Zion Death Ruled Accident, Reopened as Murder

01 • 12 Minute Read

CNN	Lauren Mascarenhas

20 Years After His Wife Fell to Her Death, a Youth Pastor's Story Unravels

Bernadette and David Vander Meer embrace during a hike.

Bernadette Vander Meer fell from Angel's Landing at Zion in August 2006, and her husband David, a youth pastor, told detectives the sunrise was lighting their path. Investigators ruled it an accident, and David collected about $567,000 in life insurance. Lauren Mascarenhas traces how the story came apart 19 years later, after David's former boss told authorities he believed David pushed her. One officer used NASA data to show the sun rose that day around 6:54 a.m., more than half an hour after David's 911 call. Then, days before his extradition hearing, David was found dead in his cell. His family has not said what his note explained.

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02 • 23 Minute Read

The New York Times

David Marchese

Mick Jagger Knows He May Have Played His Last Rolling Stones Show

Present-day Mick Jagger standing with his hands in his pockets.

David Marchese, a self described enormous Stones fan who has heard all 400 plus songs the band ever released, sat with Mick Jagger at a Manhattan hotel in May and found him chattier and warmer than the aloof figure he expected. Jagger, 82, walks through the several characters he plays on and offstage, and how decades of stadiums leave you disassociated from real life. Marchese asks if he will know when he has played his last Stones show with the band. Jagger does not rule it out. He mentions getting run over by a bus.

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03 • 30 Minute Read

The Atlantic

Yair Lapid

American Loneliness

A western landscape seen through a car window, an American flag on a booth in the foreground.

Yair Lapid has picked up a rental car somewhere in America twice a year for 35 years, driving back roads through 40 states with Springsteen and Johnny Cash on the stereo. Israel's former prime minister argues the standard eulogy for a violent, polarized, dispirited America is not insight but gossip. The loneliness Americans feel, he writes, is not a malfunction. It is the raw material the country was built from, the same severed roots that pushed immigrants to cross oceans and reinvent themselves. What everyone calls an epidemic, he calls something else.

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04 • 25 Minute Read

Harvard Magazine

Lydialyle Gibson

My Pet Rabbit Lost Her Companion. Then She Went Speed Dating.

Illustration of a refrigerator covered with animal pictures, notes, and drawings, surrounded by greenery.

Lydialyle Gibson's pet rabbit Petunia lost her bondmate Oliver to a respiratory infection, and what followed was not confusion but rage, stomping and shoving her food bowls for weeks. So Gibson signed her up for speed dating, the standard matchmaking tool for domesticated rabbits. Petunia bit, lunged, and rejected seven suitors across two shelter sessions. Neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo, who lost her own husband, tells Gibson exactly what is happening in a grieving brain. Then a shelter volunteer emails Gibson about a rabbit who lost his own mate the night before. His name is Spruce.

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Zion Death Ruled Accident, Reopened as Murder

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