Four interesting stories for you today.
A writer sits down for sibling therapy with the brother he's spent fifty years failing to really know.
Monarch butterflies are staging a comeback, and tiny solar trackers are following three of them, named Cinderella, Eric, and Carle, on their way north.
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High school senior Ben Mueller spent five hours combing three million pages of Epstein files for links to his own Marin County, California. He found one: a 2013 email tying a local woman, Gisele Attias Bonnouvrier, to providing Epstein an "Austrian model." Ara Rosenthal interviews the Redwood Bark's teenage staff about what happened next. Bonnouvrier threatened to sue the district unless the post came down within 48 hours. They lawyered up instead. Two weeks later, the teacher who'd spent a year defending them left the program. Whether the Bark can keep winning that fight alone is still unknown.
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High school senior Ben Mueller spent five hours combing three million pages of Epstein files for links to his own Marin County, California. He found one: a 2013 email tying a local woman, Gisele Attias Bonnouvrier, to providing Epstein an "Austrian model." Ara Rosenthal interviews the Redwood Bark's teenage staff about what happened next. Bonnouvrier threatened to sue the school district, and administrators gave the students 48 hours to take the post down. They lawyered up instead. Two weeks later, their journalism teacher stepped away. The students stayed.
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The New York Times
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Daniel Bergner
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Daniel Bergner and his brother Bob had barely spoken about anything real in decades until Bob asked, "What about us?" Weeks later the two book seven sessions of sibling therapy with therapist Rachael Benjamin. Old wounds surface fast: a bullied childhood hockey rink, Bob's bipolar diagnosis and psych ward stay in his twenties, his path from a Holocaust-scarred Jewish family to the Episcopal priesthood, his shelved dreams of becoming a professional musician. Bergner admits a memory he's never told anyone, something their grandmother once said about which brother truly loved the other. Neither man is sure the repair will hold.
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The Atlantic
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Vann R. Newkirk II
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Vann R. Newkirk II follows three tagged monarch butterflies, nicknamed Cinderella, Eric, and Carle by his six-year-old daughter, as they leave a Mexican mountain sanctuary and fly north. Population counts have climbed for two straight years, partly thanks to decades of tree planting. But avocado cartels now log the same forests, and the conservationist who fought them, Homero Gómez González, turned up dead in 2020. Monarch Watch's founder gives the migration maybe 20 years before its numbers become unrecoverable. Cinderella alone makes it past Texas. Nobody knows if her children will finish what she started.
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