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LUNCH BREAK READS

Millie Kerr checked into Houston's Menninger Clinic voluntarily, and her fight to get out ended in a lawsuit she refused to settle.
Former SEALs now retell the post-9/11 wars on podcasts built for young men, and one of their guests now runs the Pentagon.
After 11 sober years, essayist Meghan O'Gieblyn pointed to the spiked mulled wine and spent nine months hiding binges in airports.
In rural Manitoba, each Hutterite colony writes its own rules for smartphones, and a 29-year-old YouTuber with 13 million views is testing them.

01 • 45 Minute Read

Texas Monthly

Mimi Swartz

One Woman’s Fight to Free Herself From a Mental Hospital

In April 2023, Millie Kerr, a 41-year-old lawyer turned wildlife writer, was unraveling after a follow-up surgery for ovarian cancer, and she told her brother she might kill herself. Her father, John, a board member at Houston’s prestigious Menninger Clinic, persuaded her to check in voluntarily. Within hours she denied being suicidal and asked to leave. Instead, a psychiatrist who had already spoken with her father floated a bipolar diagnosis, and after she threatened to sue, he filed for emergency detention and constables moved her to West Oaks, a for-profit hospital with a record of regulatory problems. Her lawyers say legally required court filings and exams never happened there. Menninger maintains the detention kept her safe, and West Oaks has denied the allegations. Months after her release, her cancer returned, but she sued both hospitals and refused to settle so her story wouldn’t be buried. She died in January with the suit still pending.

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02 • 30 Minute Read

The New York Times Magazine

Wesley Morgan

They Were the Military’s ‘Quiet Professionals.’ Now They’re Talking.

In July, former SEAL Matt Bissonnette told fellow ex-SEAL Andy Stumpf on his podcast that he left the Navy partly because rules of engagement in Afghanistan made raids more dangerous. Stumpf’s “Cleared Hot” is one of more than a dozen shows where former special operators retell the post-9/11 wars for young men eager to enlist. Many argue that politicians and generals lost Afghanistan by restraining the troops. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, once a guest on ex-SEAL Shawn Ryan’s most popular show, has carried that argument into strikes on Iran and Caribbean drug boats. On Stumpf’s show, Robert O’Neill, a former SEAL who says he killed Osama bin Laden, admitted leaving details out of mission reports and seemed to describe killing a prisoner, which he now says never happened. Stumpf, who sees the wars as futile, concedes that however much hosts dwell on war’s toll, some young listeners will hear only the thrill.

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03 • 15 Minute Read

The Guardian

Meghan O'Gieblyn

‘I perfected deception’: My secret life as a relapsed alcoholic

At a Helsinki Christmas market, Meghan O’Gieblyn, an essayist who had been sober for 11 years, asked for nonalcoholic mulled wine and then pointed to the spiked version instead. For months she had treated drinking as an idle mental game, reasoning from meditation lectures and her own book on AI and consciousness that sobriety was just a story she told. The drink left her flat, but two months later, at a Nashville airport restaurant where she could order by QR code without saying the words, she felt the old transcendence return. For nine months she binged only in airports and hotel rooms, hid it from her husband, and even counseled a young family friend out of rehab while claiming 11 sober years. She writes that relapse is harder to confess than addiction because she talked herself into it, and the bliss behind that choice is the part she leaves out at recovery meetings.

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04 • 13 Minute Read

Maclean's

Daniel Miksha

The Hutterites’ Guide To Technology

Giselle Waldner, a 29-year-old Hutterite in rural Manitoba, has drawn 13 million YouTube views showing life on her colony, one of nearly 400 communal Anabaptist farms in Canada that try to live apart from secular society. She began posting to counter discrimination during COVID, but many Hutterites see her channel as a hole in the wall around their culture. Each colony writes its own tech rules. James Valley bans smartphones, which has driven young people to hide them. Decker gives adults smartphones but allows wi-fi only at school and work, switched off nightly at 9. There, Julian Waldner, 27, drifted from his community after finding radical theology online as a teen, until neighbors flooded his home when his father died; he has since deleted most of his apps. The lesson for everyone else is that limits on technology work best when a community adopts them together.

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Her father sat on the clinic's board. It wouldn't let her leave.

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