Translator & Deception

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In Search of Zabihollah Mansouri

The Yale Review • 10 Dec 2024 • ~5650 words

Was Iran’s most famous translator secretly its most prolific author?

A few months after Mansouri’s translation was published, Corbin traveled to Iran. After one of his lectures, several attendees told him they had greatly enjoyed his book on Sadra. When the perplexed French thinker said he had never written such a book, they handed him a copy. Corbin leafed through it, astonished. By way of a network of acquaintances, he tried to track down the translator. Bastani Parizi agreed to deliver a message from Corbin. He went to the translator’s legendary office, that dingy fifth-floor attic in a ramshackle building on Ferdowsi Avenue, and informed him that Henry Corbin wanted to meet him. “Is Mr. Corbin alive?” Mansouri asked, visibly shocked. “Of course he is. Didn’t you know that?” “I wish you told him that Zabihollah Mansouri is dead.”

The high-profile murder of a 5-year-old boy — and his mother’s quest to free his convicted killer

Philadelphia Inquirer • 10 Dec 2024 • ~17000 words

A story of deception and redemption: The high-profile murder of a 5-year-old boy — and his mother’s quest to free his convicted killer.

She opened her laptop and wrote a letter to Gaynor, one of the convicted killers whose name stuck in her mind for years: “In my heart I believe that I have forgiven you. But I need to know for sure. The only way to know this is for me to meet you face to face …” COVID-19 would put all visits on hold. It wouldn’t be until spring 2024 that she would meet with Gaynor and Johnson, separately, via a prison Zoom call. She came away aghast, barely able to speak. The police account of the murder – the one she held in her heart for so long – was false, built on lies and deception. Nothing was how it had seemed.

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Spending less, living longer: What the U.S. can learn from Portugal’s innovative health system

STAT • 10 Dec 2024 • ~5000 words

Usha Lee McFarling reports on Portugal’s public healthcare system. Focusing on old fashioned primary care and public health helps them punch above their weight when it comes to healthcare.

Portugal is not without challenges. A shortage of primary care doctors means long waits for care, and more than a million people, many of them immigrants, have no assigned physician. But STAT’s analysis, based on two weeks of reporting in Portugal and interviews with dozens of health care workers, patients, and policy experts, found their system is nimble and makes smart use of data and electronic health records to track both individual and population health in real time. It embraces innovative programs such as “social prescribing” that expand the boundaries of what is considered health care, while progressive laws on drug use and treatment have been credited with driving down overdose deaths, even as they rose in the U.S.

He Investigates the Internet’s Most Vicious Hackers—From a Secret Location

WSJ • 7 Dec 2024 • ~2700 words • Archive Link

In the increasingly dangerous world of cybercrime, Brian Krebs faces threats, manipulation and the odd chess challenge.

Krebs tracks it all from his workstation, sitting in a black leather professional racing seat that his wife calls the “space chair.” In it, he’s surrounded by a 250-watt Bose sound system, a microphone and 6 feet of touch screen monitors that slowly lower up and down, like something out of a sci-fi movie. With a glance to his left, Krebs can see a half-dozen live feeds from security cameras placed around his home. He gives fake names to plumbers and landscapers who work on his home to keep his address secret. He asked a visiting reporter not to reveal certain information, like the name of his dog. He isn’t registered to vote, because that requires an address.

Progress unmoored

Works in Progress • 5 Dec 2024 • ~4050 words

Cruise ships are growing larger and more luxurious, breaking records while other transportation sectors face stagnation. Despite environmental concerns, the cruise industry thrives by offering affordable and diverse experiences at sea. The industry's success shows that progress is possible, even when land-based infrastructure struggles to keep up.

Airplanes today fly no faster than they did in the 1970s. In many countries, road speeds have decreased. Flying cars never showed up. In developed countries, the tallest buildings have only inched higher. Most rich countries produce less energy per capita than they did 20 years ago, and the cost of building new physical infrastructure like railways seems to rise inexorably. Yet cruise ships continue to grow: a natural experiment in what can be achieved outside the constraints that have stifled progress on dry land.

‘Gun control is dead, and we killed it’: the growing threat of firearms that can be made at home

The Guardian • 7 Dec 2024 • ~4150 words

Guns can be made with 3D-printed parts at home, using non-regulated materials. Does that mean the end of gun control?

The FGC-9 changed everything. Unlike those early models, the FGC-9 includes no regulated components: it can be made using just a 3D printer and parts available from a hardware store; it requires only some metalworking skills. Today, 3D printers are available for a couple of hundred pounds, while strong plastic polymers to print with are relatively inexpensive. The upper and lower receivers of the FGC-9 (the barrel assembly and trigger sections) are fully 3D-printed from plastic, as are the pistol grip and stock. The magazine can also be printed. Unlike previous 3D-printed gun models, it is a semi-automatic weapon. “It was revolutionary,” says Dr Rajan Basra, a researcher from King’s College London who studies 3D-printed weapons. The FGC-9 is now thought to be the most popular 3D-printed weapon in the world. It is particularly difficult to police, given that it doesn’t involve illegal parts. As Basra says, “You can’t regulate a steel tube or a spring.”

It Should’ve Been a Routine Procedure. Instead, a Young Mother Became a Victim of Texas’s Broken Medical System.

Texas Monthly • 9 Dec 2024 • ~7900 words

After Kimberly Ray’s tragic death, her family found out just how hard it is to hold Texas medical providers to account.

There was a lot Kimberly didn’t know about Integrity Wellness. That wasn’t her fault—it’s often hard in Texas to discover much about the people and institutions you entrust with your life. The first place many patients turn to is Google, scrolling through websites and online reviews as if they were searching for dinner reservations or selecting a new refrigerator. These ratings can be notoriously incomplete and misleading. One infamous Texas doctor, the neurosurgeon Christopher Duntsch, left such an astonishing trail of fatalities and paralyzed patients as he moved from hospital to hospital that he later became known as Dr. Death. He eventually went to prison, in 2017, yet up until the moment his license was suspended, his rating at Healthgrades, a sort of Yelp for physicians, was 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Caviar Pizzas, New Money, and the Death of an Ancient Fish

Hakai Magazine • 10 Dec 2024 • ~4750 words

Fancy fish eggs have become the latest luxury good to go viral on social media, raising questions about the future of sturgeon.

Whether on a Dorito or a $2,000 pizza, these ephemera add up to something real in the physical world of fish. Until relatively recently, salted sturgeon eggs (and sometimes eggs of salmon, paddlefish, or a handful of other fish species that fall into the caviar bucket) were a pricey but very niche menu item first popularized by Russian royalty in tsarist times. No more. Global caviar sales have surged 74 percent since 2020, especially during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the idea of a luxury-experience-in-a-can appealed to the restaurant-deprived. Caviar producers in California, Europe, and China recorded burgeoning profits, while the total volume of sturgeon product entering the United States—the world’s largest caviar producer—has also swelled. But, like matryoshka nesting dolls, an array of businesses fronted by influencers and marketed on all kinds of social media platforms manage to move vast amounts of fish eggs without ever getting anyone’s hands slimy.

How One Woman in France Is Battling the System That Was Meant To Protect Her

New Lines Magazine • 10 Dec 2024 • ~6900 words

Foreign women who experience sexual abuse must fight against overbearing institutions and discriminatory attitudes to find safety and justice.

Foreign women in France, particularly those from Africa, face significant additional restrictions from the political and judicial systems, as well as from child and maternity protection agencies and women’s organizations. French victims of sexual violence may at least move freely within Europe and find another shelter or a new job, often supported by state aid. Yet foreign women — especially those without legal residency — are corralled into institutions that instruct them on how to be more French, from using forks when eating to what to wear for a court hearing. These institutions prepare them for a life within the French system. Any resistance to this authority can result in expulsion from the country or the loss of custody of their children. Besides the horror of what they lived, migrant women have to find a way through complex barriers. The legal system is already deeply skewed in favor of men when it comes to French and European victims of sexual and domestic violence, due to a potent mixture of unqualified workers, outdated laws, misogyny and excruciatingly long procedures.

Running Was His Life. Then Came Putin’s War.

Runner's World • 5 Dec 2024 • ~5400 words

Before Russia invaded, Ukrainian ultrarunning champion Andrii Tkachuk had never run better. Would he race again?

Tkachuk isn’t a trained soldier. He’s a runner, and not just any runner: He’s one of the world’s greatest ultramarathoners. He signed up for active duty after Russia invaded his native Ukraine in late February 2022, and a few days later, on March 1, he marched toward Zaporizhizhia in southeast Ukraine with the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade. While he was familiar with the suffering that can come while running 200 kilometers or more, he was unprepared for the horrors that awaited him.

Why Do Animals Adopt?

Nautilus • 10 Dec 2024 • ~2150 words

Taking responsibility for another’s young reveals the deep evolutionary roots of care.

In December 2018, rangers spotted a Gir lioness with an odd litter of cubs: One of them was a young leopard. “I got the information, went there, and just couldn’t believe my eyes,” says Stotra Chakrabarti, a behavioral ecologist at Macalester College in Minnesota, who was then a graduate student doing field work in the area. Lions and leopards compete for the same resources, so the usual reaction of an adult of either species encountering a youngster of the other would be to kill it on the spot. But for the next 45 days, the rangers and researchers watched as the leopard cub nursed from the lioness, noshed on kills she made, and romped with his adoptive lion siblings.