This Week’s Top 5 Long Reads

This week’s top 5:

• Women who overcame unimaginable odds
• Are the parents of school shooters legally liable?
• A Mother’s Trial, a Son’s Journey
• The reality of being diagnosed with autism in your 40s
• A huge and amazing ecosystem that lives in the Earth’s crust.

Ryan Hockensmith | ESPN | June 26, 2024 | 5,538 words

Eleven years ago, Emma Carey plummeted to the ground from 14,000 feet after a tandem jump with her skydiving instructor went horribly wrong. ESPNRyan Hockensmith recounts Carey’s life-changing fall: “Emma Carey was flying and she looked so happy,” he writes. “She was 14,000 feet above the ground, clutching the parachute straps like an excited kid heading off to her first day of school. Oh, I want to be a skydiver.But she doesn’t know that the most horrible thing a human being can experience is about to happen to her.” Her accident could have easily played a central role in the story. Hockensmith is a skilled reporter and writer, and he uses evocative details to give us more than just the basic facts about Carrie’s accident and its aftermath. He introduces us to Emma and her best friend, Gemma Murdach, who have done everything together, including skydiving, on a “package plan.” What exactly happened during Carrie’s jump is unclear. All she knows is that the main chute and the safety chute got tangled and neither opened as expected, and that her instructor landed unconscious on top of her. She doesn’t blame the instructor for what happened, and makes sure the instructor’s name isn’t mentioned in the news report after the accident. The premise of the story is compelling, but what I liked most about Carrie is that her attitude almost becomes a full-fledged character in the story. “She alternated between feelings of immense gratitude to be alive and immense anger at the accident, at the world, at her body, at everything. There were good mornings and bad afternoons, good bad 1:52 and 1:53, and bad 1:54. She just kept trying to live to 1:55,” Hockensmith writes. This is a gripping story of sheer will and determination. Emma may have lost feeling and some of the use of her legs, but she is here to tell you that as a person, she is perfectly sane. —KS

John Woodrow Cox | The Washington Post | July 8, 2024 | 8,641 words

This is the second story in my top five for the summer that focuses on the parents of young people who commit mass shooters; the first was written by Mark Vollman. Mother JonesThe first is about Chin Rodger, whose experience with her son Elliot helps experts understand the mind and behavior of mass shooters in order to prevent future crimes. The second, by masterful John Woodrow Cox, is about James and Jennifer Crumbly, who were recently convicted of manslaughter for failing to secure the gun their son Ethan used to kill four people and wound seven others at his high school (a gun given to them by Ethan’s parents, incidentally). These stories represent a new front in the effort to combat America’s epidemic of gun violence, but Cox’s portrayal is controversial. As the headline states, the case against the Crumblys was historic, the first time a parent had ever been held legally liable for a mass shooting committed by their child, but the stakes were high. The prosecutor who handled these cases, Karen McDonald, received death and rape threats and was questioned by some of her colleagues. The work took her life and that of her coworkers, and the need for therapy is mentioned multiple times in the story. Cox accompanied the prosecution for months, allowing her to show in intimate narrative detail what it took to win in court and what she lost in the process. “Before the shooting, McDonald was easygoing, at least with family and friends, her 26-year-old daughter Maeve Stargard said, describing her as a ‘total bum’ who enjoyed throwing surprise parties and giving outlandish gifts. She watched that side of her mother fade, but she accepted it was something she needed to do, not just to support her four grieving families, but to overcome persistent doubts about her own decisions,” Cox writes. I admire this sacrifice, but at the same time, I don’t think anyone should have to. America’s toxic gun culture destroys people’s lives in many ways. —SD

Ryan Nurai | Esquire | July 24, 2024 | 4,757 words

There’s little point in glossing over this brutal incident, so here it is: Four years before Ryan Nourai was born, his mother was carjacked, kidnapped, repeatedly raped, shot twice in the head, and left in an alley. She survived, though she had bullet fragments lodged in her brain. Her son knew about the bullet but little else. It wasn’t until decades after his mother’s death that he tried to piece together what had happened in full. “Why, now, with my mother dead and her body in the room next to me, does this feel closer than it ever has before?” he writes. Because the attacker was long ago arrested and jailed for the attack, Nourai’s ensuing investigation is less a search for who, more a search for how, an attempt to fill the gap that stands between him and understanding. But as he draws closer to her, jumping through the years — scattering her ashes, accompanying the former homicide detective who investigated the case, speaking at the perpetrator’s parole hearing — you start to realize that resolution isn’t the point. Something else is going on here, something that takes the form of grief but with a touch of self-discovery. “I’ve always tried to find whether her grit and vitality lived on in me — and to do that, I thought I had to recreate her pain,” he writes. “Now I see that that’s not true.” In stark prose, Nourai paints a picture of the boundless length and depth of his son’s love:public relations

Mary H.K. Choi | New York Magazine | July 3, 2024 | 5,906 words

My brother was diagnosed with autism in his late 40s. This was a significant new chapter for our family. At the time, I thought it was unusual for a diagnosis to be so late, but a few years later, I learned about John Paul Scott’s Long Lead Scott wrote an essay about his delayed diagnosis, “I tried to forget it all my life. I’m glad I didn’t.” After it was published, Scott was overwhelmed by the number of people who contacted him to empathize with his experience. Shedding light is meaningful. When autism was less well understood, discovery was slow and many grew up without knowledge that could have helped ease many of the challenges. But it’s never too late to start looking for answers, as Mary H.K. Choi’s powerful essay shows again: cutChoi explained that even after her diagnosis at age 43, she struggled with a kind of imposter syndrome, wondering: “Even if I was officially autistic, was I autistic? sufficient Why is it important? And what is the point? that “What does that mean?” Despite being able to see and write honestly about her anxieties, awkward moments, and the pain she’s caused those close to her, Chay struggles to feel like her diagnosis of ASD Level 1, the mildest form of Autism Spectrum Disorder, doesn’t seem significant. Gradually, Chay comes to accept that “the disorder is not a spectrum but a solar system with a three-dimensional constellation that varies from person to person,” which intertwines with her cultural identity and other influences to make her who she is. After years of trying to fit into a box, she’s finally adapting the box to fit her. —The CW

Ferris Jabr | New York Times Magazine | June 24, 2024 | 5,966 words

Deep in the Earth’s crust, the ancient subterranean world is teeming with endogenous microbes. They are tiny but mighty, and unlike their terrestrial cousins, they breathe rocks rather than oxygen. They are also extraordinary, digging vast caverns over time and “engaging in the Earth’s ceaseless alchemy,” writes Ferris Jubb. They have survived billions of years of Earth’s upheaval and may have even helped form the continents and laid the foundations for life on Earth. I’m interested in illustrating the vast geological history of the Earth in an accessible and beautiful way, and Jubb does just that, bringing to life inanimate rocks and the amazing microbes that live within them. He explores some of the principles of Earth system science, which studies the Earth and life as a single, self-regulating system, and the idea that living organisms such as humans, animals, plants, and microbes are not just products of evolutionary processes but participants in their own evolution. In other words, he writes: teeth Earth. My favorite science articles are those that inform and awe-inspiring at the same time. Like Jabr’s article on the social life of forests, this piece reminds me of the interconnectedness of all things and challenges and changes my understanding of this amazing physical world we live in. —CLR

Audience Award

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