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Michelle Weber
Professional writer, editor, napper, and dog-snorgler. Knows you are, but what is she?
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It’s a Lovely Day for a Bike Ride

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Photo by Mack Male via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Tom Justice was an Olympic cycling hopeful. Tom Justice’s life didn’t work out quite the way he’d hoped. Tom Justice found an unlikely escape hatch: bank robbery, but just for the thrills — not the cash. In October 1999, he robbed his second bank, the Lake Forest, Illinois, branch of Northern Trust, escaping by bike with over $3,000. He put the cash in paper bags and left them in spots where homeless people would find them.

He eventually robbed 26 banks of nearly $130,000 before descending into drug addiction. Steven Leckart‘s story in Chicago Magazine is as engaging and cinematic as one could want for this sad, twisted Robin Hood of a tale.

But before he could flash his lights, the cyclist pulled over and hopped off his bike. When Thompson pulled up, the guy was fidgeting with his back wheel. It started to drizzle again.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Thompson asked through the open window of his patrol car.

“Hey, yeah, sorry, it’s gonna take me a second,” Tom said, continuing to tinker.

Thompson parked a few feet ahead, turned on his flashing red and blue lights, and walked back to the cyclist.

“I live in San Ramon. I’m riding home,” said Tom, pretending to adjust his brakes before climbing onto the bike and clicking his left foot into the pedal.

“Do you mind if I take a look in your bag?” Thompson asked the cyclist.

“Yeah, no problem. I just have to unclip,” replied Tom. “These pedals are actually counterbalanced, so I need to click into both in order to get out at the same time.”

There’s no such thing as counterbalanced pedals. But Thompson didn’t know that. He watched as the cyclist lifted his right foot, clicked down into the pedal, and — whoosh! — bolted into the street in a dead start as hellacious as any Tom had ever mustered on a velodrome.

“I knew it!” cried Thompson. He desperately grabbed his radio, but another officer was talking on the channel. The cyclist shot down Main Street and out of sight.

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February 14, 2019
Categories: Crime, Editor's Pick, Highlight, Quotes
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Prison or Bust: A Cost-Benefit Analysis

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Edward Averill was alone, and broke, and unwell. So he deliberately, non-violently robbed a bank to get sent to jail; at least there, people would have to take care of him and he’d get the help he needed. At The Atavist, Ciara O’Rourke tells his story with deep wells of compassion. It’s an emotional rollercoaster of profound loneliness, desperation, thwarted plans, revived hope, and an uncertain future — a man who slipped through every crack there was to slip through and tried to work a system that wasn’t working for him.

It wasn’t unheard of for people to commit crimes to get health care—a North Carolina man with arthritis and slipped discs robbed a bank of $1 in 2011, and two years later an Oregon man did the same thing for the same amount. Still, Brewer didn’t think anyone had ever done it in Austin. He asked if Averill was having a mental health crisis. “Nope,” Averill said. “I know exactly what I’m doing.” He described the robbery in meticulous detail. He said he wanted to be found guilty and go to prison as soon as possible.

When Brewer walked out of the room, he turned to his partner. “This is not one I’m going to brag about,” he said.

Brewer went to the municipal court to get a magistrate judge’s signature on Averill’s arrest affidavit. Judge Stephen Vigorito stared at Brewer after he read the document. “Are you kidding me?” Vigorito asked. After several minutes, the judge set a bond of $10,000, the lowest Brewer had ever seen for this particular crime—bonds in bank-robbery cases are usually several times that.

As the detective walked down the courthouse hallway to file the paperwork with the county clerk, he heard Vigorito running behind him. “Give it back, give it back,” the judge said, reaching for the affidavit when he caught up to Brewer. Vigorito wrote a new bond amount— $7,500—pressing hard with his pen so the numbers would be legible over the original figure.

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February 13, 2019
Categories: Crime, Editor's Pick, Highlight, Profiles & Interviews, Quotes
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We’ve All Been Unreliable Witnesses to Lorena

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Documentary subject Lorena Gallo, formerly Lorena Bobbitt, is interviewed at the premiere of the film "Lorena" during the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2019, in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Danny Moloshok/Invision/AP)

For the New York Times, Amy Choznik spent time with Lorena Gallo in the lead-up to “Lorena,” a four-part Jordan Peele-produced documentary that launches this Friday. Many of us could probably spit out a synopsis of what made Lorena a household name (and a household punchline) — her last name, at the height of her notoriety, was Bobbitt. Many of us would probably be very wrong about the details.

Lorena is correct, of course, that most people forget that before she was tried for what she did, John was charged with marital sexual assault. (He was acquitted.) At the time, marital rape only recently had been made a crime in all 50 states and was nearly impossible to prove in Virginia. Many in the media, including Ladies’ Home Journal and Gay Talese on assignment for The New Yorker, questioned whether it was an oxymoron. (“Wife Rape? Who Really Gets Screwed?” an earlier column in Penthouse read.) Al Franken, as the character Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live, implored Lorena to apologize to John’s penis. And, she is correct, that people forget that a jury found her not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. We forget about the string of witnesses at her trial who testified that they had seen bruises on her arms and neck and that she had called 911 repeatedly and that John had bragged to friends about forcing his wife to have sex. In the years since the trial, he was arrested several times and served jail time for violence against two different women. (He denied the allegations.) “This is about a victim and a survivor and this is about what’s happening in our world today,” Lorena told me.

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February 13, 2019
Categories: Crime, Editor's Pick, Highlight, Profiles & Interviews, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
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How Do You Get Help When No One Believes You?

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In this Nov. 18, 2015, file photo, labels on a cabinet in a ward at the Western State Hospital in Lakewood, Wash., read "flashlights" and "restraints." (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)

Head to BuzzFeed for an excerpt from Esmé Weijun Wang‘s The Collected Schizophrenias, on her institutionalizations — some of them might have saved her life, but they were themselves traumatizing experiences that reveal the deep flaws in the way we approach psychiatric care. Told with flat-out candor and beautifully precise language, she dispels deep-seated misconceptions about schizophrenic disorders and the people who live with them.

During my second hospitalization, which occurred in the same location as my first, I passed a nurse.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said, which was true. My mania and subsequent depression seemed to have been exorcised by the overdose I’d taken immediately prior to being hospitalized, and other than being frustrated by my return to the WS2 ward, life no longer felt like an intolerable sentence.

The nurse smiled. “But how are you really doing?”

“I’m really doing okay.”

The notes I’ve acquired from Yale Psychiatric Institute read, among other things, “Patient shows lack of insight.”

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February 12, 2019
Categories: Editor's Pick, Essays & Criticism, Highlight, Quotes
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Into the Mouth of Madness and Out Again, Alive

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A still from video released via the Thai NavySEAL Facebook Page on Wednesday, July 11, 2018, shows rescuers with an evacuated boy at the Tham Luang Nang Non cave, Thailand. (Thai NavySEAL Facebook Page via AP)

In the summer of 2018, 12 members of a Thai junior football team and their coach were successfully rescued from a cave in which they’d become trapped when heavy rains caused sudden flooding. The rescue options ranged from unrealistic to torturous to deadly to mad. At Maclean’s, Shannon Gormley tells the story of the rescue divers who chose “mad” — and succeeded.

Dr. Harry believes the risks of sedating the children beat the risks of not sedating the children. The lead divers believe the same, and the Thais believe the experts know best. The children cannot dive; the children will panic; the children will drown their rescuers and themselves. That is why Dr. Harry is going to do this: inject 12 kids with a sedative so powerful it will knock them out cold.

Ketamine: a horse tranquilizer, an operating-room drug, a soon-to-be cave-rescue pharmaceutical product in its early testing stages on rock-entombed human minors.

If only it were so simple. The children’s drugs will need to be topped up with half-doses along the way. Dr. Harry cannot dive every child out himself, but the divers are not medical doctors. Dr. Harry must give a dozen cave hobbyists and small-business owners a crash course in do-it-yourself anaesthesiology.

If anyone dies—and many divers think they will be lucky to save two or three of the kids—Dr. Harry will bear much of the burden. He is not licensed to practice medicine in Thailand, let alone teach other foreigners to practice. Though Thailand and Australia have offered some assurance that he won’t suffer legal consequences for his young patients’ probable deaths, a conscience and a name are not so easily protected.

Cave divers are solitary creatures, Dr. Harry will later say to the cameras he normally avoids. And as he instructs laymen how to sedate a bunch of boys in the dark before dragging them through a flooded, stalactite-strewn tunnel, Dr. Harry is very alone.

He thinks the drugs might help some children survive. He’s going to try, anyway. That’s the plan. But you never know.

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February 6, 2019
Categories: Editor's Pick, Highlight, Quotes
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Why Must We Tarnish the Glittering Legacy of Italo Disco with Petty Squabbles

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Den Harrow, either during a performance or just after escaping from a pack of wild boars.

Italo Disco was the disco that no one really needed: “English-language vocals, whose repetitive lyrics, often accented and malaprop-laden, were set to catchy melodies filigreed with synthesizers.” One of its biggest stars was Den Harrow, an invented performer cobbled together out of Tom Hooker (the singer) Stefano Zandri (the on-stage lip syncer). At GQ, Alice Gregory tells the story of Den’s sharp rise, unsurprising decline, and the fallout from two blowhard, sort-of partners who really, really don’t like one another.

Tawny and taut, with twinkly eyes and TV teeth, Tom looks even more like Rob Lowe than Rob Lowe looks like himself. He has the appearance (faultless) and bearing (dauntless) of a very lucky person, which he is, and which he is usually capable of remembering. Tom has a loving family, a beautiful home, a creative career, and lots of money. He also has a mortal enemy. When Tom talks about Stefano Zandri—or, as he calls him, “Stefano or Den or Whatever”—the grace with which his life has been blessed disappears, instantly it seems, from the foreground of his mind. He begins to swear and to brag; he becomes bothered by minor three-decade-old slights. Tom mocks Stefano for not speaking English, for “not having a pot to piss in.” He calls him “obnoxious,” a “chronic liar,” “a horndog with low standards and no selection process.” To observe this transformation, from blessed family man to apoplexy incarnate, is to bear witness to something almost mythic. Like if Achilles’ problem wasn’t his heel but his toe, which he stubbed, repeatedly, over the years and which every time he did sent him into a temporary infantile rage.

To be fair, Stefano himself isn’t above Tom-directed barbs, which he spouts in Facebook posts, Instagram comments, and national radio interviews, and which he tends to express with an impressive, almost poetic specificity. “Needle dick” is one of his preferred insults. For years he’s been preoccupied with the notion that Tom bought the exact same Porsche as he did in 1989. On Facebook, he’s called Tom “envious and troubled,” a “clown,” a “brown-noser with no personality,” a “small penis man,” a “Coward!” “You should be ashamed that you sold your voice,” he’s written. “You are clumsy and you have a bad energy as you are a bad person.” A few weeks after writing “I would put your head in your butt for real,” Stefano threatened Tom, saying, “I know where you live. I will come to Vegas and kick your flaccid ass.” Tom’s two daughters were 5 and 6 at the time, and the threat to his family infuriated him. Tom insisted to me that he wasn’t actually scared but then added, “I don’t know—maybe he has some guys around!”

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February 5, 2019
Categories: Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Highlight, Quotes
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Exile, Compounded

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The 77-meter (250-foot) Baris cargo towed by a Greek Navy Frigate, as a man looks on from the coastal Cretan port of Ierapetra, Greece, on Thursday, Nov. 27, 2014. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

Masood Hotak was displaced for the first time when he left Afghanistan, trying to reach Europe, then displaced for a second time when he disappeared from the ranks of migrants and smugglers en route. His brother Javed mounted a multi-year, multi-country effort to track him down, to no avail. For Harper’s, Matthew Wolfe accompanied Javed during his search to tell the story of the profundity of this disappearance.

In the midst of this unprecedented wave of dislocation, thousands of migrants disappear every year. These disappearances are a function, largely, of the imperatives of secret travel. Lacking official permission to cross borders, “irregular migrants” are compelled to move covertly, avoiding the gaze of the state. In transit, they enter what the anthropologist Susan Bibler Coutin has called “spaces of nonexistence.” Barred from formal routes, some of them are pushed onto more hazardous paths—traversing deserts on foot or navigating rough seas with inflatable rafts. Others assume false identities, using forged or borrowed documents. In either case, aspects of the migrant’s identity are erased or deformed.

This invisibility cuts both ways. Even as it allows an endangered group to remain undetected, it renders them susceptible to new kinds of abuse. De facto stateless, they lack a government’s protection from exploitation by smugglers and unscrupulous authorities alike. Seeking safe harbor, many instead end up incarcerated, hospitalized, ransomed, stranded, or sold into servitude. In Europe, there is no comprehensive system in place to trace the missing or identify the dead. Already living in the shadows, migrants who go missing become, in the words of Jenny Edkins, a politics professor at the University of Manchester, “double disappeared.”

Taken as a whole, their plight constitutes an immense, mostly hidden catastrophe. The families of these migrants are left to mount searches—alone and with minimal resources—of staggering scope and complexity. They must attempt to defy the entropy of a progressively more disordered world—seeking, against long odds, to sew together what has been ripped apart.

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February 4, 2019
Categories: Current Events, Editor's Pick, Highlight, Quotes
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The Pain of Loss, Through Centuries and Books

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Photo by x1klima via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

In LitHub, Katharine Smyth explores the grief surrounding her father’s death with the help of Virginia Woolf — quasi-shared experiences, 112 years apart.

Virginia Woolf described the days before her mother’s funeral as a period of “astonishing intensity.” She and her siblings “lived through them in hush, in artificial light. Rooms were shut. People were creeping in and out. People were coming to the door all the time. . . .The hall reeked of flowers. They were piled on the hall table.” It was the spring of 1895 in London, but it may as well have been the winter of 2007 in Boston, a stretch of weeks I remember above all as crepuscular and silent, shot through with the cold beauty of a hundred pounds of flowers and the hollow chiming of the doorbell. I couldn’t shake that crystalline, hyperaware feeling one gets on important occasions—on birthdays, for instance, or on losing one’s virginity. My father is dead, I said to myself, my father is dead. Again and again I said it, and still I failed to grasp what it meant.

Her astute observations on the bewildering fog of mourning are resonant for anyone who has struggled to cope with loss.

I lacked the kinds of elaborate customs that governed the Stephens’ behavior, of course; thanks to my era, and to my father’s hostility to organized religion, I lacked any customs at all. But while I wouldn’t have traded the freedom to mourn as I liked for those claustrophobic, false-feeling Victorian practices, or even the comfort of a god I didn’t believe in—how gratifying, that afternoon of sitting shiva!—I did find myself longing for ritual, for structure, for some organizing principle by which to counter the awful shapelessness of loss. The conventions of sorrow may give rise to hypocrisy, but sorrow uncontained holds its own perils.

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January 31, 2019
Categories: Books, Editor's Pick, Quotes
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Power to the People

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The words Pray and Obey on a chimney at the former home of Warren Jeffs in Hildale, Wednesday April 5, 2017. (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP)

For years, Hildale, Utah, was controlled by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and more specifically, by Warren Jeffs; under his watch, every element of civic and social life was dictated by the church, and powerful church families controlled the lion’s share of wealth, creating a steep economic divide. Jeffs is now in prison and Hildale is trying to redefine itself — last year it elected a secular mayor, a woman — but as Tarpley Hitt explains in her story for The Daily Beast, “redefining” is about a lot more than transferring government power back to the actual government.

For the new government, bridging that divide is a top priority. In a sense, they have a head start (most of their 1 percent is now incarcerated). But inequality in Hildale is not like inequality anywhere else in the United States, where disparity usually stems from an unbalanced capitalist system. For decades, Short Creek operated as a quasi-communist state. The original settlers wanted to establish a radical kind of cooperative society that adhered to the New Testament value of holding “all things in common.” They pooled all their resources in a collective trust, and for decades—the vast majority of Short Creek’s existence—everything in the town was shared: from homes, to food, to health care.

After Jeffs and his father, the communal trust crumpled. When the federal government seized all the town’s assets in 2005, it was valued at a staggering $110 million, much of which had been leached from apostates and less powerful families. Not long later, the feds ordered the town to subdivide, and in the years since, Hildale has been gradually—and painfully, for many townspeople—divvying up the land, establishing private property for the first time in history.

The new council has been tasked with overseeing the town’s transition to an entirely new economic system. But they’re trying to do that while nursing the wounds Warren left behind—in a deeply divided constituency, where the act of drawing lines in the sand (sometimes literally: the council had to draft zoning laws) runs the risk of driving people even further apart.

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January 30, 2019
Categories: Editor's Pick, Highlight, History, Quotes
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Did Your Walls Keep Them Out, or Lock You In?

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Gabriela Garcia‘s story is short, but her main character is richly drawn — multidimensional, flawed, and real. “Frosted Glass,” in The Iowa Review, tells the story of Ms. Mendez, seamlessly layering together mother-daughter strife, the immigrant experience, neighborhood one-upswoman-ship, racism, and the folly of trying to solve problems by building walls. It manages to be both timely and timeless, deeply personal and culturally trenchant.

Mrs. Mendez fumed. She watched the lights go on at the neighbor’s house. The Mendezes had installed the trendiest windows they could find—frosted glass, cut into identical squares. They could see out, but anyone looking in would see just blobs and shapes. They’d see silhouettes moving in and out of shadows like creatures stretching and curling into their caves. This is why Mrs. Mendez had busted her back for twenty-five years. This is why she had arrived with her one suitcase and cleaned homes for so many years while taking classes at the community college where all her teachers assumed by her accent she understood nothing. Why she’d studied accounting with an English-to-Spanish dictionary at her side and spent years working her way up a ladder full of splinters and snapped legs at every turn. So she could have goddamn frosted glass spy windows she could see out of but nobody could see into.

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January 29, 2019
Categories: Editor's Pick, Fiction, Highlight, Quotes
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