Mark Johnson | The Atavist Magazine | September 2026 | 2,048 words (7 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 180, “The Family Plan.”

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At first she told no one. Not her twin sister. Not her mother. Not even her father the scientist.

Six-year-old Jenna Smith knew better than to pee when she was in the bath. But on that night in 1992, in her family’s home in Iowa City, the water felt so comfortable against her skin that she didn’t want to get out of the tub. It seemed like such a small thing. Who would know?

Seconds later the water around her waist turned reddish pink. Blood? It had to be. Jenna wondered if she’d hurt herself. “I was six years old sitting in a bathtub, watching a few seconds of my world stop making sense,” she would recall years later.

She kept the blood a secret because she didn’t want to admit that she’d peed in the bath. But when it was still in her urine the next time she used the toilet, she went to her mother. Concerned, her mom called her dad, Richard Smith, and he took Jenna to the emergency room.

Richard was an ear, nose, and throat doctor in the University of Iowa’s school of medicine, a researcher who would become one of the world’s authorities on the genetics of hearing loss. His wife, Lynne Lanning, had worked as both a lawyer and a nurse. They had four young children: twins Jenna and Jessica, who were identical, and two boys, Luke and Rion.

At the ER, doctors ran tests on Jenna, but they couldn’t identify the cause of the blood. In the days that followed the bleeding intensified. At her parents’ urging, Jenna collected samples of her urine in Dixie cups for further testing. The doctors remained stumped, however, and after a while Jenna found the whole thing more annoying than worrisome.

The uncertainty was much harder on her parents. It wasn’t that doctors were misdiagnosing their daughter; they were unable to diagnose her at all. “It was horrible,” Richard said. “Imagine seeing your child and you know something is wrong, and you know the doctors treating her have no clue what to do.” Richard called a pediatric nephrologist he knew in Houston, where the family had lived previously. The nephrologist listed several conditions that could be causing the bleeding and said that, to determine which was to blame, Jenna’s parents should take her to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

In July 1992, Richard, Lynne, and Jenna drove nearly 500 miles to get answers. Doctors in Cincinnati diagnosed Jenna with dense deposit disease, a condition in which proteins clog and damage the kidneys, leading to renal failure in many patients. There was no cure.

The hospital couldn’t tell the family much else—no one could. The disease was exceedingly rare, afflicting between one and three people in a million. Back home, Richard and Lynne spent hours inside the University of Iowa’s quiet medical library, poring over papers in search of information about their daughter’s illness. They could find no evidence that anyone was actively studying the condition.

Although many Americans—roughly one in ten—suffer from a rare disease, the experience can be lonely. Friends and relatives don’t understand the unique miseries such illnesses impose on daily life. Few doctors are likely to have encountered them before. And because there aren’t many patients, drug companies usually don’t invest in research for treatments.

Richard and Lynne feared that their daughter’s life might be tragically brief. Sometimes the mention of weddings would sink Lynne into melancholy; she couldn’t bring herself to watch the movie Father of the Bride. Richard agonized over what to do. His training compelled him to seek answers, but he wanted to be Jenna’s father, not the scientist charged with curing her. He kept his research focused on hearing loss. At first, anyway.

Stories of scientific discovery almost always celebrate individual researchers, consigning the contributions of loved ones, communities, and colleagues to footnotes. There are exceptions―the teams that built the first atomic bomb and deciphered the human genome, for instance. Science also has its share of famous families. Marie and Pierre Curie, along with their daughter Irène and her husband, Frédéric, won five Nobel Prizes between them for discoveries related to radioactivity. For the most part, however, the history of scientific progress has been mythologized as a succession of brilliant, driven individuals—often men—who chose the lab over the dinner table and competition over collaboration.

Some scientists have embraced the role of maverick. “You have to worry about your own work and ignore what everyone else is doing,” the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman is said to have told a colleague. The decades-long pursuit of a treatment for Jenna’s disease followed a very different path. There was no single hero, no lone scientist seeking glory. The biomedical quest required the efforts of a family and their neighbors in Iowa City, and the work of scientists around the globe. Together they changed an obscure area of medicine.

Richard and Lynne met in 1977, when both were working at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston—she as a nurse, he as a medical intern. He noticed a run in her nylons and was smitten by her smile. She liked his down-to-earth manner and intelligence, his humor and kindness. They were working in the hospital’s burn unit when he asked her out.

The couple married in 1981, and except for two years in England, they remained in Houston until 1990. That December they moved to Iowa City, where Richard had a job waiting for him leading the pediatric otolaryngology division and running a research lab at the University of Iowa’s medical school. They had been there only a year when Jenna got sick.

Richard and Lynne learned that their daughter’s disease was caused by a malfunction in her complement system. Believed to have evolved long before other parts of our immune infrastructure, the complement system sends proteins to battle foreign invaders. Unlike antibodies, these proteins are not tailored to fight a specific virus or bacteria, but they kick into gear faster when a threat is detected. In people with Jenna’s condition, the complement system is like a runaway train: Proteins become overstimulated and then accumulate in the glomeruli, tiny filters the kidneys use to clear waste from blood.

Blood in the urine is one symptom of the disease. Others include swelling, high blood pressure, inflammation, and fatigue. When Jenna was in the first grade, her body struggled to make growth hormones. Her production of red blood cells slowed, and she grew increasingly tired. During rehearsals for The Nutcracker ballet around Christmas 1993, she’d finish her part and then lie down backstage, completely spent.

Doctors put her on a heavy dose of the steroid prednisone and on blood-pressure medication. The prednisone caused her body to retain water. She woke up each morning with her eyes swollen shut, then waited in bed until the swelling receded. She couldn’t fit into her clothes or shoes. She wore flip-flops and roomy jumpers Lynne sewed for her.

As twins, Jenna and Jessica had always been close. They played together, made up songs and dance moves, explored the woods near their home, and enjoyed pranking friends and family members. “She made a lot of things feel not so heavy,” Jenna said of her sister. Still, she sometimes thought that Jessica “got off scot-free” by not having dense deposit disease. Neither girl liked feeling different from the other. (Years later, Jessica would be diagnosed with type-1 diabetes; Jenna would not.)

The changes to Jenna’s appearance meant the girls were no longer identical. Once, according to Lynne, when a boy at school said that Jenna couldn’t be a twin anymore because of how she looked, Jessica slugged him. Lynne recalled sitting in the principal’s office, politely listening to a lecture—this is not the way we resolve things!—but understanding why Jessica had lashed out. Nothing was so frightening to her daughters as the idea that they’d stop being twins.

About half of those afflicted with Jenna’s disease progressed to kidney failure within a decade of diagnosis; it took her less than a year. She made it through the last day of first grade. Then, as other children departed for summer camp, she went to a clinic. While her classmates practiced archery and did arts and crafts, she learned about the catheter doctors would surgically insert in her body. Through that tube, a machine would pump fluid into her abdomen, where her peritoneum—her abdominal lining—would take over the filtering function kidneys usually perform.

She would take the peritoneal dialysis machine home with her and use it every day for the foreseeable future, possibly for the rest of her life. When a nurse tried to take Lynne aside to show her how to operate it, Jenna stopped her. “I’m the patient,” the seven-year-old insisted. “I’m learning how to run the machine.”

In such moments, Lynne was surprised at the strength she drew from her daughter. She needed it. Her grief could leave her feeling drained. One day she found herself crying into the soil as she gardened.

But Lynne and Richard were determined that sadness would not define their lives. For a long time, they didn’t have a TV in their house—they wanted the family to talk when they were together, and for the children to build forts, learn to sew, be creative. They had painting nights, creating portraits of one another. There were cooking contests, too. Richard and Lynne made sure to spend one-on-one time with each kid. Richard traveled with Luke to Japan, with Rion to the Grand Canyon, with Jessica to Italy, and with Jenna to England. Lynne took trips with the children to Brazil, England, and Guatemala. There were themed birthday celebrations: a James Bond party for Richard, where everyone was armed with Nerf guns, and one for Lynne where Richard dressed as the artist Bob Ross and the guests painted “happy little clouds.” Richard coached the kids’ hockey and soccer teams. He built harps and lyres from scratch, and Lynne played them.

Every day, Richard left for work at 5 a.m., while the children were still in bed. He returned around six at night. The family joked that they could hear him coming from half a mile away in his rust-bucket Isuzu Trooper with the bad muffler and a hole in the passenger footwell. When he wasn’t seeing patients or in surgery, Richard was in the lab. On Saturdays, Luke would go there with him. Sometimes the other kids joined. They liked to refill the communal candy jars and visit the mice used in experiments.

It seemed a wonder to the lab’s staff that Richard squeezed so much into a day. When they began using email to communicate, they received messages from him time-stamped three or four in the morning. “Why don’t you sleep sometime?” a colleague replied once. Indeed, Richard slept little. At night his mind kept running through the mysteries of his daughter’s disease.

Richard had read that it took 10,000 hours—the equivalent of working full-time for about five years—to achieve expertise in a subject. He believed it. In 1995, he began flying to conferences about kidney disease, where he talked to the few doctors who cared for patients like Jenna. Medicine was getting no closer to finding a treatment.

That year the owner of a ranch where Richard and Lynne’s children took riding lessons offered to host a fundraiser for kidney disease research. The family organized Dressage in the Heartland, which featured riding events, fiddle music, and bowls of chili. After raising upwards of $10,000 for the National Kidney Foundation, they held the event again the following year. There are hundreds of kidney ailments, however, and the foundation didn’t allow the money the family raised to be earmarked for the research of dense deposit disease. (The foundation said it now allows monetary gifts to be dedicated to specific conditions.)

Richard and Lynne ran into more disappointment during a visit to the University of Minnesota in early 1997. A specialist they consulted was blunt. “Nobody is looking at this disease,” he told them. “And barring something unforeseen, nothing will be done in the next twenty years.”

It was a four-and-a-half-hour drive back to Iowa City. In the car, Lynne brought up what the doctor had said. Maybe they would have to be that unforeseen something.

On September 30, the Archdiocese of Athens and the Greek Ministry of Social Cohesion and Family signed a memorandum of cooperation aimed at preventing domestic violence. The document was signed by Bishop Varnavas of Christoupolis—Protosyncellus of the Archdiocese of Athens and representative of Archbishop Ieronymos—and Deputy Minister Elena Rapti. This new agreement expands the existing […]

A few years ago, Sebastian Barry—whose collected literary works, drawn from family history and lore, offer “a loser’s history of 20th-century Ireland”—announced that the final novel in his series would tackle the relationship between his parents. “The declaration seemed to set the table for a feast of disclosure,” writes Giles Harvey, who spoke with Barry for more than a year as the novel took shape. But the feast never arrived. The “career-spanning profile” Harvey once suggested to Barry becomes a study of abuse, memory, and revelation—one Barry’s forte, and now, perhaps, his greatest struggle.

Barry and I corresponded for the next year and a half, during which the novel appeared to be on course. Then, in July of last year, he sent me a surprising email. Something had happened in the time since his father died, Barry explained. “Where there was once a great need to proclaim aloud,” he wrote — neglecting to specify just what it was he’d felt the need to proclaim — Barry now found himself in a different state of mind. “A matter I thought so urgent and in need of saying” had come to seem better served by a “strange new beneficent silence.”

Mark and Betsy Blondin | Longreads | September 22, 2026 | 2,702 words (10 minutes)

We left Boyne City, Michigan, in the fall of 1996 in a 34-foot Coachmen motorhome towing a minivan, with three children, a golden retriever not originally part of the plan, and a desktop computer on a stand bolted to the floor where a chair used to be. We stopped in Flint to say goodbye to family and retrofit the motorhome for the road. Mark’s father had died that June. His mother was devastated, and for a while the question wasn’t which route to choose but whether to go at all. We left Flint on October 4. Five miles later, the motorhome shut down.

A loose fuel line.

A few miles after the fuel line was fixed, we were surprised by a flat tire on the van’s tow dolly, and then, unbelievably, we bent a bumper while putting the van back on the dolly. It was past seven in the evening. We were finally on our way to Cleveland, Ohio.

That was day one. What we built over the following nine months—25,000 miles through 40 states—would go on to earn a Yahoo! Cool Site designation, a presentation at a US Department of Education national conference, and a place in the federal Education Resources Information Center archive. On the road, we filed over 1,500 emails and website dispatches from museum lobbies, hotel reception desks, libraries, and wherever we could find a phone jack and someone willing to let us run a telephone cord to their wall.

Google would not exist for another two years. The word “blog” had not yet been coined. We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.

Blondins’ Assignment America was both the name of our trip and the website we built in real time as we traveled. We had a partnership with Northwest Academy, a science and technology charter school in northern Michigan in its first year of operation, that made it possible. We had prepared to make the case for why our children—Donald, 14, and twins Kelly and Stacy, 11—would not attend the 1996–97 school year in a conventional sense. The school board didn’t just accommodate us; they encouraged us. Northwest Academy loaned us a laptop and a 1.2 MP digital camera, and we took their curriculum on the road.

The idea had been circulating for some time. For over a year, we had been looking at our future and considering ideas for our next step. Watching The Bridges of Madison County and the questions it raises about the road not taken confirmed for us that we could do something unconventional and educational. Our adventure was also, after Mark’s 12-year career run at Coca-Cola, exactly what we needed.

Red flags of risk waved. In Betsy’s 1996 site bio before the trip began, she wrote her own reasons for going: “I hope [the children] learn that although it is not always easy, unconventional choices in life can be made. Quitting my part-time job as a writer for The Citizen in Boyne City for this adventure was not easy for me. Neither is the financial risk, but I believe it will be worth it.”

What emerged was a family travel journal published to the web, which we updated continuously with photographs and written dispatches. On the site we invited visitors to submit their own travel stories and organically grew a readership we couldn’t really see or measure. Blondins’ Assignment America, our family’s online home, resided at blondins.com, running on Microsoft FrontPage 97.

It is still there. We have not updated the code. The link list on the homepage points to AltaVista, HotBot, and WebCrawler. Many of the links are broken. It is an archive, broken links and all—a well-preserved time capsule.

We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.

This archive holds more than our travel dispatches. Each family member had their own web page. Donald created Donald.com on GeoCities, a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free. He dated his site-building career to November 27, 1996—54 days into the trip. One section with links to tutorials existed to teach strangers how to build websites of their own. The note for November 18, 1997, reads: “I have photoshop! Major site changes are coming.” 

The photographs were 640 by 480 pixels, because anything larger would take a reader minutes to load; we could feel our audience’s patience through the phone line. We uploaded our dispatches whenever we could find a connection—this fundamental part of our publishing process was not on a schedule, nor was it guaranteed. Seven weeks in, parked in Sarasota, Florida, Mark wrote in his journal that he hoped to get something on the site before we left. The week before, in Jacksonville, three days had passed with no update.

When we were lucky, we were able to upload our accounts of adventures on the day they happened.

Stacy posted on October 15, 1996: “Dear Journal: Today was not my favorite day, but it was okay. We spent half the day looking for a place to check our e-mail and were successful. Then we went to the Portland Museum of Art where we saw some neat artwork by Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, etc. Later that night we went swimming while Dad and Donald went to Maine Internet Connections. Kelly and I had lots of fun playing at the pool. We slept once again at the college police parking lot.”

Kelly wrote about our hike on the Lost Mine Trail in the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend National Park in Texas on January 9, 1997. “The trail was supposedly five and a half miles, but straight uphill. We made it back down in about 45 minutes. When we got back, we did some laundry. For dinner, we had barbecue chicken in tortilla shells. There was still snow on the Chisos. There is a legend that there is gold in the mountain.”

Our stories traveled unfiltered into the world for anyone anywhere to read. 

In our 34-foot home, the dinette was the flat surface where we spread out school work and projects and wrote in our journals. It also converted to a bed for Donald. When he wanted to sleep before the rest of us, the cry went out to clear the dinette—a plea or a command, depending on the night. Years later we could still hear echoes of “clear the dinette!”

The web of 1996 was not yet monetized in the way it is today. The internet then wasn’t flooded with platforms competing for your attention and harvesting and selling your data, or algorithms constantly tuned to optimize for engagement. At the time, Yahoo! had editors—actual people employed to look at websites and decide which ones were worth surfacing to other people. That web lasted about a decade before it was dismantled, piece by piece, in favor of one that extracts profits from similar interactions. 

We were the beneficiaries of that architecture and didn’t know it was temporary.

Logistics in the physical world were more challenging than in the world online. Six weeks in, we were low on propane, parked in a friend’s driveway in Maplewood, New Jersey, taking the van into New York City on day trips. The only place that filled RV tanks was in Jersey City. We left the van behind and drove the motorhome onto streets built for nothing that long. Following sketchy directions, we stopped several times to ask for help. The horns behind us did not let up. We found the place, got the propane, and worked our way back through the traffic.

It was one of the worst days of our trip. 

Some of our best days resulted from meeting people while finding ways to get online. Back on day one at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, we told our story, and after a momentary pause, the receptionist at the information desk gave us her chair. We sat at her desk in that major museum and filed our dispatches while visitors walked up to ask for directions to the dinosaurs. We did our best to help. 

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, also in Cleveland, gave us free admission, a press kit, and a phone line. The Great Lakes Science Center nearby, and new that year, gave us free admission and a tour by their PR director. We got better at telling the story, and three charming children helped.

A man named Pierre at a Portland, Maine, YMCA spent an hour trying every phone line in the building to help us connect.

In New York City, our communication efforts found us, just a bit embarrassed, walking down the aisle in our travel clothes to seats five rows from the stage at The King and I. Mark had called the box office that afternoon and told a woman named Sandy our story. Our tickets were waiting at will call for a magical theater night.

A 7-Eleven outside Washington, DC, became a nightly ritual: We’d run a 50-foot cord to the backroom, upload the day’s pages, check and send email, and play a trivia game about the museums we’d visited. Correct answers were worth a Slurpee. That is what the technology was for.

Somewhere past the Four Corners Monument on the Navajo Nation, we ran out of gas less than a mile short of a station that had no can to sell us. A man drove past, saw our motorhome stopped on the shoulder, and turned around. He went home for a gas can and brought back enough gas for us to reach the pump. We never learned his name. This is what human kindness did.

We were the beneficiaries of that architecture and didn’t know it was temporary.

Betsy filed a few freelance columns for The Citizen from the road. Her parents mailed printed issues of the newspaper to whatever general-delivery post office or friend’s or relative’s address we could predict two weeks ahead.

The yeses got bigger as the trip went on. At the JFK Presidential Library outside of Boston, which also gave us free admission, Mark asked if we could park the motorhome in the lot overnight. The staff said yes, and after our visit they showed us where to park and locked the gate behind us. One family, one motorhome, one golden retriever, inside the locked grounds of a federal presidential library, with a view of Boston in the dark. Nobody had a policy for that. Someone had a key and decided yes.

When we needed someone to take Buddy for the month we spent in Hawaii, we found him a home through a golden retriever email list. It connected us to a breeder in Morton, Washington, who knew a young man near Seattle raising his own golden for a 4-H project. He needed the money; Buddy needed a yard. The family also had room for the motorhome. Nobody took a percentage. Nobody optimized the match.

No matter where we were, the realities of our past intruded on our adventure. The family parked the motorhome in Pacifica, California, and waited while Mark flew back to Michigan. He had been fired by Coca-Cola Enterprises in March 1995, and his age-discrimination suit had reached the deposition stage. It ran from nine in the morning to 5:30 p.m. His mother waited at the house our family still owned but no longer lived in. With the retirement savings spent down, much was dependent on the court case going well.

One family, one motorhome, one golden retriever, inside the locked grounds of a federal presidential library, with a view of Boston in the dark. Nobody had a policy for that. Someone had a key and decided yes.

We returned home in June 1997, rich in experience and financially broke. A brief exchange at a campground became an unforgettable memory. Betsy had told an elderly man she was worried the children wouldn’t understand or appreciate what the trip had been. He thought about it. “Maybe it’s not a matter of appreciating it as something unique or separate,” he told her. “It will simply become part of who they are.”  

We spent the summer running an ice cream and yogurt business, and planning the future. While researching, we discovered a request for abstracts from the organizers of a US Department of Education conference called “Families, Technology, and Education.” We were accepted as featured speakers and off to Chicago that October.

A PowerPoint to help tell our story and a video our children had made in Big Bend National Park on its plant and animal life fit the conference title in every way. On a stage in front of 400 educators from around the country, we made our presentation. During the Q&A period, Donald fielded several questions like a pro. Our paper, People Make Dreams Come True, and Technology Expands the Possibilities: An Educational Journey across the United States, seemed close to becoming a template for the future of education—and we had played a role.

In June 1998, an email arrived from a stranger in New York.

His name was Ted Sammons, and he worked in the editorial department of Broadway Books. He had seen Blondins’ Assignment America on Yahoo!’s “Cool Site” listing and had been impressed—and, he admitted, a bit jealous. He believed the story of our trip would make a good book, and he wanted to know if we’d thought about writing one. Of course we had.

We made our pitch, but ultimately, the editorial board passed. Their stated reason was not enough tragedy. 

In 1998, our story was: family leaves, family travels, family lands well. We both began new careers. It’s an adventure with an enviable ending. Eventually, Donald went to Berkeley, and Kelly and Stacy went to Harvard.

In December 1997, we put the Boyne City house on the market, loaded the motorhome for its last trip, and landed in Carlsbad, California, one of our favorite cities discovered on our journey. It was there that Betsy began work as a managing editor and Mark went into the technology industry. Our children thrived. 

The household that once ran a 50-foot cord into a 7-Eleven backroom to send the day’s mail now talks on platforms that eavesdrop on what we say.

A decade passed, and the publisher Betsy worked for went under. Cloud computing came for the company Mark worked for, and then for the storage business he started. In 2009, we lost our Carlsbad house.

Getting from Carlsbad to a city on the Portuguese coast took 10 more years and three continents worth of seeking. But that isn’t this story.

Today, the children are grown and our family is scattered across four countries. The household that once ran a 50-foot cord into a 7-Eleven backroom to send the day’s mail now talks on platforms that eavesdrop on what we say.

Our children’s dispatches still live where they filed them, and how they perceive the trip is not a question we have to ask in 2026. We see it in them. In their curiosity, courage, and adaptability that can partly be traced back to Cleveland. The older, wise man at the campground had predicted correctly. It has indeed become a part of each of us.

Recently, we went looking for who still visits the site. The statistics page is a dead link; it has outlived the instrument that measured it.

We both still write, and Betsy still edits, from a town on the Portuguese coast—a domain renewed annually, hosting billed monthly, a newsletter on a platform that takes its percentage. Every function we had for free in 1996, now itemized. The North Central Michigan College server had hosted our website and asked for nothing.  

While the early web afforded us online advantages, the real-world experiences and connections we enjoyed would not have been possible without the human kindness and generosity we found along the way. Both human and online access made our adventure possible.

Our story is a record of an internet that no longer exists: the one with human editors, not algorithms, discovering and surfacing content worth seeing. The one that offered real access and possibility, resulting in a federal agency highlighting our work and an editor at a major publishing house discovering our project. The one that connected us to a host family for our dog and motorhome in rural Washington, no strings attached. That internet—serendipitous, kind, free, and open—is gone.

Nine months, 25,000 miles, 40 states. Three kids who were there for all of it. A golden retriever who died years later in Carlsbad. A motorhome that is long gone. 

And a website that is, in the most literal sense, still on its way to Cleveland.

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Mark and Betsy Blondin are living and writing in Vila do Conde, Portugal, currently at work on a memoir of the thirty years that followed Assignment America. Betsy is a longtime writer and editor at WordMetro.com who compiled and published Migraine Expressions: A Creative Journey Through Life with Migraine. Together, they published At Home Abroad: Today’s Expats Tell Their Stories. Mark’s work has appeared in The Humanist, and he writes at markblondin.com and Material Witness.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

This story moves chronologically through a marriage that begins to unravel—with fatal consequences. The victim is Dan Markel, the ex-husband of Wendi Adelson, but it’s the involvement of Wendi’s domineering mother, Donna, and her brother, Charlie, that leads to his tragic end. Katherine Laidlaw shows how there were far more than two people in this marriage—and far more than two lives destroyed when it fell apart.

Harvey was nominally the breadwinner, but Donna ruled the family. She had strict ideas about how her children should live, pushing them to earn advanced degrees and build prestigious careers. Rob became a doctor, and Charlie became a periodontist, eventually buying his father’s dental practice. Donna obsessed, too, about her children’s love lives, scrolling through online dating profiles and sending them lists of promising candidates. When Rob started seeing a woman who wasn’t Jewish, Donna interfered so aggressively that he eventually broke it off and briefly married someone else. (He has since married his original non-Jewish girlfriend.) At first, Donna was thrilled that her daughter was seeing Dan, then a lawyer at a boutique firm. She was less thrilled when he left to pursue academia, a path that she felt paid poorly and lacked cachet.

Public records show that businesses associated with Tavira have undergone changes to their custody operations following regulatory intervention in Dubai and Monaco. Separately, Tavira Monaco is a defendant in English civil proceedings concerning shares provided as collateral for a stock-backed loan.

The civil allegations remain disputed, and the public judgments reviewed for this article do not establish that Tavira knowingly participated in fraud. Neither Tavira nor its founder, Eliot Goodfellow, is charged in the related United States criminal case.

An international financial group

Tavira was founded in London in 2005 as Tavira Securities. It has since expanded into areas including agency brokerage, asset management, corporate broking and custody.

The group has operated through regulated businesses in several jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom, Monaco, Dubai, Australia and the United States.

Goodfellow remains Tavira Financial Limited’s controlling shareholder. Companies House records state that he owns at least 75 per cent of its shares and voting rights and has the right to appoint or remove directors.

Tavira Financial’s accounts for the year ending 31 March 2025 reported increased revenue alongside a wider annual loss. The accounts also referred to the closure of its contracts-for-difference business and restructuring of its custody activities as the group concentrated on agency brokerage, asset management and corporate broking.

The Salinas civil proceedings

Tavira Monaco is one of six defendants in English civil proceedings brought by Mexican businessman Ricardo Salinas Pliego and Corporacion RBS.

According to the claimants’ case, as summarised in a 2024 High Court judgment, Salinas transferred Grupo Elektra shares worth more than $400 million to two custodians, Weiser Global Capital Markets and Tavira Monaco. The shares were provided as security for loans under a stock-loan agreement concluded in July 2021.

The claimants allege that they entered the transaction after being led to believe that the lender was associated with the prominent American Astor family and that the shares would not be sold unless an event of default occurred.

They further allege that Vladimir Sklarov, who used the name “Gregory Mitchell” in connection with the transaction, caused the shares to be transferred and sold without their authority and used part of the proceeds to fund the loans themselves.

Financial Mail reported in June 2025, citing trading logs reviewed by Salinas’s team, that some of the disputed shares were sold through transactions involving Morgan Stanley, BBVA and Merrill Lynch. The report did not allege that those banks knew of or participated in the alleged fraud. Their appearance in a transaction chain does not, by itself, establish misconduct or knowledge of any underlying dispute.

These remain allegations in continuing civil litigation. In the interlocutory proceedings, the Sklarov defendants maintained that the transaction documents entitled them to trade the collateral and that Salinas’s advisers had been told this. The public decisions reviewed for this article do not amount to a final determination of Tavira Monaco’s liability.

The High Court granted freezing and proprietary injunctions in August 2024. An application by the Sklarov defendants to discharge those injunctions was rejected in October 2024. Later appellate proceedings concerned procedural and evidential issues rather than a final trial of the underlying claims. Tavira Monaco was not involved in the most recent appeal.

Separate US criminal case

A US federal indictment filed on 30 April 2026 and unsealed in May charges Sklarov with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York alleges that Sklarov operated an entity presented as an established stock-backed lender associated with the Astor family. Prosecutors allege that he used aliases and false representations to obtain control of shares worth approximately $450 million.

Sklarov has not been convicted in that case. The charges are allegations, and he is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

The publicly available indictment charges Sklarov, not Tavira Financial, Tavira Monaco, Goodfellow, Morgan Stanley, BBVA or Merrill Lynch. The existence of the criminal case should therefore not be taken as establishing criminal conduct by any of those companies or individuals.

Restrictions in Dubai

On 10 September 2024, the Dubai Financial Services Authority imposed restrictions on Tavira Financial Limited’s Dubai branch.

According to the DFSA public register, the firm was restricted from soliciting or conducting specified regulated financial-services business with new clients. It was also restricted from soliciting or onboarding new clients in connection with financial promotions.

The public register does not state the reason for the restrictions and does not connect them to the Salinas litigation.

Tavira’s accounts subsequently referred to a decision to close the Dubai branch’s custody operation and to restructure custody activities across the group. The DFSA register nevertheless continues to list Tavira Financial as an authorised firm, subject to the published restrictions.

Companies House records show that Goodfellow ceased to be a Tavira Financial director on 13 September 2024, three days after the restrictions were imposed. Neither the DFSA entry nor the Companies House filing gives a reason for his departure or establishes that it was connected to the restrictions or the Salinas proceedings.

Monaco sanction suspended pending challenge

Tavira Monaco has also been the subject of regulatory action.

On 12 February 2026, Monaco’s Commission de Contrôle des Activités Financières ordered the withdrawal of Tavira Monaco’s authorisation after upholding four regulatory breaches.

The published CCAF decision found that the company had failed to submit required accounts, activity reports and auditors’ reports within statutory deadlines. It also found that the company had not continuously maintained two people responsible for its strategic direction and management, had lacked a bank account in its own name with a Monaco credit institution since July 2023, and had lacked sufficient human and technical resources since 2023.

Tavira Monaco challenged the decision. On 21 May 2026, the President of Monaco’s Supreme Court suspended its execution. According to the CCAF’s current case notice, Tavira Monaco’s application to annul the decision remains pending.

The withdrawal decision should therefore not be described as presently effective without also reporting the suspension and continuing challenge.

Questions about custody controls

The Dubai restrictions, restructuring of custody operations and Monaco proceedings raise legitimate questions about governance and operational controls. They do not, by themselves, prove any connection to the alleged misconduct in the Salinas transaction.

The English civil case raises separate, disputed questions about the instructions received by Tavira Monaco, the authority it understood the relevant parties to possess, the movement of the collateral and the custody records maintained during the transaction. Those matters remain for determination in the civil proceedings.

Right of reply

EU Reporter sent Tavira Financial, Tavira Monaco and Eliot Goodfellow a detailed summary of the matters in this article and asked for their responses concerning the civil allegations, regulatory decisions, custody restructuring and Goodfellow’s departure from the board. EU Reporter has received no replies from Tavira Financial, Tavira Monaco and Eliot Goodfellow

EU Reporter also asked Morgan Stanley, BBVA and Bank of America, the parent company of Merrill Lynch, whether they could confirm the reported transactions and whether they wished to comment.  Morgan Stanley replied, saying “no comment”. The others,  BBVA and Bank of America, the parent company of Merrill Lynch, have not replied at all.

i have been struggling in the last couple of days to get the facts right and make an update on that horror story of the dead infant found in a deep freezer at an Airbrb apartment in Kypseli district of Athens on August 31. The more I delay to write down and post the update, […]

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Haakon automatically became king the moment his father died.

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The report said Harry was deeply moved by the gesture because Althorp holds significant personal and family memories.

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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.

Princess Eugenie is seen holding her baby girl in her arms with caption, “4 weeks of you!!”

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He was among eight people carrying the coffin, alongside King Haakon and his children.

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As the couple arrives in the UK, commentators weigh Meghan's well-being against speculation of a future royal reconciliation.

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King Charles hopes other members of royal family will also welcome Harry and Meghan.

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A second fundraising campaign has also raised nearly £52,000.

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The necklace was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York in 2015 for about $4.3 million.

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The king spent more than three decades balancing royal tradition with a modern, inclusive image.

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The king was admitted to Oslo University Hospital on August 17 with hemolytic anemia.

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What defines success when it comes to music? For Hrishikesh Hirway, who wrote four albums under the name The One AM Radio, it meant commercial attention. His interest in making music cooled after sales and airplay failed to materialize; he went 15 years without releasing an album. In this essay for The Bitter Southerner, Hirway looks at how he overcame perfectionism to write and record In the Last Hour of Light, an album heavy on collaboration.

“But Phil was echoing something I’d heard in the interviews I’d conducted and read about in books on writing: separate your creative, generative side from your editing, critical side. They push in opposite directions, and as soon as you start to edit, you’re no longer as free to play.”

“It was two days after my 47th birthday, which had left me feeling melancholy about reaching middle age and still feeling so far from my goals. I sat on my couch, put my headphones on, and played the album. Something had shifted for me. Somewhere around the third song, I felt something for the first time: I loved what I was hearing.

The music brought back memories with perfect clarity: what it felt like to write each song, to record them, the long journey to transform a part of myself into this music. It was no longer a question of the music’s worth. I can say to myself: this album is a document. And in it —listen!—you’re alive.”