On April 14th, which happened to be the eve of the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, the staff of the Boston Globe won the Pulitzer in breaking news for its “exhaustive and empathetic coverage” of the attack. This week, the paper extended that coverage with a three-part story, by David Abel, about a family whose life was shattered by the bombs. Bill and Denise Richard were standing near the finish line with their three young children when the bombs went off. Their son, Martin, was killed, their daughter lost a leg, Denise was blinded in one eye, and Bill’s eardrums were blown out. Abel’s account of the family’s first year after the bombing is slow and detailed, giving a sense of the emotional and practical complexities that come with being the victims of a tragedy that is both catastrophic and very public.
In the online creative-nonfiction magazine Vela (a small publication that features work by female writers, but calls that fact “almost, almost incidental” to the writing they publish), Lauren Quinn writes a smart and very personal essay about fads in addiction memoirs and the difficulty of trying to write about her own addiction. Quinn got sober at the young age of seventeen, and she says that the main story of her addiction is not the gritty and explosive details of the user’s life but the “slippery undertow” of the perpetual recovery. This runs counter to the expectations that rule the genre of addiction writing, which often hinges on “the titillating glamor of active drug use” followed by the triumph of redemption. This essay can be read alongside a piece Quinn wrote for Vela in 2012, which gives an oblique look at drug abuse through the story of a man called Eat Pray Paul, whom she met while living in Cambodia.
Cornelis Drebbel was a Renaissance-era Dutch inventor who was famous for his ingenious gadgets and spectacular displays of mastery over light and air. Some of his contemporaries thought he was dabbling in witchcraft, and some scholars today think that he might have been the model for Shakespeare’s Prospero. In Nautilus, Steven Ashley writes about one of Drebbel’s most important inventions: the first thermostat, which he put in a small oven that was used as an egg incubator. Ashley discusses the importance of feedback-control devices, which influenced a wide range of modern technologies, and for which Drebbel’s thermostat was a forerunner. He also traces Drebbel’s breakthrough to an unexpected source: the spiritualist philosophy of the alchemists.
“The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie,” by John Jeremiah Sullivan, in New York Times Magazine, investigates a mystery that has plagued blues enthusiasts for decades. It starts with a recording, made in Wisconsin in the nineteen-thirties, of two women who display a rare musical mastery, but about whom nothing is known apart from their names: Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. Sullivan’s search for the women’s stories takes him to Robert McCormick, a man, now in his eighties, who once travelled the country collecting recordings and stories of American music. McCormick is like a one-man archive of blues history, but he has kept much of his information to himself. (This has presented an unusual predicament for writers in the field: “You couldn’t tell the story of the blues without Mack McCormick, and you couldn’t tell it because of him.”) Sullivan’s account of his own sleuthing into the stories of Elvie and Geeshie, with and around McCormick, is equal parts educational, moving, and beautifully written.
