Jul

25

2025

Cynthia Friedman (managing director): Esmé Weijun Wang’s book of essays, The Collected Schizophrenias, is superb. Wang has schizoaffective disorder, about which a first-person perspective is rare. Her writing is nuanced and clear: The first essay begins, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” And her prose has personality; at one point, she describes the DSM—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which sets the national standard for understanding and diagnosing mental illnesses—as “the heavy purple bible-o’-madness.” The essays vary across topics, from reflections on pop culture, raising kids, and violence, to anecdotes on psychosis, school, and family.

Throughout the book, Wang wrestles with the common perception that, while a diagnosis of depression is likened to diabetes—“in other words, it’s not your fault if you get it, and you’ll be fine if you just take care of it”—schizophrenia, in contrast, is likened to Alzheimer’s, erasing the person beneath the illness and dooming them to live as a perpetual burden. She talks about the information that she circulates to strangers to demonstrate that she is trustworthy: that she’s married, has a good sense of style, and was admitted to Yale. She writes about psychotic episodes she’s had in which her sense of reality fractured—when she hallucinated the presence of demons, believed that there were cameras in her shower, or, for one prolonged period, was convinced that she was already dead. She discusses high-profile instances of violence, like the 1988 murder of Malcoum Tate by his sister and mother, after his schizophrenia repeatedly manifested in threats of violence against family members, and the attempted murder of 12-year-old Peyton “Bella” Leutner by two of her close friends—who were later diagnosed with schizophrenia and the more abstract schizotypy, and whose childlike fantasies had been spurred on by videos and chat forums about a ghoulish underworld figure. Through these stories, Wang explores questions around safety, trauma, the failures of available systems for treating the mentally ill, and the sometimes thin line between sanity and insanity. Her observations are sharp and cohesive; in many cases, she arrives somewhere at the end of an essay that feels unexpected—perhaps even to her—as if she is working through her thinking on the page.

I’ve been recommending this book to friends since I picked it up two weeks ago. For those who have a family member with schizophrenia, it can be very personal. For me, with my own mental illness—a mood disorder that is more manageable and less stigmatized—it has long felt clear that if my brain were wired differently, I, too, could have delusions. But this book feels relevant to everyone, whether or not they have personal ties to the subject matter. We all absorb stories of intense mental illness through the media and general cultural osmosis, and many of us interact with mentally ill, unhoused people in casual, daily ways on our commutes or city streets. Wang does not provide easy answers, but she offers a window into an experience that many of us cannot access otherwise—and perhaps a way to empathize and connect with others across this complicated terrain.

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Much ink has been spilled about the sensationalist and exploitative nature of the true crime genre. But until reading the incarcerated writer John J. Lennon’s forthcoming book, The Tragedy of True Crime, I didn’t realize just how common it is for prisoners—both the household names and the less-well-known—to be approached to have their crimes rehashed on the true crime shows that air on channels like Investigation Discovery and HLN. Lennon, in prison in New York for murdering another man when he was a 24-year-old drug dealer in 2001, describes several of his friends and acquaintances receiving such overtures. He was himself featured on an HLN show in 2019. Producers promised that the show, hosted by Chris Cuomo, would be about prison “redemption stories,” and Lennon wanted the chance to demonstrate his rehabilitation to the man whose governor brother had the power to commute his sentence. Once filming was underway, HLN revealed the series was called Inside Evil, and depicted him as an unsettling menace— a portrait that may have later convinced New York officials to vote against his parole.

This ever-churning true crime ecosystem is the framing device for Lennon’s book, but he spends less time deconstructing the evident failures of such media than modeling an alternative form of reporting on violence. The book intersperses his own personal memoir with reported accounts of the experiences of three other men he knows who are in prison for committing murder: Michael Shane Hale, a white gay man from the South who murdered his abusive partner in New York City; Milton Jones, a Black man from Buffalo who, at age 17, was enticed by a friend to murder and rob two priests; and Robert Chambers, a white man from New York City also known as the “preppy killer,” famous for strangling a young woman he was dating in Central Park in the 1980s when he was 19. Each man’s story is told with exacting, novelistic detail. Frequently, Lennon invites the reader into the scene of his interviews, describing chats with Jones in the basement rec room as “weights clinked and slammed” in the background. Attica, Sing Sing, and Sullivan Correctional Center, the all-encompassing structures that color every aspect of Lennon’s interactions with his subjects, become characters in their own right.

Lennon opens the second part of the book with a Norman Mailer quote: “We won’t know anything about extreme acts of violence until some author makes such acts intimately believable . . . That is why we are likely never to know: Where is the author ready to bear the onus of suggesting that he or she truly understands the inner logic of violence?” Many true crime offerings promise to bring the viewer into the “mind of a killer” but end up simply acquiescing to the public’s desire to cleave the capacity for violence away from the average human and into a separate box for the aberrant and degenerate. Lennon knows that his own position gives him the opportunity to tell a fuller story about why people commit grave acts of violence, in order to better understand what we might do in such cases besides locking people up. This approach means that there’s no whitewashing. In recounting his own successful plan to murder a friend who had gotten in his way in the drug dealing business, Lennon is fully honest: “It feels much more treacherous and painful to write about my crime today than it felt to commit it more than 20 years ago. It’s why I have to write about it this way, in a declarative voice, without reflection, because it happened like that, swiftly and cowardly and instantly . . . In the minutes or hours after I killed, I was not thinking about my culpability or remorse.” He explores whether the instabilities of his childhood in New York City public housing with an absent father led to his decision, but is reluctant to rely on this as a full explanation for what he did, insisting that his mother worked hard to give him every possible resource she could and that he chose to squander his potential.

Lennon brings this same incisive lens to recounting his sources’ relationships to their crimes. Hale’s impulsive attack on the older man who had sought to control and dominate him in their relationship might be the most legible to readers; he even issued a full, heartfelt apology to his victim’s family at his guilty plea hearing. Jones, who struggles with mental illness and whose own father was injured by guard fire in the 1971 Attica prison uprising, is clearly remorseful for killing the priests, including one who was a prominent social justice activist in Buffalo. But he also can’t quite explain why he did it—a friend asked him to come along, and he just did. “I don’t know how you gonna make me look human,” he tells Lennon. Chambers, meanwhile, is depicted as an affable, gentle figure in the prison social scene who also deals with ongoing drug addiction: He works as an ASL interpreter for Deaf prisoners and is shown engaging with them patiently. But when he discusses his crime with Lennon, he appears to struggle with his own accountability. He insists, as he did at his trial years before, that his victim’s death was a total accident when he pushed her off him after she performed an aggressive sexual act; he didn’t mean to hurt her. But Lennon is skeptical that this is the full truth. “Look man, what I’m saying is you gotta clean your side of the street. Nobody believes you didn’t hold her neck,” Lennon shouts at him, frustrated. But Chambers remains silent. “My best guess is he still can’t understand how one minute he was walking into the park and talking with Jennifer and then, minutes later, strangling her. How do you explain something you can’t believe you did?” Lennon muses.

In airing such conversations, Lennon knows he has broached some ethical minefields. He acknowledges that the sister of his own victim has explicitly responded to his public writing by saying that she does not forgive him and wants him to stop using her brother’s name in his work. (He complies, referring to the man by only his initials.) Meanwhile, one friend cut off contact when she learned of his decision to write about Chambers, concerned that the book would become apologia for violence against women. (As part of his reporting process, Lennon, with the help of colleagues outside prison, reaches out to friends and family of his sources’ victims and showcases the perspective of those willing to speak.) In general, even as prison populations across the US have finally seen some decline, many Americans clearly aren’t ready for a story like Lennon’s. A recent op-ed Lennon published in The New York Times about how prisoners themselves can’t stop watching true crime shows attracted many comments questioning why a man guilty of murder should be allowed to publish his writing—and a handful deploring that guilty prisoners should get to have any time enjoying TV in their cells. For the rest of us, who are ready to think seriously about ending the violence of prison without resorting to partial truths or easy clichés about what drives humans to commit harm, Lennon’s book is an essential text.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): As I walked through the Metropolitan Museum’s new show of the works of John Singer Sargent, Sargent and Paris, I felt like I was strolling through the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton—and perhaps even Proust’s masterpiece. I usually find Sargent’s signature lushness and elegance rebarbative. But this assemblage of his works allowed me to appreciate a painter I’d previously had little or no use for.

It’s hard, after all, to resist a massive painting like Edouard and Marie-Louise Pailleron (Portraits de M.E.P . . . et de Mlle L.P.), which shows the young girl and her slightly older brother staring intently at the viewer. Their placement—the little girl dead center, her brother to the side, leaning toward her—and disquieting gaze lends the figures a mystery I’d never noticed in Sargent. Especially well done is the section dedicated to the once-scandalous Madame X. The painting itself is executed with Sargent’s unequalled skill, the haughtiness of its subject augmented by the wealth expressed by her attire, with its daring decolletage upheld by flimsy metal straps. The exhibit supplements the piece with sketches and illuminating context about the ludicrous brouhaha it prompted. The right strap of Madame X’s dress had slid off her shoulder during the posing session, which is how Sargent initially rendered it. But to display a woman of her stature and status in such disarray was simply not done. After initially refusing to do so, Sargent ultimately agreed to redo the painting, putting the strap back in place.

Every room contains works of overwhelming beauty and subtle charms. Most surprising are the handful of paintings in which Sargent uses light and color to dissolve objects, people, and places into near-abstraction: the harshly sunlit steps broken up by shadow in A Staircase in Capri, or the study in shades of white that is Fumée d’ambre gris. When it comes to the portraits, at a certain point I started focusing on the hands, which are notoriously difficult to paint. Sargent often puts them to great use. (Recognizing this, the sumptuous and informative catalog includes several detailed reproductions of hands.) In The Spanish Dance, which features flamenco dancers, the darkness is illuminated only by their white dresses and one of the women’s arms; the rapidity of her motion is expressed in the tilt of her head and blur of her hands. In Sargent’s society portraits, the hands are an expression of the subject’s assured place in the hierarchy: the clenched right fist of the aforementioned Marie-Louise Pailleron; the crossed hands of her mother; the casually splayed fingers on the hips of her father. Perhaps most of all, the digits have an arrogance of their own in the grip of the right hand on the neck of the subject’s robe in Dr. Pozzi at Home.

Sargent and Paris is a festival of wealth—both that once located in its subjects’ pockets and the quality of the works. We can fully profit from the latter.

How do we keep moving forward when the deathly forces intensify against us? When the road before us becomes a wall closing in, where do we turn? How do we keep moving together in the face of deathly horrors? Masei, the second of the two portions we read this week and the final parshah of the Book of Bamidbar, may point us to responses to these questions. The parshah begins by reviewing the itinerary of the Israelites’ 40-year journey from Egypt to the banks of the Jordan River. In this barebones trip down memory lane, only the stopping stations are listed, with almost no mention of the significance of their stay there. For example, we read that “they traveled from Rephidim and encamped at the wilderness of Sinai,” but not about the Revelation at Sinai, the construction of the Tabernacle, or the death of Nadav and Avihu there. We read that “they traveled from the Sinai wilderness and encamped at Kivrot Ha-Ta‘avah,” but not about the insurrection demanding meat that transpired there. Nothing of the scouts’ report, Korach’s insurrection, or the other major events of the desert narrative. But when it comes to the Israelites’ journey from Kadesh to Mount Hor, we read, “Aaron the priest ascended Mount Hor at the command of YHWH and died there, in the 40th year after the Israelites had left the land of Egypt, on the first day of the fifth month.”

Aaron’s death jumps out as one of the only events actually mentioned. But it stands out for a different reason, as well: It contradicts another verse in the Torah. Our parshah notes that Aaron died at Mount Hor, but in Moses’s retelling in the Book of Devarim, “The Israelites traveled from the wells of Benei Ya‘akan to Moserah; there, Aaron died and he was buried there.” So where did Aaron die—Mount Hor or Moserah? An early midrash notices that our parshah describes Aaron’s death with the active verb for dying (“vayamot sham”), while Devarim uses a form that could mean “lay dead” (“sham met Aharon”). On that basis, it resolves the apparent contradiction by explaining that Aaron died at Mount Hor, as our parshah says, but he lay dead and was buried in Moserah.

This resolution raises its own problem: Moserah was seven stations earlier than Mount Hor on the Israelites’ journey. That means that when Aaron died at Mount Hor, the people backtracked until they found an appropriately dignified burial place, at Moserah. Of all the Israelites’ rebellions in the Book of Bamidbar, the behavior that aroused God’s wrath most severely was when they threatened to turn back toward Egypt. Indeed, throughout the story, turning backward has been cast as sedition.

But we may look at the Israelites’ backtracking in another light. Sometimes a journey is mere preparation, the necessary means to arrive at our destination, where we can perform our desired task. Sometimes, though, the journey is valuable in itself. For example, the Talmud teaches that upon witnessing a young woman bypass a local synagogue to pray in a more distant study house, Rabbi Yohanan understood that there is spiritual reward in the experience of walking those footsteps on the way to pray. The 20th-century rabbi Yitzchak Hutner (Pahad Yitzhak, Rosh HaShanah 5) explains this dynamic in light of a Talmudic interpretation written by the medieval commentator known as the Ritba, who mentions cases in which walking to do a mitzvah is considered not just preparation but part of actually performing it. What his examples—carrying the dead to burial, welcoming a bride to her wedding, and ascending to the Temple in Jerusalem for the Festivals—share in common is that they are grounded in the nurturing of relationships. Wherever the content of a mitzvah is the relationship itself, the journey toward it is an expression of that closeness; it is already part of the mitzvah. Walking to the post office is functional; walking to a shiva house or to spend time with a suffering and lonely friend, or to support a picket line, is already part of the mitzvah experience.

The same may be said of burying the dead: Proper burial is one of the greatest of mitzvot. It is described in Rabbinic literature as the “truest form of kindness”—“chesed shel emet”—since there is no possibility of being repaid by the recipient. Halakhot abound regarding not only the burial, but also the escort of the dead to the place of burial. Every effort made to treat the dead with dignity is an essential kindness, so if the Israelites knew of a proper burial place for their leader several stops back at Mount Hor, it was appropriate for them to turn back in order to bring him there.

This attitude toward death is not a given. In 1915, the labor organizer Joe Hill wrote to a comrade before he was martyred by the state, “Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!”—a sentiment that has been abridged into a common movement refrain. The idea is that the urgency of political work leaves no time for indulgences such as grieving. Keep moving forward, no matter what; all hands on deck; the work is greater than any one of us. But our movements have learned the hard way that in the long term, “don’t mourn; organize” does not lead to liberation. Our grief is not a luxury. Grief gritted through and suppressed erupts in burnout, in hostility and conflict with those we love, in deterioration of mental health. And the greater our political losses, the more urgent our need for both organizing and mourning. After all, the horrors surrounding us—the myriad cruelties of Project 2025, the ICE concentration camps, the poison pipelines, the genocide in Gaza, and on and on—are, at their heart, mass death events that we have not been strong enough to prevent.

For the monster of capitalism, death is ungrievable because the machinery of profit for the few may not be interrupted. When our organizing makes no room for mourning, our movements inadvertently adhere to that same script of the unrelenting, forward march of progress. “This is why,” writes Sarah Jaffe, “grieving collectively becomes revolutionary. What is a radical politics without consideration of these universal pains and struggles? What is it without making space for joy, yes, but also pain? What is it if not a demand that we stop that murderous process in order to acknowledge the toll it has taken?” To refuse such logics, we must be present in our grief—backtracking if necessary, if that’s where grief guides us, together.

When our relationships precede our tasks, the steps we take along the way are themselves in the service of closeness, of relationship. The spiritual reward they yield is so profound that a journey that is problematic on its own, such as turning backward toward Egypt, is praiseworthy when it is a journey of loving relationship, toward providing a deceased elder a dignified burial place. Indeed, relationships of care with our dead loved ones—inherently non-transactional and thus illegible to capitalism—are the model for how we might show care to the living, what a life of lovingkindness, resource-sharing, and mutual aid can look like. Grieving, then, is not just a necessary respite from movement progress; it is movement progress. “Yes, grief flattens, it erases, it traps,” writes Jaffe. “But it also, in moments, opens up a vast space of new possibility.” The movement that appears to be backtracking is actually the most forward movement—when it resiliently centers the relationships of care, the preciousness of life, and the scandal of its erasure.

Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein is a Torah teacher and political educator based in Chicago, where he directs the Avodah Justice Fellowship.