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Overcoming the Grief-Soaked Years: The (Yukon) Quest for Solace

Photo by Daniel Reichert (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Musher and Ironman athlete Katherine Keith has known pain and suffering: her daughter died as an infant and first her husband was killed in a plane crash while ferrying a neighbor for emergency medical attention in Alaska. Not one to allow grief and adversity to defeat her, Keith won the Yukon Quest’s Rookie of the Year award, placing seventh in the 1,000-mile dog sled race. Read Matt Crossman’s profile at ESPNW.

She knew if she was going to survive her grief, she had to do something about it. Healing would not just happen on its own — she had to pursue it.

She told herself: “Yes, I want to live. Yes, I want to be really proactive about this. Yes, I’m going to not be defeated. Yes. I just had to make a really big conscious effort that, yes, I’m doing this. I’m not going to let this drag me down because that disrespects their memory.”

And it was more than just saying yes in a reactive way. Katherine sought out new experiences. She trained for and competed in triathlons and Iron Man competitions as a way to refill her reservoir of willpower, strength and grit that emptied when Madi and Dave died. The first Iron Man she entered was on the sixth anniversary of Dave’s death. She saw it as a way to honor him and to mark another turning point in her life. She cried and yelled as she ran across the tough, hilly course near Las Vegas.

“It’s a self-test to see if I’m resilient enough,” she says. “You have to train your body to be able to run a marathon. But you also have to train your mind to be able to withstand the difficulties in life. By putting myself through the Iron Mans, I think in my twisted way, I was tuning up my mind to make it a more resilient place.”

She sees her dog-mushing career the same way. If she could finish the Yukon Quest — all 946.7 hand-freezing, energy-sapping, hallucination-inducing miles of it — she would have more proof that she can survive whatever life throws at her.

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My Mother’s Murder: ‘I am good at keeping secrets. I am good at telling lies.’

Leah Carroll’s mother mysteriously disappeared when she was four years old. In this excerpt of her book, DOWN CITY, Carroll reveals it took her years to determine that her mother was murdered by an organized crime syndicate as a suspected drug informant.

Most of the time my mom and I are a secret team, keeping secrets from my dad. She tells me we’re going to take the city bus because her car is getting fixed and this sounds like a great adventure. We take the bus to her friend’s house in Providence and she leaves me there in the living room, where I watch television until the room begins to darken.

I am good at keeping secrets. I am good at telling lies. I’m so good that years later, when I’m an adult trying to find out more about my mother’s life and death, I’ll have trouble with my own memories: Did I know we were on the bus buying drugs? Did I understand the danger we were in? Did I really believe we were in this together?

Another time, Mom drives me in Grandma’s car to a small house with long steps leading up to the front door from the street. She takes the keys from the ignition and tells me to wait in the car. She leans over and pats the space beneath the dashboard, telling me to get down there and stay until she comes back. “I’ll lock the doors,” she says.

In the real world, my mom’s body will remain off the side of the highway, undiscovered for five months.

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Drug Addicted and Autistic: A More Common Combination Than You Think

Photo by Kaushik Narasimhan (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Addicted and autistic? At Spectrum, Maia Szalavitz explores the unexpected biological and psychological commonalities of addiction and autism, and some new science that suggests that combination may be more common than you think.

Shane Stoner’s addiction began in 2008. He lost a factory job, his parents divorced, his father died — and then a relative introduced him to heroin. “I felt like heroin gave me confidence,” Stoner says. “I could get out of bed in the morning and do the day. No matter what happened, it made me feel like it was going to be all right.” It erased his constant anxiety.

Stoner, now 44, eventually entered detox in 2013 after he was arrested for stealing copper from an abandoned house. It was obvious at that point that he was addicted to heroin. But it would take several more years for him to get the diagnosis that truly helped him understand himself: autism.

The new label came as a relief. It explained Stoner’s sensitivity to things such as tags on his T-shirts, and his succession of obsessive interests. It clarified why he had such a difficult time fitting in as a child, his problems with roommates in college — and why he continued to struggle with social connections as an adult. “I can’t believe nobody ever mentioned it before, because I started thinking back and there’s pictures of me, like, 3 years old, and I’m honestly flapping my hands.”

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Conspiracy to Cover-up: Why We’ll Never Learn the Truth About the Attica Prison Riot

Photo by Michael Coghlan (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At The Morning News, J. Oliver Conroy reports on the aftermath of the Attica Prison riot and how the state doggedly covered up the truth: a grisly state-initiated mass murder in the name of justice and order. Of the 43 dead, 29 were inmates — many of them shot in the back or executed at close range as the state attempted to regain control of the prison.

Shortly before 9:45 a.m. on Sept. 13, 1971, the fifth morning of the Attica prison uprising, hundreds of prisoners milled in the yard, waiting with increasing dread for news of any developments in their ongoing negotiations with New York state authorities. At 9:46, they got their answer. A helicopter thundered overhead and began blanketing the yard in billowing clouds of tear gas. In fact the tear gas was partly a powder: C.S., a weaponized orthochlorobenzylidene compound then popular a world away in Vietnam, where the US military used it to flush Viet Cong out of the jungle and into the sights of waiting gunships. In footage of the Attica retaking, you can see a domino wave of people crumpling as the cloud of C.S. rolls over them.

The powder hung in the air like a dense fog, clinging to the prisoners’ clothes and working itself into their skin and lungs and further obscuring the vision of the gas-masked state troopers waiting for the signal to begin their assault. As the prisoners collapsed, choking and retching, the police opened fire. Over the next several minutes, officers poured hundreds of rounds of gunfire into the yard, including, a judge later estimated, between 2,349 and 3,132 pellets of buckshot. The prison yard was transformed into a charnel house. The prisoners, who had no firearms, were sitting ducks, as were the hostages that the police had ostensibly come to save. As hundreds of police and corrections officers stormed the prison, they sometimes paused to shoot inmates who were already on the ground or wounded. “Surrender peacefully. You will not be harmed,” a megaphone announced as unarmed prisoners were mowed down.

After the shooting ended and the gas cleared, National Guardsmen came through, collecting bodies and dumping them in rows on the muddy ground. The final death toll of the Attica riot and retaking was 43 people, including one corrections officer fatally wounded during the initial uprising, three prisoners killed by other prisoners, and 39 people killed by authorities, including 10 hostages—captive corrections officers and civilian prison staff killed by the troopers’ indiscriminate shooting.

The bloody outcome, it becomes clear…was the result, to a great extent, of conscious political choices by the state.

Mike Smith is someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about Attica. Smith, then 23 years old and recently married, had just started as a rookie corrections officer at Attica when the riot broke out and he was seized as a hostage…

Then the helicopter rose above the prison walls, showering everyone in C.S., and shooting started from every direction, and “all hell broke loose.” Smith was shot four times across the abdomen—by someone firing, he believes emphatically, a fully automatic AR-15—incidentally a rifle then issued to servicemen in Vietnam—and his arm was hit by a ricocheted pistol bullet. Noble, also wounded, pulled him to the ground. As Smith lay bleeding he watched prisoners and hostages shot to pieces around him.

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An Emotional Tour of History: Naming Lakes After the Fallen

Photo by Phospheros (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At the Winnipeg Free Press, Bill Redekop profiles Des Kappel, the toponymist in charge of naming the 90,000 remaining land features and lakes in the Canadian province of Manitoba. Currently tasked with matching land features to casualties of the First World War, Kappel’s work is often an emotional tour through history as he collects letters and photos of the fallen for inclusion in his database.

The commemorative project was about more than just naming. The province also asked for photographs, biographical information and any other documentation from families who suffered war casualties. These are included in a database. Kappel communicated with many of the families during the process.

“For some people, (the commemorative naming) is closure because the person died overseas, or right in the sea, and are buried overseas, if formally buried at all. We have families go up to the commemorative lakes and build cairns or put down plaques.” And some family members request that their ashes be spread on the lake that bears the name of their loved one.

The compilation of people’s stories brings home the insanity of war. It includes names, photos, biographies, the geographical features commemorated in their name, and very personal information, such as their letters home.

Take the example of Pte. Ralph Aandal of St. Vital. “I had a nice trip out here. We rode on the train for quite a ways. Then we got off and rode on camel for miles and miles.” He was joking. He had arrived in the Carberry desert to train at the nearby Shilo military base.

His last letter was postmarked the day he died: “We are still on the German border,” he wrote. “I haven’t been sick at all out here. It’s funny we all haven’t gone to the hospital. We are laying in water day and night… Love Ralph (14 December, 1944).”

That’s just the first name in the commemorative edition. Aandel Lake, northeast of Reindeer Lake in northern Manitoba, is named after him.

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Where to Hide Dead Bodies and Thieves: the Laundry Chute

Photo by Mike King (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At The Atlantic, Sarah Minor notes that dead bodies, thieves, skulls, and historical bits of ephemera that fly out of pockets on the passage down are just some of the hidden secrets that laundry chutes reveal.

In June 1998, while renovating his home in St. Louis, Joseph Heathcott found a collection of trash moldering in the slender cavity between his pantry and his laundry chute. It was a stack of small paper scraps “lying in repose at various scales,” with sooty edges that were just beginning to stick together and combine. There was a box of playing cards, a train ticket from Kansas City, a receipt, a diary entry, a delivery card, sections of handwritten notes, a laundry ticket, and labels from Christmas packaging. The scraps had gathered over a century, escaping from pockets as garments fell from the second floor, and some of the scraps slipped through a seam his chute.

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What’s Literally Underfoot at the Oscars, or The Secrets of the Red Carpet, Revealed

Photo by Root FileSystem (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At The Los Angeles Times, Daniel Miller goes behind the scenes to report on the famed red carpet that graces the entrance to the Oscars. What you learn about the care, installation, and true color of this 50,000 square foot rug may just surprise you.

A red carpet made its debut at the Oscars in 1961 and has since become an integral part of the spectacle, whose pre-show extravaganza is widely viewed by fans tuning in to check out stars’ fashion hits and misses.

The unique nature of the Academy Awards extends to its carpet: It isn’t even a traditional red.

Instead, the carpet is closer to burgundy and has been for the last 15 years. The exclusive shade — called Academy Red — is supposed to flatter the A-list actors who are photographed and filmed walking on it. It’s a secret color, one whose precise specifications the show’s organizers won’t reveal for fear of copycats.

“Listen, there is only one Academy Awards,” said Joe Lewis, an associate producer of the arrivals and pre-show portion of the Oscars. “Some things that make the Academy Awards the Academy Awards should be proprietary.”

The secrecy surrounding the carpet illustrates the exacting nature of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the annual awards show. And it’s just one quirk of the custom carpet.

A crew of about 18 workers began installing the red carpet along Hollywood Boulevard in front of the Dolby on Feb. 21. It will take them nearly 900 man-hours to install the carpet, and the work won’t be finished until just before the stars begin arriving Sunday afternoon — as throngs of foreign tourists, street performers in superhero costumes and edgy security guards look on.

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The Wait: Is There Such a Thing as a Good Miscarriage?

Photo by Michael Coghlan (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The due date was July 5. I let this day pass like all the others, without even mentioning it to anyone. By this point, a couple of days will go by without my thinking about the baby I would have had, about what all our lives would have been like. It’s a Sunday, and I spend the day watching my daughter play in a tiny pool shaped like a giant turtle. She climbs in and out, in and out.

At Lenny, Jessica Grose recounts the agonizing waiting period after an inconclusive ultrasound and considers whether there is such a thing as a good miscarriage.

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The Needle and the Damage Done: ‘What kind of a childhood is that?’

Photo by Urban Seed Education (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At The Washington Post, Eli Saslow profiles Zaine, Arianna, and Zoie Pulliam — three kids 17 and under deemed “opiate orphans.” The Pulliam kids exemplify a generation of children whose parents have died of drug overdoses as a result of the opioid epidemic.

Nearly everyone in Zaine’s life had been anxiously monitoring that line for the past year and a half, ever since both of his parents died of heroin overdoses in April 2015. His parents had become two of the record 33,091 people to die of opioid overdoses that year in a national crisis that has been worst of all in rural West Virginia, where health officials estimate that overdose rates are now eight to 10 times higher than the national average. Middle-aged white men in this part of the country have lost a full year of life expectancy during the past two decades. Middle-aged white women have lost more than two years. The opiate epidemic has essentially wiped out an entire generation of health advances, and now West Virginia has begun to focus more of its resources on prevention and preservation among the next generation entering into the void.

These children are sometimes referred to by health officials here as opiate orphans, and three of the most recent ones live in a small house in South Charleston: Zoie, 10, who believed that her parents had died in their sleep; Arianna, 13, who was just starting to wear her mother’s old makeup; and Zaine, 17, who had been the one to discover his parents that morning on their bedroom floor, and whose grades had begun to drop ever since.

Madie, 53, had retired from her maintenance job at the public schools and moved into the house to help take care of the children after the overdoses. “Mah-maw,” they called her, and she told salty jokes, cooked their breakfast and slept in Zoie’s bedroom when she had nightmares.

But, on some nights, it was Madie who couldn’t sleep, when neither her doctor-prescribed antidepressants nor her occasional swallows of Fireball whiskey could quiet her grief or her rising anxiety. She had once struggled with addiction herself before getting clean. She had raised a daughter who had become an addict. Now she was responsible for three more children in a place where that same disease had officially been classified as a “widespread, progressive and fatal epidemic.”

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What Murderers Will Never Tell You About Their Childhood

Photo by Donald Tong

Mitigation specialist Jennifer Wynn investigates the upbringings of defendants to humanize them enough to convince at least one juror to bypass the death penalty for a life in prison without parole. Wynn shares the stories of three of her clients — men charged with murder — whose lives are marked by poverty, substance abuse, untreated mental illness, and extreme child neglect. Read the full story by Elon Green at Mel Magazine.

Jennifer Wynn’s job is to make jurors feel sympathy for people who’ve committed unspeakable crimes

“We hear all about the victims,” Jennifer Wynn told me recently, “but we never hear about the defendant’s story.”

Wynn, cheerful and salty, is a mitigation specialist. She is engaged by defense attorneys, mostly in capital cases, to investigate and compile the life story of the defendant. The material Wynn gathers, often heartbreaking and brutal, is used to convince the jury to deliver a sentence other than death. (In non-capital cases the same person is called a sentencing advocate, and they similarly argue for a less-severe sentence.

She has now done mitigation work on 30 murder cases, 25 of which were death penalty-eligible, and won them all.

When people share with you their deepest, darkest secrets — the worst things they’ve done — they need validation. These are people who, for the most part, have been told their whole lives, You’re a piece of shit. They’re bullied, they’re picked on, they’re shot at. Then they act out, and society says, See, you are a monster. Then, people like me come in and say, No, you’re not a monster, and you still do deserve to be part of the human race. The system is fucked up, and I tell them that. It’s the first time they’ve ever heard that.

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