FIRST THINGS / American Carnage by Christopher Caldwell

“If you take too much heroin, your breathing slows until you die. Unfortunately, the drug sets an addictive trap that is sinister and subtle. It provides a euphoria—a feeling of contentment, simplification, and release—which users swear has no equal. Users quickly develop a tolerance, requiring higher and higher amounts to get the same effect. The dosage required to attain the feeling the user originally experienced rises until it is higher than the dosage that will kill him.”

NEVADA PUBLIC RADIO / The Meth Lunches by Kim Foster

“He keeps going, his plans, his dreams, how he will rent a house for the three of them, how he will get the other boys back, even though they have long been adopted, how this baby is a gift from God, a sign to him that everything will be okay. He doesn’t seem concerned that Tessy is probably five months along, has used meth all of her pregnancy, and has not been to a doctor. I become so angry I stop cooking for him. I stop making the lunches. I cut him off without explaining why.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE / A Small Town Police Officer’s War on Drugs by Benjamin Rachlin

“New Hampshire has the second-highest rate of drug overdoses in the country. Eric Adams in Laconia (pop. 16,000) has been assigned one task: to stop them.”

THE INTERCEPT / The Crimes of Seal Team 6 by Matthew Cole

“...hidden behind the heroic narratives is a darker, more troubling story of ‘revenge ops,’ unjustified killings, mutilations, and other atrocities — a pattern of criminal violence that emerged soon after the Afghan war began and was tolerated and covered up by the command’s leadership.” This podcast with the author is a good appetizer for the piece.

THE HUFFINGTON POST / What Bullets Do to Bodies by Jason Fagone

“The gun debate would change in an instant if Americans witnessed the horrors that trauma surgeons confront every day.”

THE LITERARY REVIEW / Infirmary Music by Cameron Dezzon Hammon

“Sometimes, I didn’t believe what I was singing—the hymns, the assurances, the promises of a faith I was only lightly tethered to. But sometimes I did believe. I believed athletically, fervently, because what else to do?”

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR / Good Neighbors by Tamara Dean

“When beavers came between us and a farmer down the road, we knew something more was at stake.”

BUZZFEED / Fuck That Gator by Thomas Golianopoulos

“Tommie Woodward yelled, ‘Fuck that gator!’ just before he was killed by one in Texas, and his death instantly became a national joke. For his family, grieving means having to rescue the person from the punchline.”

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD / Death of a Dairyman by Mary Pols

“Butch Clark was the ultimate milkman.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES / A Generation in Japan Faces a Lonely Death by Norimitsu Onishi

“It was getting dark. Crickets were singing, the harbingers of autumn in Japan. Deeper into the danchi, toward Mrs. Ito’s apartment, the door of the dead 67-year-old man was still taped over, the smell refusing to disappear.”

SMITHSONIAN / Europe’s Famed Bog Bodies Are Starting to Reveal Their Secrets by Joshua Levine

“High-tech tools divulge new information about the mysterious and violent fates met by these corpses.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES / A Pet Tortoise Who Will Outlive Us All by Hanya Yanagihara

“It’s humbling to care for an animal that reminds you, each day, of your own imminent death.”