When Illness Makes a Spouse a Stranger
A woman watched her husband’s behavior change dramatically—so much so she even considered divorce. He was eventually diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a rare and frequently misdiagnosed brain disease that affects personality and language skills:
“Looking back, Mrs. French, who is 66 and lives in Manhattan, recalled episodes of odd behavior over the years and realized that her husband’s mind had probably begun to slip while he was in his 50s, at least a decade before the disease was diagnosed. He had always changed jobs a lot. At the time she took it as a sign of a stubborn personality, not of illness — and it is still not clear which it was. He always wanted to do things his own way, and that did not sit well with some bosses.
“‘I thought it was just Michael being Michael,’ she said.
“A friend described Mr. French as being unable to read the tea leaves, oblivious of corporate politics. At one point Mrs. French even bought him a self-help book. But he never changed.”
The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy
Edward Conard is Mitt Romney’s former partner at Bain, and he’s not afraid to have an honest conversation about wealth:
“A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money. For proof, he looks to the market. At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. ‘What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?’ he asked. ‘I’m sure those guys are college-educated.'”
Earl Sweatshirt Is Back from the Wilderness
The rapper from Odd Future, whose disappearance became a pop music mystery, speaks out on where he went: Coral Reef Academy, a therapeutic retreat for at-risk boys in Vaitele, outside of the Samoan capital of Apia:
“As Odd Future became more popular, though, his absence was harder to ignore. While Ms. Harris remained largely silent, ‘Free Earl’ became a slogan, a hashtag, a mantra. Odd Future fans began to see her as an antagonist. At one point a threatening note was left on her door.
“‘I could have never imagined in my wildest dreams that this decision to send him away to a school that had the kind of support for his emotional well-being that he needed would turn into a story about locking him away,’ she said. To explain her son’s absence, she added, ‘I would’ve had to have talked about his personal life in a way that I think would’ve been really unfair.'”
My Son Went to Heaven, and All I Got Was a No. 1 Best Seller
How young Colton Burpo’s visit to Heaven became a word-of-mouth best seller, and what it means to a writer raised fundamentalist:
“When I was not quite 4 — about the same age as Colton Burpo — my own newly born-again parents sat me down to impart the good news about Jesus, the son of God, who was born in a manger surrounded by sheep and donkeys and ended up being nailed to a cross on a hill and dying there. On the third day, he rose from the grave (you could tell it was he from the nail holes), and he did all of this to pay for my sins. If I accepted him into my heart, I would be rewarded with everlasting life in heaven. Otherwise, I would burn eternally with the Devil in hell. So we needed, urgently, to pray.
“‘Right now?’ I said, or something like that. I remember not feeling 100 percent ready to ask this undead man, with his holey extremities, to dwell inside me.”
The Criminalization of Bad Mothers
A new chemical endangerment law in Alabama, originally designed to protect children from meth labs, is now being used to prosecute mothers who used drugs during their pregnancy:
“Emma Ketteringham, the director of legal advocacy at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a New York-based reproductive-justice group, has been following Kimbrough’s case closely. She has drafted ‘friend of the court’ briefs for Kimbrough signed by groups like the National Organization for Women-Alabama and the American Medical Association. She argues that applying Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law to pregnant women ‘violates constitutional guarantees of liberty, privacy, equality, due process and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.’ In effect, she says, under Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law, pregnant women have become ‘a special class of people that should be treated differently from every other citizen.’ And, she says, the law violates pregnant women’s constitutional rights to equal protection under the law. Ketteringham also recruited two prominent Alabama lawyers, Jake Watson and Brian M. White, to take Kimbrough’s case pro bono. ‘I love babies, too, but I don’t like locking up their mamas,’ Watson told me.”
How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death
Researchers are exploring whether certain drugs can help patients cope with fear of death. Pam Sakuda, who was given 6 to 14 months to live, was administered psilocybin—an active component of magic mushrooms:
“Sakuda brought a few pictures of loved ones, which, Grob recalled, she clutched in her hands as she lay back on the bed. By her side were Grob and one of his research assistants, both of whom stayed with the subjects for the six-to-seven-hour treatment session. Sakuda knew that there would be time set aside in the days and weeks following when she would meet with Grob and his team to process what would happen in that room. Black eyeshades were draped over Sakuda’s face, encouraging her to look inward. She was given headphones. Music was piped in: the sounds of rivers rushing, sweet staccatos, deep drumming. Each hour, Grob and his staff checked in with Sakuda, as they did with every subject, asking if all was O.K. and taking her blood pressure. At one point, Grob observed that Sakuda, with the eyeshades draped over her face, began to cry. Later on, Sakuda would reveal to Grob that the source of her tears was a keen empathetic understanding of what her spouse Norbert would feel when she died.”
How My Aunt Marge Ended Up in the Deep Freeze
A strange real-life murder inspires a new film starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine. How does the victim’s real family feel about being the subject of a black comedy?
“I was living in Los Angeles when Aunt Marge was murdered in 1996 and hadn’t been to Carthage, where I was born, in quite a few years. I went back for the trial in 1998 because, let’s face it, it’s not often that someone in your family becomes the focus of a sensational murder case, on the local news for weeks at a time, the circumstances of her demise so tawdry and bizarre that the story appeared in People magazine, on ‘Hard Copy’ and, eventually, on the guilty-pleasure pinnacle of true-crime cable-TV programs, ‘City Confidential.’ And there was something about Aunt Marge’s ending up in a freezer that seemed appropriate. She’d always been kind of coldhearted. It was not an unfitting end.”
Robert Caro’s Big Dig
As the Lyndon Johnson biographer prepares to release his fourth volume examining the former president, a look at how Caro came to spend “36 years and 3388 pages” on LBJ:
“Johnson, who all along predicted an early end for himself, died at 64. Caro is already 76, in excellent health after a scary bout with pancreatitis in 2004. He says that the reason ‘The Passage of Power’ took so long is that he was at the same time researching the rest of the story, and that he can wrap it all up, with reasonable dispatch, in just one more volume. That’s what he said the last time, after finishing ‘Master of the Senate.’ (He also thought he could finish ‘The Power Broker’ in nine months or so. It took him seven years, during which he and his wife, Ina, went broke.) Robert Gottlieb, who signed up Caro to do ‘The Years of Lyndon Johnson’ when he was editor in chief of Knopf, has continued to edit all of Caro’s books, even after officially leaving the company (he also excerpted Volume 2 at The New Yorker when he was editor in chief there). Not long ago he said he told Caro: ‘Let’s look at this situation actuarially. I’m now 80, and you are 75. The actuarial odds are that if you take however many more years you’re going to take, I’m not going to be here.’ Gottlieb added, ‘The truth is, Bob doesn’t really need me, but he thinks he does.'”
Jack White Is the Coolest, Weirdest, Savviest Rock Star of Our Time
Inside the rock star’s Nashville home and the headquarters for his growing company, Third Man Records:
“White walked back to a room called the Vault, which is maintained at a constant 64 degrees. He pressed his thumb to a biometric scanner. The lock clicked, and he swung the door open to reveal floor-to-ceiling shelves containing the master recordings of nearly every song he’s ever been involved with. Unusually for a musician, White has maintained control of his own masters, granting him extraordinary artistic freedom as well as truckloads of money. ‘It’s good to finally have them in a nice sealed environment,’ White said. I asked where they’d been before, and he laughed. ‘In a closet in my house. Ready to be set on fire.’
“White said the building used to be a candy factory, but I had my doubts. He’s notoriously bendy with the truth — most famously his claim that his White Stripes bandmate, Meg White, was his sister, when in fact she was his wife. Considering the White Stripes named themselves for peppermint candies, the whole thing seemed a little neat. ‘That’s what they told me,’ he insisted, not quite convincingly. I asked if I needed to worry about him embellishing details like that, and he cackled in delight. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.'”
Peter Dinklage Was Smart to Say No
The Game of Thrones star’s long path to stardom—and the choices he made to reject stereotypical roles for dwarves:
“‘I read about him online the day before the Globes. It really made me sad. I don’t know why.’ He corrected himself: ‘I mean, I know why: it’s terrible.’ In October, Henderson, who is 37 and is 4-foot-2, was picked up and thrown by an unknown assailant in Somerset, England. He suffered partial paralysis and now requires a walker. The night of the Globes, after Dinklage’s mention, Henderson’s name was a trending topic on Twitter. Dinklage later turned down offers to discuss the case with Anderson Cooper and other news hosts.
“‘People are all, like, I dedicated it to him,’ he said. ‘They’ve made it more romantic than it actually was. I just wanted to go, “This is screwed up.” Dwarves are still the butt of jokes. It’s one of the last bastions of acceptable prejudice. Not just by people who’ve had too much to drink in England and want to throw a person. But by media, everything.’ He sipped his coffee and pointed out that media portrayal is, in part, the fault of actors who are dwarves. ‘You can say no. You can not be the object of ridicule.'”