sommelier from New York. “I was in Montreal for 2024,” says Mees from the Netherlands, treading water. “My wife is a virgin.” Everyone is friendly, but somewhat shifty when it comes to the issue of where to watch. We are too.
By 6pm on the day of, we are stationed on the infernal hillside, on a dusty path beneath pine trees and an immaculate sky. There are better vantage points but we have some degree of privacy here. We can hear others, but we can’t see them. The partial phase begins with a yodel at 7:34pm when the sun is eight degrees — or a fist’s length — above the horizon and my father-in-law produces a bottle of local white, which immediately turns warm in the glass. The nibble of the moon turns into a bite then into a crescent and I’m surprised how well my bottom-of-the-range bridge camera with a solar filter over the lens captures the partial phases. Later I’ll wish I never turned the thing on. Meara is quiet. Glowing. She is more pregnant than ever.
At a conformation show, purebred dogs are evaluated by judges according to written documents that strive to capture the exemplary features of each breed. (These standards are searchable via the American Kennel Club; my dog’s breed standard, for instance, is “interested and even mischievous” in expression, but might be faulted for a “short, prancing, or choppy gait.” Noted.) Hannah Berger files a remarkably observed dispatch from one such show in Virginia, where she has traveled to consider show dogs as signifiers, “the ideal against its approximation.” There’s plenty of human folly here, not limited to the interpretation of a “breed standard” and its pursuit over time. A janitor ceaselessly sweeps away dog hair; a mother silences her child as one might a yapping pet. Berger layers her observations into an ending so clever that I gasped.
Now under the jurisdiction of the American Kennel Club in the U.S., conformation shows measure the degree to which a dog “conforms” to its “breed standard,” a document that transmutes historical function into superficially measurable and marketable qualities: proportions, attitude, gaiting patterns. These documents vary widely in length and style. The greyhound’s standard, for example, is a spare two-hundred-word document that strays from sobriety just once in its description of the eyes: “dark, bright, intelligent, indicating spirit.” The standard of the Coton de Tulear, the bichon-like “national dog” of Madagascar, is nearly eight times as long, describing colors and shapes in percentages and angles. Its “joie de vivre” is mentioned twice.
Wendell Berry, who died this week at the age of 92, published dozens of books of poetry, fiction, and essays, any of which might make for meaningful connection with Berry’s ideas about place and how we engage with it. But this conversation with Amanda Petrusich, which bloomed from a personal correspondence between the two writers, feels like an especially vital tribute to Berry. Here, his decades of thought on sustainability and its human limits find gloriously vivid expression; after all, place shapes our voices, too. Throughout, Berry is luminous and pithy and discerning: “We’re alive only in some place in particular.” “Every generation is a bridge between something that’s past and something that’s coming.” “Our conversation is worth more right now than either one of us thinking separately.” The last is a perfect sentiment for any dialogue, including those on the page.
Part of manners used to be to say to somebody you just met, “Where you from?” And I quit asking it, because so many people say they’re from everywhere or nowhere. I’ll tell you a little bit of my history that may be pertinent. My mother was born and grew up in Port Royal, my father about four miles south. Both of their families had lived here since about the beginning of the nineteenth century. When I came to teach at the University of Kentucky, Tanya and I thought we would live in Lexington, and we would have “a country place.” And we hardly had laid our hands to this house, which needed some preservation work, when we realized, we’re not going to have a country place; we’re going to live here. And so we have. We bought this home and twelve acres in the fall of 1964, and moved in, in the midst of renovations, in the summer of 1965. That put our children here, and now we’ve got grandchildren who are at home here. That comes from a decision that we made to be here, and to be here permanently.
In mid-August, The New York Times lost a defamation lawsuit in Alabama. It’s the first such case the paper has lost in more than half a century. Back in 2023, the Times reported that a University of Alabama basketball player named Kai Spears was at the scene of a fatal shooting—information that turned out to be false, and based on a single anonymous source. A jury found the paper liable for damages to the tune of $9.25 million. Ryan Phillips, the only reporter to attend the duration of the defamation trial, describes the experience:
Chief among the post-publication issues was the Times‘ reluctance to issue a correction or retraction when it became immediately clear that Witz’s anonymous source had been wrong in their assertion that Spears was in Miller’s car during the shooting.
The jury heard lengthy testimony about how the newspaper published “updates” in the form of “Editor’s Notes” to the online story to reflect each new denial coming from the University of Alabama, UA Director of Athletics Greg Byrne, Spears’ father, and then the Alabama walk-on himself in an Instagram post.
Apart from the updates, which the Times argued were tantamount to a correction when applying Alabama law to the evidence, the story remained unchanged until an official correction was eventually published by The New York Times on June 3, 2023.
“I do unashamedly want to write page-turners,” Jon Ronson told The New Yorker in an interview. “I can never understand why most nonfiction books have such limited creative ambitions.” Ronson, who is “not a thrill-seeker,” then recounts fearing for his life while being pursued by members of a secretive political gathering—a chase that found its way into Them: Adventures with Extremists, his 2001 breakthrough book. Thrills have a way of finding Ronson, either through active pursuit or some subtler means of revelation. The Men Who Stare At Goats begins with a US Army general who attempts to walk through walls, repeatedly smacking into them. In the opening of The Psychopath Test, a neurologist hands Ronson a baffling package, copies of which have been anonymously mailed to academics throughout the world. The pages turn themselves.
Ronson’s latest, The Castle, earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, which praised the book as “a blockbuster portrait of men gone mad” and Ronson’s style as “intuitive but rigorous.” His podcast, Things Fell Apart, was recently renewed for a third season, in which Ronson will shift focus from American culture wars to individual battles against institutions. He once told The Guardian, “I get called faux-naïf all the time. But I honestly think I am just genuinely naive.” It’s an observation that reminds me of Joan Didion’s own famous self-assessment: that she was “so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive . . . that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.” Ronson is warmer than that, but his access is no less astonishing. Time and again, someone allows him to get very close—closer, perhaps, than they might be aware of. Each of Ronson’s books is a testament to his depth of inquiry, his proximity to the surprising, and his conviction that a good narrative should be propulsive.
—Brendan Fitzgerald
Where did you grow up?
Cardiff, Wales. In a suburb called Lisvane.
What places feel like home?
London, for sure. As a child, when we’d visit my grandparents, I’d sneak away and jump on a bus and just get lost in the City. Even when it wasn’t home, it felt like home. Eventually I lived there for decades, loving especially Soho and Islington. I also love our tiny town in the Hudson Valley. We’ve lived here since 2019.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
As a teenager, watching Nick Broomfield documentaries and reading the great nonfiction adventurers from the ’60s and ’70s like Hunter S. Thompson and PJ O’Rourke and the writers featured in Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism. And when I started in journalism, the editors who first gave me a break: Ian Parker, Chris Heath, Deborah Orr, Ian Katz.
What is your favorite time of day?
Early morning. I make a coffee and for the first few hours my brain is at its best and I can write a lot.
What are you really good at?
Narrative nonfiction. If I go off on some journey, I know exactly how to make it work. It’s the only thing I’m good at.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
Recently the BBC gave me a subscription to Descript, a text-based audio editing program. It’s a dream gift for a detail-oriented storyteller. I can finally do the audio editing myself. I sit there for hours.
Describe your favorite meal.
I guess some kind of salad with lots of fruit and vegetables and a good dressing. You can’t beat Greek dressing.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
Silence! I can’t believe how great the silence is here in the Hudson Valley. There’s something very comforting about knowing it won’t end. They’ll never turn this country lane into a big road.
Where do you do your best thinking?
When I’m out on a story, in some strange place, gathering material. I just instinctively know what’ll work, what the best moments are. Fiction people can do that in their imaginations. I can’t. But when I’m out on a story, I just know.
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
The journey of leaving Cardiff and moving to London when I was 18. I felt like finally my life could begin.
Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson. I listen to it over and over to get to sleep. So I still don’t know how he dies.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
Every book I’ve written has chapters I’m equally proud of: sneaking into Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones and getting chased by the Bilderberg Group in Them, the goat staring in The Men Who Stare At Goats, pretty much all of The Psychopath Test, much of Lost at Sea, Justine Sacco in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. The Castle feels really good. I felt very confident writing it, mixing up tones and styles in a way I don’t think I could have managed before.
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Just wandering around Reddit can be good. The whole world is somewhere on Reddit. And if you don’t find your next story, it might still unlock some part of your brain.
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
Kurt Vonnegut, for his brevity and his clashes between comedy and horror.
What words do you overuse?
It used to be “There was a silence” but I’ve cured myself of that, thank God.
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
I don’t know if this counts, but every book I read for pleasure is a celebrity memoir, mostly musicians and actors. Cher. Anthony Hopkins. Bruce Springsteen. I LOVED the English actor Kathy Burke’s one, A Mind Of My Own. Right now it’s Johnny Marr.
What superpower would you like to have?
I think I’d like to be able to shoot fire out of my hands. No. Teleportation through space and time.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
I really identified with my dog, Floppy—how he wanted to be around people but didn’t want to interact with them.
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
Run or walk.
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense. The Pitt. Succession. All of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, especially Doechii, Sierra Ferrell, and Chappell Roan. Bruce Springsteen’s 1979 No Nukes concert video. Huh, it’s almost all music. I guess that’s the stuff we should remember. People being their best.
What does your writing space look like?
Jon Ronson’s nonfiction books include So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, The Psychopath Test, Them: Adventures with Extremists, Lost at Sea, and The Men Who Stare At Goats.They have all been international and/or New York Times bestsellers and have been translated into more than 30 languages. His latest book, The Castle, is now available.
If you make time for one 9/11 anniversary story this year, make it Garrett M. Graff’s piece. This is no mere retrospective. For National Geographic, Graff takes us through that Tuesday morning 25 years ago to explain how America lost its sense of security, minute-by-minute on the morning of September 11, 2001.
It was now 8:53 a.m. There were just 10 minutes left in America as we knew it.
FBI director Robert Mueller was in his first week on the job, sitting in his office suite on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. . . .Toward the end of the meeting, someone interrupted to tell Mueller a plane had crashed in New York. Sitting in a briefing on al Qaeda, deep in a conversation about terrorism, Mueller turned and looked out the window at the blue sky beyond and asked, “How could a plane not see the tower? It’s so clear out today.”
Truthfully, terrorism in 2001 just wasn’t something most Americans thought about, outside of the movies or the occasional evening news story or headline. It was a plot device for thrillers, not a perpetual source of anxiety at shopping malls, schools, or public events. And even in the cinema, the “terrorists” were less ideological enemies doing existential battle against the Great Satan and more often the disgruntled genius or vaguely European criminal mastermind. Think Dennis Hopper’s villainous former bomb squad officer in the 1994 blockbuster Speed or Alan Rickman’s turn as the suave, ruthless radical Hans Gruber in Die Hard.
Earlier this year, the US Supreme Court heard an appeal from death row inmate Terry Pitchford, who was denied relief by the Mississippi Supreme Court after his attorneys claimed Black people were illegally struck from his jury. Investigative reporter Hannah McAlilly delves into the case, and into the wider problem of racial prejudice in the selection of juries in Mississippi:
A prosecutor struck a Black woman for having “red dyed hair” and in another, a prosecutor struck a Black man because he had “a ponytail, a sort of strange hair design.” That prosecutor told the judge he was concerned the juror might identify too closely with the defendant, who also was of a similar age. “Both have unusual hair styles,” the prosecutor said.
Prosecutors struck Black jurors who, they said, seemed angry, irritated or inattentive. A Black woman was struck because the prosecutor didn’t like her “vibe.” Another, who worked a night shift before showing up to jury selection, was struck for being “fidgety” and looking “angry.” Another was struck because she “frowned a lot.”
In a beautiful and vivid essay on home, time, and family, Diane Roberts reflects on the house that her parents built, and their family’s land in Leon County, Florida, to which she feels deeply connected. I especially love Roberts’s thoughts on a home versus a house—the latter is composed of construction materials, but “home implies a complex neural network of family association and feeling, layers of experience, a shared past.” Despite the tragedies the home holds, it is ultimately a place of memory and meaning.
Home and time are as tangled as the skunk vine and Confederate jasmine choking my backyard fence. I suppose that’s to be expected. My house holds our history and the indispensable relics of former houses, objects cherished by the now-dead: the tiny rocking chair my grandfather made for my mother when she was three; the 1960 TR3 in the barn my brother never quite got around to fixing; the two old rosebushes dug up from the Washington County farm, replanted at Great-Aunt Rilla’s house in Chipley, then dug up again and transported to our front yard. The house didn’t simply belong to us, it was us—our mother, our father, Brad, and me.
In this story for MIT Technology Review, Sara Harrison explores the field of social robotics and the growing use of robot companions as therapy for autistic and other neurodivergent kids. These playful machines show promise: Research suggests that they can help children practice social skills and offer something overworked therapists and exhausted parents can’t—a patient companion, available 24/7. But Harrison also reports on their limitations and risks. Does this approach truly work? What about all the data gathered on the child? And what happens when a robot friend suddenly stops working and “dies”? A fascinating and unsettling look at tech that has moved into the most intimate corners of a family’s home.
While Moxie found herself in more and more people’s homes, Embodied still struggled to make money. In 2024, the company announced it would cease operations. Its robots—which depended on external servers that the company could no longer pay for—would descend into a deep slumber.
Videos of bereft children who seemed to have become deeply attached to the blue bot began to circulate online. “I don’t want her to leave,” wailed one child in a TikTok video. Desperate parents posted on TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit looking for solutions. “My autistic child is devastated and I’m pissed,” wrote one parent. “Hope Embodied gives us a couple days to say goodbye,” wrote another.
When I was little I had a ritual with my parents where, as they tucked me into bed, they’d tell me a few reasons why they loved me (yes, I know how lucky I am to have been raised in an environment like this). As part of their list, I always asked them to say I was careful, and dutifully they’d repeat, “Yes, of course, we love you because you’re so careful.” I needed my parents’ words to ward against a recurring-day-mare-type vision I had in those years, in which I climbed onto our roof and then, while recklessly peering over the edge, toppled off the eave and cracked open my skull. I would never have put myself in that situation in waking life; I was so cautious that even an imagined scenario in which I endangered myself was enough to terrify me. But being reassured of my carefulness night after night made me feel safer.
My prudent youth did involve a handful of responsibly chaperoned birthday parties at Northern California climbing gyms, and a handful of climbing excursions in the Sierras with my grandfather, but ironically the flatland of Minnesota is where I got serious about the sport. During those unrelentingly brutal winters I seized upon climbing for exercise and entertainment—in the gym, since it was colder than the dark side of Mars outside—as a way to stave off cabin fever in the long months of permafrost. On a recent visit back to the Twin Cities at the close of one such winter, right after a session at the gym where I first cut my teeth, I posted up on the patio of an organic café to bask in the abrupt warmth of springtime. A guy sitting at the table next to me asked if I was a climber—our veiny forearms signal us to one another like Harley-Davidson jackets do for bikers—and I said yes. We started chatting.
This guy had just moved to town to save his own life. He was a paraglider, parachutist, kite-surfer, and wingsuiter, and he said that in the last year a dozen members of his inner circle “went in,” including his best friend and his brother, all in accidents related to their gravity-skirting pursuits. At first I couldn’t figure out what he meant by “went in,” but as I listened to him enumerate their various methods of “going in,” I eventually realized he was telling me they had all died. I could hardly comprehend the reality he described: being at the heart of a community where loved ones blink out in droves, like candles in a gale. He knew if he stayed in the game as a professional extreme athlete, pressured by peers and sponsors alike to remain at the cutting edge, he himself wouldn’t be around much longer. So, sight-unseen, he moved to the flattest and boringest place he’d ever heard of: Minnesota. He came specifically because there weren’t any cliffs for him to throw himself off. Only a few months into his new life as a Minnesotan, he was still in the jittery, cold turkey phase of his thrill detox.
“You done much free soloing?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said. A truer answer would have been HELL NO I’M A WIMP, MY PARENTS LOVE ME BECAUSE I’M CAREFUL.
“Amazing feeling,” he said. “Being certain if you fuck up you’ll die, and being equally certain you won’t fuck up.”
We listened to the birds, sipped our coffees. I picked at the remains of my huevos rancheros. The juncos twittering around us sounded gladder than usual to be alive. I asked, “Is it really that much less fun to have a rope on? Like, clip a few draws? Place some cams along the way?”
He shook his head. “Once you been hucking yourself off the high dive, it’s no fun jumping off the edge of the pool.”
This at least rang true. Even I find it boring to jump off the edge of the pool.
“Glad you got out when you did,” I said.
He nodded grimly, seeming less glad than I was. Then I asked what he was getting up to instead. Of course, it was the most extreme thing you can do on flat ground.
“Ultramarathons,” he said.
He didn’t seem interested in probing his own psychology or rationales. He unapologetically liked the feeling of being adrenalized, and he wanted to feel that feeling as much as possible without killing himself. Why turn it into some elaborate trolley problem? For those living on the outer edges of risk, I suspect confidence is the key to survival: the confidence in one’s ability to assess a risk and then the confidence to execute the necessary action once a risk is deemed acceptable. Extreme athletes don’t seem to think too hard, at least on an abstract philosophical level, about the dangers they face. Their engagement is logistical, methodical. Far more productive to test the snowpack, visualize the beta, read the weather report, double-check the way the parachute is folded, determine what direction the wind blows down the talus field.
Rather than focusing on what we stand to lose, what riches does risk put us in position to gain?
But risk has been on my mind of late, because, much to my own surprise, my relationship to it has been changing. Recently I was on a very tall boulder called the Kraken, and it felt like I spent a hundred years with the sand in its penultimate pocket rolling grittily under my fingertips while I searched the rounded top of the block for a hold I could trust. A part of me is there still, suspended in that epoch of hold hunting, gearing up for the final move. This is one of risk’s most obvious gifts, the chance to experience that rare, thin-slicing acuity where each separate millisecond stands out like an image etched in stone. The present dilates to activate the past and future, too, as though we’re living our whole life all at once. With a cognitive rapacity available only during a fight-or-flight response, we cast our gaze forward, asking what grim future will bloom if we fall. And simultaneously cast it back, asking what errors in our past have brought us to this crossroads. Have I survived a situation like this before? Will I get lucky and survive again?
In a film, that’s where the music would come up, dissonant strings, ringing ears, the drums increasing tempo. It’s odd that the times of our deepest dumbstruck not-knowingness should be called “moments of truth.” I found a shallow, sandy divot for my right hand, threw my left heel high over the lip, and rolled onto the top of the boulder. A friend took photos, but it makes me uncomfortable to look at them.
From the back seat of a lifted pickup, deep house oozing out of a handmade portable stereo that Owen built into an antique suitcase, I look over the truck bed at the contrail of dust we send into the Eastern Sierra evening. Our pilot expertly navigates a kaleidoscope of dirt roads to deliver us at the Crab Cooker. Tumbling out of the truck we grab towels, water bottles, and puffy jackets, and walk a raised wooden path to the area’s hottest hot spring. An eggy, algal cloud envelops us before the spring itself comes into view. Then we see the rock-rimmed pool, a steam plume ascending from a dark crater. The water here, when it first comes to the surface, hovers around 150 degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to cook crabs, no exaggeration in the name—so people cut it with cold water from a surface stream until it comes down to around 110. The pool is still hotter than any man-made tub I’ve ever sunk myself into, and its scalding sting feels spectacular on the aches we’ve accrued from several consecutive climbing days at the Buttermilks and in Owens River Gorge. We keep our hands lifted above the surface of the water so our hard-earned calluses don’t melt off.
Parallel to us climbers, there runs an entire subculture of hot springs enthusiasts who travel the country to find the loveliest, toastiest, unlikeliest geothermal pools that tectonics has to offer. Connecting with this odd population of wanderers is one of the surprise pleasures of our annual Bishop trip. The Crab Cooker must rank high on their list. Wild sage and scrubby junipers riddle the sand, boulders punctuate the foothills and draws, and the impressive ridgelines of the Sierra Eastside tower over it all, seemingly close enough to splash with the flick of a finger. At sunset the land gets saturated with glory and import and impeccable desert light, and we in our good fortune get to gaze at this panorama while the guts of the planet warm us to temperatures well in excess of our own hearts’ heat.
When, to our surprise, two bodies coalesce out of the steam, we apologize for our loudness and promptly shut down the stereo. The strangers don’t mind, they say, they’ve been enjoying the ruckus. The new arrivals are a pair of Germans, a father and his grown son, who have been touring America together. Before long our separate conversations become enmeshed in the small pool. We learn that the younger soaker, the son, used to be an accomplished extreme athlete. He somberly explains that he found himself a lonelier and lonelier survivor as his BASE-jumping and wingsuiting friends went in. Hearing the phrase now for the second time, I’m struck by the gentleness of the euphemism, far softer than the verb to crater, as in “their parachute didn’t deploy and they cratered,” which I’d heard in gruffer conversations with BASE jumpers. I picture these lost friends “going in” to a collective reserve of matter and spirit, the heavenly welter where all unmade is remade. Although, with the image of a crater in mind, I suppose “going in” could refer not to the eternally cyclical return to one’s mysterious origin but rather to a body “going in” to the ground at terminal velocity. Needless to say, I don’t ask the German.
He explains to a rapt audience that last year, upon successfully landing a jump, his still-open parachute caught a fierce gust of wind that slammed him into a cliff and dragged him across a talus field. Multiple impacts against the rocks shattered innumerable bones, including several in his back. By coincidence, the guy’s best friend was flying the emergency helicopter that came to collect his ragdoll body. To those on board it looked like a hopeless case, a certain fatality, but in the end the guy survived. Hearing the story, I look to my own best friend soaking by my side. We make eye contact and discreetly drop our jaws a fraction of a centimeter, a silent exchange of Jesus fucking Christ.
“Jesus Christ,” I say aloud to the German.
“It’s no problem,” the guy says, gesturing grandly at the mountain-rimmed basin that surrounds us. “Happy I am living.”
He’s still in the middle of a years-long rehabilitation process, he explains. He points to a neck brace he’d removed before his soak, whose plastic struts I now see glowing in the moonlight, a safe distance back from the water where it won’t get splashed. “It’s no problem to wear that sometimes.”
“Just like when he was a baby,” the dad says cheerfully. “I help him eat, then I help him shit!”
We typically view risk in relation to death—inviting its possibility, skirting its tentacles—but I’ve lately been exploring a philosophy that views risk, instead, in relation to life. Rather than focusing on what we stand to lose, what riches does risk put us in position to gain? This question came by way of a book called Éloge du risque by French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle. It hadn’t yet been translated into English, but with undergrad French memories and a Larousse dictionary in hand, I bought a copy and dove in. I worked on my translations of Éloge du risque while riding the Flatiron Flyer bus between Boulder and Denver. During this commute the Flatirons themselves rise to the west like a fleet of ships tacking in formation, their huge reddish triangular faces making a tidy row of sails afloat on a choppy sea of pine.
A route called Freeway ascends the Second Flatiron (they’re numbered sequentially from north to south), and locals tell me it’s a fun, dead-easy romp for the entire thousand feet of the eastern face. Nobody bothers to use the melodramatic phrase free solo; they just call it a scramble. The route has seen barefoot ascents, no-hands ascents, and, the clearest indicator of its difficulty, an ascent by a climber wearing roller skates. For some reason I never wonder whether I’m going to climb it, I just know, innately, that I’m going to. It’s an indicator that my relationship to risk is changing. Even still, as I prepare to solo—sorry, scramble—the Second, I approach it with a solemnity bordering on gloom. I warm up at home, stretch, fuel and hydrate, tidy the basement so that if I die I won’t leave an unsightly mess for my landlady to deal with. Ridiculous. The short drive across town feels haunted, with the Flatirons leering in the windshield as I pilot my way westward. I park and take a deep breath before exiting the vehicle. Walk up the trail, a well-beaten one that sees countless tourists and toddlers safely along the base of the range, taking every rock-hopping step with exaggerated care, testing the infallibility of my balance. And then I sit at the base of the Second for ages, meditative and serious, while a string of a half-dozen stoned teenagers fire the route, unroped, not even pausing their giggling conversation as they step off the trail and onto the rock.
Supposedly there’s a crux around fifty feet off the ground, but for me it turned out the crux was just deciding to do it. When I finally put on my climbing shoes, tuck my sneakers into my backpack, and lay my hands on the crystalline stone, hard moves are absolutely nowhere to be found. The climbing feels easier than walking, in fact, since I get to use my hands in addition to my feet. From a hundred feet up, and again at three hundred and again at five hundred, I glance down at the sandstone ramp the foot of the mountain makes, observe how the trail gets thinner and the trees get smaller as I rise, and experience a wave of giddiness. I sip that sensation like champagne, peering, bubbling, then I turn my face to the wall and continue the scramble. At the summit I sit a long time and look east at a flat expanse of town and plain that appears to extend all the way to the Atlantic. I’ve wagered my life, and have been repaid tenfold.
A week later, I take an incremental step up in difficulty and try the Third Flatiron. Locals, I notice, do tend to refer to this one as a solo, not a scramble. I’m exiting the kiddie pool. Again I follow the trail through Chautauqua Park with a measure of unease in my gut, hiking through grassy open fields up into the pine sea, and then across a stretch of loose talus to the base of the route. A thousand angling, rippling feet of sandstone thrust westward, the summit hidden from view. I bring my chalk bag this time and coat my palms with a layer of white dust to keep them from slickening with sweat. Unlike the Second, the Third is a legitimate, if moderate, climb. I make careful progress, never moving more than one limb at a time, testing each handhold for soundness, testing each surface for slipperiness, before entrusting my weight to it. Focus, rather than rhapsody, rules the experience. The crux comes at the top. Until that point I’d been hanging on bucket-like holds, generous craters, but the rock comprising the last twenty feet below the peak has been worn smooth by the elements. Though the terrain is low angle, it’s holdless as an asphalt road. This section, I knew from my research beforehand, would require a few moves of open-hand slab climbing. In the absence of tangible features on the cliff, you just paste your hands and feet onto the surface and rely on friction to hold you in place.
Slab is an unnerving, faith-based style of climbing, and those few moves—a thousand feet off the ground, knowing a fall would be fatal—demand a degree of meticulousness I’ve never before needed to summon. To summon it that afternoon is like flexing a new muscle for the very first time. I feel each grain of the gritty matrix as it deforms the skin of my fingertips, fitting the ridges of my fingerprint to match the ridges of the Flatiron’s surface. I attune to the gumminess of my shoe, the pressure of the ball of my foot compressing its rubber sole, filling completely the negative space of the rock’s surface. Death isn’t on my mind. It’s a million miles away. I know I will be perfect, and this perfection will make me invincible. If I fall, my last thought will be I never saw this coming. But I wager; I scurry. I summit. From the top I stare down at the backs of raptors, at the pine and the prairie, and again my spirit prospers.
The next morning from the bus I cast a lingering glance over the Flatirons. I look at the granulated ripples of the cliffs and superimpose my antlike image onto them, watching memories of myself crawl up the faces as if in footage captured by a drone. I’m still up there, forever taking those calm breaths, forever palming those grainy domes. Fellow commuters catch me wearing a moony smile. Now, pen gripped in my teeth, Éloge du risque open in my lap, my gaze drifts a click northward. My newfound muscle twitches. In the notebook for my scraps and outlines I write FOR RISK ESSAY: SOLO THE FIRST? After spending the day on campus I get back on the bus for my evening commute, and that scribbled notion digs into me uncomfortably. The wobble on the highway made my script look manic. It is manic. The idea stands squarely outside of what I consider to be an acceptable level of climbing risk. From the bus window the First dominates the ridgeline as the Flatirons fall into shadow. Morning and evening light seem to fashion two different ranges out of the same rock space. When I try on the idea of soloing the First, it feels like a too-small sweater pulled over my head, grabbing my skull. I know I should rip it off and discard it. But I could also push my way inside. I recall a strong, confident climber-friend whose trip report after soloing the First was simply, “I’m never going to do that again.” I wondered what had happened to turn his face so ashen, but he didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t pry.
These accident reports save lives more directly, more demonstrably, than poetry or scripture.
Climbing culture has a storytelling idiom I call “Close Calls.” They’re an inversion of just-so stories; instead of tales of creation like “How the Zebra Got Its Stripes” or “How the Giraffe’s Neck Got So Long,” Close Calls focus on tales of destruction like “How Rebecca Lost Her Leg” or “How Johnny Lost His Partner.” Years ago at the base of the Incredible Hulk, a gorgeous granite outcrop in the Sierras, Owen and I were preparing to climb the classic Red Dihedral. We’d undertaken the steep approach hike in the evening, stove heated some expired and deeply disappointing beef stew, and established our bivvy beside a picturesque rivulet riffling through a boulder field. Two young women camped at another minimeadow a few hundred feet downstream, and when the stars came up, they invited us down for a sip of whiskey. We splashed a bit of warmish bourbon into our unwashed bowls, resulting in a cocktail like a hot Sazerac with a beef-grease rinse instead of an absinthe one. During that night’s edition of Close Calls, we hear of a time an inexperienced leader led a pitch and built an anchor, and one of the women (now sipping her whiskey between plot points) followed him up, arriving at a worthless nest of protection that, had she fallen, would have sputtered from the wall and killed them both. Next my buddy describes watching a climber follow an outdoor route on top-rope, unclipping each draw along the way, and then, at the top, unclipping the two draws that held the rope, and then, the height of outrageousness, untying his rope and dropping it to the ground, meaning he was now clinging to holds a hundred feet off the deck with nothing else to hold him in place. By some miracle a professional climber was on a route next door and, seeing the disaster unfold, climbed to the stranded kid in minutes with a spare rope to reattach him to the world.
As with any public storytelling genre, there’s a ritual to it. One teller shares the scariest climbing story they’ve heard or experienced, a story of someone’s closest call. The fireside audience takes in the punchline—a survival unscathed, a rescue, an injury, a fatality—in solemn contemplation. After a respectful interval and perhaps another sip of whiskey, the next teller narrates an even closer call. For listeners familiar enough with safety systems to fully appreciate the danger, miscommunication, unpreparedness or negligence in these stories, the tales provide riveting entertainment, in their own grim way. But they serve a deeper purpose, too, in that they circulate these scenarios as a risk-prevention measure. The same could be said of the more formal narratives published by the American Alpine Club. Their style is unadorned, a blow-by-blow sequence of errors that led up to an injury or death on the wall, but safety-oriented climbers read these annual accident reports with biblical devotion. Instead of re-living old traumas, these prudent folks pre-live them, learning to deal with such catastrophes should they arise or, better yet, learning to avoid such catastrophes altogether. These accident reports save lives more directly, more demonstrably, than poetry or scripture.
We could easily swap Close Calls all night, but both teams are planning to start our ascents of the Hulk at dawn, so we force ourselves to break up the party before it gets too late. I brush my teeth, taking a gamble on unfiltered river water, and tuck myself into bed. In the sleeping bag, staring up at the densest panorama of stars I’ve seen in months, I wonder what moment, in my life so far, was the moment I was nearest to death. My own closest call, in a statistical sense, when my odds of survival were lowest. At first I think it would land among the instances when I was most afraid. There was a hike to a ghost town called Lundy when I was dead certain I was being stalked by a mountain lion. Or a time at an outdoor concert in Denver when gunshots broke out and the whole crowd stampeded in panic away from the brutal sound. Then I wonder if my closest call fell among the times I sustained an injury: a spinout on the highway from a blown tire, a fainting spell in the Rockies brought on by dehydration and exhaustion, a split forehead from an ice cave collapse that let me see my own skull through the hole in my skin. But in all likelihood, I bet the moment passed by me altogether unnoticed. One of my countless midnights on a two-lane country road, maybe, when the approaching headlights belonged to a drunk driver, or a trucker on the cusp of sleep, or a heartsick teenager composing a text to an ex. So long as they keep their car on the proper side of the yellow line, I never know the peril I’m in.
This evening in Boulder the sky is not its usual bluebird. From the egress window of my cheap-ass basement rental I see bulbous clouds gathering overhead. A handful of months have passed and by now the Second Flatiron scramble has become my go-to after-work workout. I lap it a couple times a week, not bothering with climbing shoes anymore, just using the same busted sneakers I wear for the approach hike. But when it rains, the rock slickens, the lichen sucks up moisture and magically transforms from a crust to a lubricant. Given the inclement weather, it’s shaping up to be a work night. So instead of soloing—sorry, scrambling—at sunset, I’m at my desk with a mug of mint tea, bringing Dufourmantelle into English word by word. Risk, she writes and I translate, “inaugurates an other time, as though traumatic. But a positive trauma.”
“An other time” makes me think, to my discredit, of the movie Donnie Darko. The premise of that film, as I interpret it, is that one night in a freak accident an airplane engine fell through the roof of the protagonist Donnie’s house, and should have crushed him, except that he was somnambulantly chasing a giant nightmare rabbit onto a golf course at the time, and thereby avoided his fate. This sets in motion an alternate universe—the one where Donnie lives—that runs alongside the one in which he rightfully dies. I think this is what Dufourmantelle means: When we take a risk, knowing we’ll either experience a near-miss like the Donnie who lives or a direct hit like the Donnie who dies, we create a narrative fork in the road. I’ve long wondered what wingsuiters, free soloists, and skydivers gain through their constant navigation of risk, and tonight I start to sense it. When carefully and responsibly considered, these dangerous activities let adventurers inhabit innumerable parallel universes. We get to live infinite lives and die infinite deaths as, in preparation, we imagine the outcomes and contingencies of each climb, each jump, each flight. The potential plotlines proliferate and the density of our life experience increases. Time dilates to accommodate not only the life we’ve lived and the life we will lead, but also all the lives we might have lived, and might yet lead.
I turn my attention to trauma positif. It’s an uncomfortable phrase. The language carries a reminder that many people experience risk and precarity only under duress. As far as I’m concerned, the privilege inherent in elective risk is alpinism’s original sin, and a key reason that, despite the vast increase in diversity and gender parity in climbing in the last decade, the sport has been slow to shake its aura of patriarchy and whiteness. But Dufourmantelle’s claims sound right to me. Just as negative trauma has the power to reshape the stories that people tell themselves about themselves and about the worlds they inhabit, so too can a trauma positif rewrite a person’s history, even as it rewrites their future. As a result of the risks I’ve taken, and the trauma positif of surviving them, I’m phasing out the story that I’m a meek person. Now, with demonstrable evidence, I must tell myself I’m capable of being brave. Maybe every time you risk your life, you lose it: You lose the life you had before taking the risk, and supplant that life with a new one. A solo of the First Flatiron feels this way for me. Ever since moving to town I’ve told myself I couldn’t solo it. So if I solo it, the version of me too frightened to try it will die.
Days later I see the headline in the local paper: “17-Year-Old Falls to His Death While Climbing Boulder’s First Flatiron.” There’s a photograph of the formation I’ve spent my daily commute mulling over, and the article below:
Equipped with camping and outdoor survival gear—but no climbing-specific equipment—a 17-year-old died after climbing alone and falling up to 100 feet or more from Boulder’s First Flatiron on Sunday evening.
Climber rescues, and non-fatal falls, are common every summer across the iconic rock formations above Chautauqua Park. But this appears to be the first accidental climbing death on the Flatirons in nine years.
The teenager—whose identity has not yet been released, and who officials initially said was 18—was found by a hiker near the base of the First Flatiron, above the Blue Bell Shelter in Chautauqua Park, according to Boulder County sheriff’s officials.
Sheriff’s Cmdr. Mike Wagner said the teen was free-soloing—climbing alone, without the use of ropes or gear—on the First Flatiron when he fell possibly more than 100 feet and suffered “massive traumatic injuries.”
Sources report that the climber took a selfie and posted it to Instagram shortly before the fall. There follow, in the next few days, admonishments from the climbing community, the oft-repeated self-assurances that this kid was unprepared but we know better, and more than a few references to a phenomenon known as “Kodak Courage,” where the possibility of taking an impressive photograph pushes a climber past their typical margin of safety. The next time I walk up to the foot of the First Flatiron, a sober memorial sits at the base of a pine tree. Cards, flowers, offerings. A printout of the photo the climber snapped and posted minutes before his death.
Toward the tail end of the same season the paper runs another headline: “Climber Dies After Falling from Boulder’s First Flatiron.” This time there’s a different stock photo of the mountain, now caked with snow. The article reads:
A man climbing on the First Flatiron on Thursday afternoon fell to his death, the second person to die following an accidental plummet off of the iconic Boulder landmark since August but only the second in nearly a decade.
Boulder County Sheriff’s Office Cmdr. Kevin Parker said that the man—who has not been publicly identified—did not appear to be using any kind of climbing gear, but rescuers were searching the area for any signs of a backpack or gear on Thursday afternoon.
By the time a Denver Post article comes out about the incident later that night, investigators have located and interviewed an eyewitness, so the article is able to provide a bit of additional detail: “The witness believed the climber fell about 1,000 feet from the top of the First Flatiron.”
With that, this essay gets shelved for a spell. It’s not just because the weather has shifted, although the snow on the Front Range makes the Flatirons unclimbable through the winter, intermittent warm days sending rivers of melt down the faces, cold storms stacking new layers of powder over the slush. But more acutely, I realize I’ve been lulled into thinking a solo of the First Flatiron would be a casual endeavor, one that wouldn’t really bring me into proximity of any grave risk. The two deaths, in rapid succession, on the route I’ve planned to climb in the same style abruptly extinguish this confidence, leave me not only shaken but also self-admonishing for having been so cocksure in the first place. I take winter walks through Chautauqua. The snow crunches under my feet, sifts from trailside pine boughs. The Flatirons stand above, their features outlined in icy white. Below, the town of Boulder enjoys its bubble of dreamy calm, a hush of distant traffic in the air, interrupted by an occasional siren belting down Baseline or Table Mesa. During these walking meditations my notebook starts to feel suspiciously similar to the luckless young climber’s selfie camera. Moleskine Courage.
What do we stand to win when our ante is ourselves? The chance to make our finite time feel infinite? The chance to make our finite self feel infinite?
The crux of the First comes in its first hundred feet, where the climbing is particularly thin, slabby and insecure. I stand in the snow at the base—where a second memorial is now tucked in the pines—and visualize the climb. My counterfactual imagination invents a worst-case scenario: I’m not far up the route, approaching the gnarled tree that marks the top of the first pitch where a roped party would typically belay. Immediately below this point there’s a delicate section of friction-dependent slab; the first time I climbed the pitch on rope, this stretch clarified for me that I’d never, ever attempt the route as a solo. There aren’t proper holds, just shallow dishes for the hands and feet. I imagine extending my left foot and placing it in one such divot. I reach farther left with my left hand, where a small diagonal rail supports my left fingertips, stacked in a row. My right hand is similarly stacked in a higher-up dish, and as I go to move my right foot toward my body’s centerline, the left foot slips off. My knees strike the rock first, my elbows a moment after. The angle is low, so I don’t go into full vertical freefall. I bounce down the face. After twenty feet a heel catches and I invert, delivering a rolling blow to my shoulder and an impact to the back of my skull. In my chest a depth charge, a low moan as I land in the talus beside the twin shrines. After my death, my writer-friends will wonder what I was working on in my last days. I’ve kept my preparations for the solo secret, but now they will look in my notebook and see I’ve been planning it for months, getting ready to sacrifice myself for no greater purpose than a literal thought exercise.
I shift my weight in the snow, shake the spectacle out of my head. I return to the trail, the car, the comforts of home.
The winter months pass, long nights, a bomb cyclone that buries my basement windows in snow and leaves me to lurk in the dark like a slumbering bear, and then spring arrives abrupt and clanging and golden. Overnight the Flatirons slough off their snowy coats. Still ambivalent about soloing the First, I go to Chautauqua with two friends, planning to rope up and climb with them as a party of three. This will give me a chance, I figure, to scope the route once more and make a final call. Reassess those dishes and divots, determine whether I can trust my life to them. We spend a long time at the base, not rushing, just racking up and rearranging our packs, sipping water and snacking, enjoying the gorgeous day. The sun dips behind the ridge and the temperature gets perfect, just on the cooler edge of pleasant. The rock won’t be greasy, there’ll be plenty of friction, but it won’t be so cold I’ll get chilly and misinterpret my shivers as fear. Plenty of daylight, light spirits, and for once in my life, I don’t overthink. I know deep in my soul that I don’t need the rope today. So I don’t tie in. I just climb alongside my friends. It’s easier than walking because I get to use my hands, and everything goes perfectly, which means in the end there’s no story at all.
I won’t solo the First again, but not because I hated it. I won’t solo it again because I loved it too much. Since then, I haven’t exactly become a soloist, but I’ve heard the bell-clear siren song from routes a number of times, Johnny Vegas in Red Rocks, the Capstan on Flagstaff Mountain, a few choice cracks in the Sierra, a handful of highballs like Airwolf and High Plains Drifter in various deserts of the West. I am measured and studious, with my books and dictionaries and writing routine and mint tea. I also, when called, enjoy something categorically deadly. Soloing puts me in touch with the multitudes I contain. On insomniac nights I relive the memories of these ropeless ascents, with every detail of every hold seared in my mind in everlasting high resolution, and the perfection of my movements lulls me to sleep. It must sound counterintuitive, but nothing in this world makes me calmer.
The phrase “to risk one’s life” conjures in my mind’s eye a kind of scale, like the one Anubis uses to weigh a heart against a feather. On one of its golden dishes sits your wager, your life; on the other there must be something of equal or greater value in order for the risk to seem worthwhile. What do we stand to win when our ante is ourselves? The chance to make our finite time feel infinite? The chance to make our finite self feel infinite? The satisfaction of saving our own life? Is that payoff enough?
I discovered Anne Dufourmantelle’s work on the university library search engine, under keywords “philosophy” and “risk.” At the time I didn’t look into her biography, just went straight to the primary text. But I’m curious to see what she’s working on now, so I check the regular internet instead of the university database. The first hit is an article from the New York Times, headlined “Philosopher Who Praised Risk Died Trying to Save Children from Drowning.” It reads:
PARIS—A French philosopher and psychoanalyst, known for her work that praised living a life that embraced risk, died last week as a result of following her own bold philosophy.
The philosopher, Anne Dufourmantelle, 53, drowned on Friday as she tried to save two children who were struggling to swim off the coast of Pampelonne beach, near St.-Tropez, France, according to a report from French public television.
Ms. Dufourmantelle was on the beach when the weather began to change and the previously safe swimming area became treacherous. She saw two children who were in danger and leapt into the sea to help, according to France 3, before being caught in the rough surf.
She was pulled unresponsive from the water by two other swimmers, and attempts to resuscitate her failed.
Both children survived.
I’m stunned by how recent the news is: Dufourmantelle died days before the first soloist fell from the First Flatiron. Another search result, an obituary, quotes an English-language lecture she’d once given: “Being completely alive is a task, it’s not at all a given thing. It’s not just about being present to the world, it’s being present to yourself, reaching an intensity that is in itself a way of being reborn.” Having only experienced her work, up until this point, through the veil of translation, there’s something uncannily intimate about reading her words in my own language for the first time. The clarity of it is painful, the poetry self-evident, breaking out of human time and into the mythic. She saw the children, the danger. She saw the swift water. She went in.
Brian Laidlaw is an author of the two collections of poetry, The Mirrormaker and The Stuntman. A songwriter and musician, he has released several albums, most recently This Aster. He writes for outdoor magazines including Outside, Climbing, Alpinist, and Orion. Based out of Moab, Utah, he moonlights—often by literal moonlight—as a rock climber.
In the new print issue of Esses, a quarterly print magazine covering motorsports and the culture around it, Duncan Fyfe writes about the most bizarre Formula One video game ever made. Centered around Gerhard Berger, a former racing driver from Austria who competed in F1 from 1984 to 1997, Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz is a quirky video game from 1993 that raises more questions than it asks. Fyfe digs into the mystery, investigating the quiz’s grammatically awkward questions and the game’s developer, Austria Soft, whose existence is questionable. (Esses subscription may be required—consider becoming a member.)
THE REAL QUIZ, it soon becomes clear, is not a test of one’s F1 knowledge, but figuring out what the game expects to hear. This only becomes more difficult, and even sinister. Question nine: FROM WHAT COUNTRY IS JEAN ALESI REALLY? The answer is not France, where Alesi was born and grew up, and under whose flag Alesi competed for over a decade. To progress in the quiz, the game forces one to submit that Alesi was born to Italian parents, and thus is “really” from Italy.
The game’s questions all have correct answers that cannot be submitted, and yet they are less difficult to answer than these ones: Who made this game? Why? And what was Gerhard Berger thinking?
“Taste is a new core skill,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman declared earlier this year—one voice in a growing chorus of pronouncements about the centrality of judgment and preference in an economy built on artificial intelligence. And yet taste itself is largely undefined by many of its loudest proponents. Celine Nguyen considers the historic relationship between automation and taste; the “seemingly irrelevant, unimportant” inputs that shape our critical perceptions; and the perils of wielding taste like a cudgel. A striking, insightful blend of criticism and personal essay.
Today’s frontier models are trained on enormous quantities of data. One takeaway from Anthropic’s 2025 settlement with a group of authors, in which the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion (or an estimated $3,000 per book) for scraping copyrighted books from shadow libraries like LibGen, is that its models have “read” at least 482,460 books. But even Claude Opus 4.8 hasn’t written a short story that I enjoy more than those by Lydia Davis or Jessi Jezewska Stevens — both of whom, despite being prodigiously well-read, have almost certainly read fewer books.
Joël Kyaviro is a professional cyclist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who has risen above government instability, war, violence, poverty, and Ebola, overcoming every “tack in his path” to become the first rider from the DRC to win a Union Cycliste International race. What’s more, he’s used his success to get the next generation of kids interested in the sport by founding Tumaini Academy, “a cycling program aimed at transcending war by getting Goméen kids on bikes and in school.”
He rolled into the finish zone alone, a full ten seconds ahead, the cushion so big that he was able to victoriously throw his arms in the air. He coasted the last few meters no hands, grinning ear to ear, as his old club president, Charles Guy Makongo, leapt up and down on the sidelines.
Makongo’s sneakers got soaked in the puddles, but he did not care. In the entire 126-year run of the Union Cycliste International, no Congolese rider had ever won a UCI race. On Instagram that night, a picture of Joël ran with a banner header reading, “A historic moment in Congolese cycling.” Posting on an African cycling forum, Makongo proclaimed, “Today’s victory is much more than a sporting result.” It showed, he said, “that talent can flourish even in the most challenging environments.”
Running with Rachel Entrekin must be pretty wild—she encourages competitors and stops mid-race to pet dogs. But her personality is even bigger off the course. Tough and empathetic, her running success has come after 13 years of hard work and a battle to transform an addictive, perfectionist past into a healthier relationship with food, rest, and herself. And even as success came and ultramarathons were won, she watched opportunities go to her male competitors. Gloria Liu honors the incredible achievement of “smashing records while battling impostor syndrome and the fragility of your own self-worth in a world enamored with men, and their accomplishments.”
The key word, however, is average. As any female runner who’s ever passed a dude working himself into a froth to stay ahead of her on the trail knows, women beat men on an individual basis daily. And as athletes like Entrekin and Dauwalter have shown, they do so, occasionally and spectacularly, even at the elite level. We have an understandable reflex to point to categorical advantages that might explain why women can do this, Malcolm says: “It’s inherently feel good, the David and Goliath aspect of a woman winning outright.”
But in searching for the advantages we hope all women have, we may be missing a simpler truth: Most men are faster than most women, but some women still beat most men. The point is not that we have any advantage. The point is that they have almost every advantage—and we still win.
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