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Let’s begin by assuming you’re not planning to watch WrestleMania this weekend. World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), with its ridiculous bombast and barbaric violence, has turned people off for decades. Yet its popularity—not to mention its profound influence on American culture and politics—persists. Below, I explain why.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment Something odd is happening with handbags. Childbirth is no fun. But an extremely fast birth can be even worse.

The Man in the Arena

WWE can be eerily prophetic. Had you watched WrestleMania 23, back in 2007, for instance, you would have seen a future president of the United States, Donald Trump, standing in the ring with a devilish smile, preparing to humiliate the WWE head honcho, Vince McMahon.

Although scores of articles have been written about the connections between wrestling and Trumpism, comparatively little is understood about McMahon—who, in reality, is one of Trump’s close friends. (During the 2016 campaign, McMahon was reportedly on the extremely small list of individuals whose phone calls Trump would take in private; his wife, Linda, went on to serve in Trump’s Cabinet.) A new biography of McMahon, Ringmaster, came out earlier this week, and I spent some time with its author, Abraham Josephine Riesman, trying to unpack the book’s principal argument: that McMahon and WWE led to “the unmaking of America.” McMahon reigned over the thorny world of professional wrestling until last summer, when he stepped down from his position as CEO and chairman following an alleged sex scandal and related hush-money payments. (Sound familiar?) He returned as chairman at the beginning of this year, after the WWE’s investigation into the allegations concluded.

What McMahon understood better than anyone was that the physical act of wrestling was just one element of what the audience wanted. Millions of people flock to WWE for the monthslong story lines, the operatic entrances, the cheeky backstage drama. Wrestlers seize the mic and deliver fired-up speeches filled with taunts, zingers, and thrilling call-and-response sections. Trump grew up a wrestling fan and mastered these arena-style linguistics. His rallies, his debates, his interviews, his social-media posts—no matter the venue, Trump relied on WWE tactics. When he launched his first presidential campaign back in 2015, this approach was shocking to some. And even more shocking when it worked.

The 45th president is not scheduled to make a cameo at this weekend’s WrestleMania. At the moment, he’s preparing to turn himself in to the authorities in New York City on Tuesday following yesterday’s grand-jury indictment. One of Trump’s congressional acolytes, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, announced that she, too, will be in New York on Tuesday: “We MUST protest the unconstitutional WITCH HUNT!” she tweeted today. Greene has also used WWE tools to propel herself to elected office. Earlier this year, during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, Greene heckled him, not unlike a WWE fan screaming from the sidelines.

I’ve watched a lot of old wrestling clips in recent weeks. Specifically, I went down a rabbit hole of interviews with the wrestler Ric Flair. Flair routinely boasted of his alligator shoes, his Rolex watch, his libido. His absurd brag—“I’ve got a limousine sittin’ out there a mile long!”—may or may not make you think of Trump and/or his first press secretary, Sean Spicer, whose use of hyperbole was, shall we say, unrestrained.

I texted some of these outlandish Ric Flair videos to friends. In response, a buddy pointed me to an October 29, 1985, speech from Flair’s former wrestling nemesis, Dusty Rhodes, a.k.a. “The American Dream.” The grainy YouTube clip of Rhodes’s monologue has more than 2.6 million views. It’s three and a half minutes long, and worth watching in its entirety.

Whereas Flair’s oratory is all “me,” Rhodes takes the approach of “we.” Rhodes ticks off examples of challenges that everyday Americans face, something that the stylin’, profilin’ Flair could never understand. His speech has a decidedly Grapes of Wrath feel to it. “Hard times are when the autoworkers are out of work and they tell ’em, ‘Go home!’” Rhodes shouts. “And hard times are when a man is workin’ a job 30 years—30 years!—they give him a watch, kick him in the butt, and say, ‘Hey, a computer took your place, daddy!’ That’s hard times!” Trump, for all of his abhorrent narcissism, shrewdly uses the “we”—specifically, the us-versus-them—approach in nearly all of his campaign speeches to similar effect. When headlining this month’s CPAC conference, he sounded not only like a vengeful pro wrestler, but like someone seething with menace: “I am your retribution.”

This year’s WrestleMania title match will be between the current champion, the hulking Roman Reigns, and Rhodes’s 37-year-old son, Cody. The younger Rhodes is a cocky blonde who leans heavily into American-flag iconography, wears a business suit and power tie, and goes by “The American Nightmare.” (Again: Sound familiar?)

WrestleMania used to be available on pay-per-view, but now it’s a two-night event streaming on Peacock on April 1 and 2. I am not the die-hard wrestling fan I was back in middle school, but I’ll likely dip in and out of the broadcast to catch a few of the monologues, if not the matches. I don’t want to go so far as to predict that a future president will enter the ring, as was the case in 2007. But I wouldn’t rule that possibility out.

Related:

How wrestling explains America Donald Trump, wrestling heel

Today’s News

After a grand jury voted to indict Donald Trump yesterday, he will likely be arraigned on Tuesday. One of his lawyers said that the former president is prepared to go to trial. The Minneapolis City Council approved an agreement with the state of Minnesota to revamp its policing system, nearly three years after George Floyd’s murder. A “high risk” storm alert—a rare weather designation reserved for severe events—was issued for parts of the American Midwest and mid-South.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Maya Chung explores what California means to writers. Work in Progress: Derek Thompson unravels why Americans care about work so much.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

The Influencer Industry Is Having an Existential Crisis

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Close to 5 million people follow Influencers in the Wild. The popular Instagram account makes fun of the work that goes into having a certain other kind of popular Instagram account: A typical post catches a woman (and usually, her butt) posing for photos in public, often surrounded by people but usually operating in total ignorance or disregard of them. In the comments, viewers—aghast at the goofiness and self-obsession on display—like to say that it’s time for a proverbial asteroid to come and deliver the Earth to its proverbial fiery end.

Influencers in the Wild has been turned into a board game with the tagline “Go places. Gain followers. Get famous. (no talent required)” And you get it because social-media influencers have always been, to some degree, a cultural joke. They get paid to post photos of themselves and to share their lives, which is something most of us do for free. It’s not real work.

But it is, actually. Influencers and other content creators are vital assets for social-media companies such as Instagram, which has courted them with juicy cuts of ad revenue in a bid to stay relevant, and TikTok, which flew some of its most famous creators out to D.C. last week to lobby for its very existence.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Chris Reel / Prime Video

Read. “The Vendor of New Hearts,” a poem by Colin Channer.

“Once way far in time in a village coiled from stone / I met an elder in a teahouse. He proposed, and I said yes / I’ll join you, and we walked together to the vendor of new hearts.”

Watch. Swarm, Donald Glover’s horror-comedy (on Amazon Prime), has a twisted take on celebrity culture.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Tomorrow, April 1, marks the 20th anniversary of the White Stripes’ Elephant, one of the defining rock albums of the new millennium. You surely know the inescapable earworm “Seven Nation Army,” but I think the peak of the record is track eight, “Ball and Biscuit,” a swaggering garage-blues romp.

P.P.S. An impeccable list of records also turn 20 this year: Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, Jay Z’s The Black Album, Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism, OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, My Morning Jacket’s It Still Moves, Songs: Ohia’s The Magnolia Electric Co., and the Strokes’ Room on Fire, to name just a few. As you settle into this Friday night, pour yourself a drink and crank the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell, yet another 2003 banger. Here’s a great clip of Karen O and the band crushing “Y Control” on Late Night With Conan O’Brien.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

President Joe Biden is using International Transgender Day of Visibility on Friday to sharply criticize acts of violence and discrimination against Americans who identify as trans and nonbinary, zeroing in on the growing number of Republican-led bills targeting trans youth.

The most important election of 2023 may also offer crucial insights into the most important election of 2024.

Next Tuesday’s vote for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court has been justifiably described as the most consequential election in the nation this year, because it will determine whether liberals or conservatives control a majority of the body. The election’s outcome will likely decide whether abortion in the state is completely banned and whether the severely gerrymandered state legislative maps that have locked in overwhelming Republican majorities since 2011 are allowed to remain in place.

But the contest between the liberal Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge Janet Protasiewicz and the conservative former state-supreme-court justice Dan Kelly has also become a revealing test of the electoral strength of the most powerful wedge issues that each party is likely to stress in next year’s presidential race.

Protasiewicz and her allies have centered her campaign on portraying Kelly as a threat to legal abortion and an accomplice in Donald Trump’s schemes to undermine democracy—the same issues that helped Democrats perform unexpectedly well in last November’s elections. Kelly and his allies have centered his campaign on presenting Protasiewicz as soft on crime, the same accusation that Republicans stressed in many of their winning campaigns last year.

With the choice framed so starkly, in a state that has been so evenly balanced between the parties, Tuesday’s result will measure which of those arguments remains more potent, particularly among the suburban voters who loom as the critical swing bloc in 2024’s presidential contest.

If Kelly wins, after being significantly outspent on television, it would underscore how much risk Democrats face from rising public anxiety about crime. But a Protasiewicz win, which most political observers in Wisconsin expect, would suggest that support for legalized abortion has accelerated the recoil from the Trump-era GOP that is already evident among college-educated suburban voters. And such a shift could restore a narrow but decisive advantage for Democrats in a state at the absolute tipping point of presidential elections.

“The margins are still very narrow, and of course the economy and other issues will come into play next year, but if it simply becomes a test between abortion and crime, I would say yes, [abortion] is more powerful by a slight, slight margin,” says Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster who has worked in Wisconsin for decades.

[Read: How working-class white voters became the GOP’s foundation]

Like the state itself, the Wisconsin Supreme Court is closely divided. Conservatives now hold a 4–3 majority (though Brian Hagedorn, one of the four conservative justices, has voted with the liberals on some key cases, particularly four rulings denying Trump’s effort to overturn the state’s 2020 election results). The retirement of a conservative justice has provided Democrats this opportunity to secure a 4–3 liberal majority.

Though Tuesday’s election is technically nonpartisan, the race has become a brawl between the two parties. The state GOP is mounting an extensive get-out-the-vote campaign for Kelly, who was appointed to the state supreme court by Republican then-Governor Scott Walker to fill an unexpired term in 2016 before losing his bid for a full term in 2020. State Democrats, meanwhile, have raised and transferred millions of dollars into the campaign for Protasiewicz, who served as an assistant county district attorney before winning election as a county-circuit-court judge . The tension between the race’s openly partisan character and traditional notions of judicial neutrality and nonpartisanship has itself become a central point of contention in the campaign.

Protasiewicz has pushed the envelope for a judicial candidate by offering voters explicit declarations of her views. She has unequivocally affirmed her support for legal abortion, described the gerrymandered state legislative maps as “rigged,” and declared that the signature legislation Walker passed to eviscerate the power of the state’s public-sector unions is unconstitutional. But in the next breath she insists that those views—which she calls her “values”—will not affect her decisions on the bench.

The juxtaposition of those two assertions can be head-spinning. At a forum this week on the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee campus, Protasiewicz declared, “I’ve been very clear with everybody that I think women should have a right to choose. Obviously, I can’t comment about what I would do on any case. That robe goes on; my personal opinions go out the door.”

After her appearance, I asked Protasiewicz why her “values” should matter to voters if they are irrelevant once she dons her judicial robe. “I truly believe that people have an absolute right to know what a candidate’s personal thoughts and personal values are,” she answered. Even if, I asked, they are irrelevant to your decisions? “I put them aside,” she said.

Kelly and other Republicans have argued that Protasiewicz’s candid expression of her “values” renders her too partisan for a judicial position. (At the Milwaukee forum, the conservative state-supreme-court justice Rebecca Bradley, appearing for Kelly, maintained that Protasiewicz would be forced to recuse herself from cases involving abortion, redistricting, and other issues because she has expressed such clear positions on them—a view that other legal experts reject.) But Kelly is, to say the least, an imperfect messenger for the argument that anyone else is too biased. He has been far more involved than Protasiewicz in direct partisan activities: Kelly has served as a paid legal adviser to the state’s leading anti-abortion group as well as to the state Republican Party.

Andrew Hitt, the former state GOP chairman, testified to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection that he had “pretty extensive conversations” with Kelly and another lawyer about the fake-electors scheme that Trump supporters developed after the 2020 election in order to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. Kelly says his involvement was limited to a single 30-minute conversation in which he explained he was not “in the loop” on the plans. But at the sole debate between the candidates earlier this month, Protasiewicz described Kelly as “a true threat to our democracy.”

In the past, local observers say, Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have more narrowly centered on debates about crime and criminal justice (even though the court isn’t directly involved in handing down sentences). “Law-and-order candidates have traditionally done very well,” Mark Jefferson, the executive director of the state Republican Party, told me.

[Read: The four quadrants of American politics]

Kelly is running in that tradition. Ads from his campaign’s final days are focused almost exclusively on lashing Protasiewicz over rulings she made to sentence a rapist and other violent offenders to limited or no jail time. So many sheriffs are appearing in Kelly ads that it’s reasonable to wonder who is still patrolling the state’s highways this week.

Protasiewicz has responded with ads defending her record on crime, and also jabbing Kelly over his work as a criminal-defense attorney. But mostly her advertising has insisted that Kelly would uphold the 1849 state abortion ban that snapped back into effect when the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturned Roe v. Wade. (Both sides agree that the state supreme court will eventually need to decide whether to sustain or strike down that law, which prohibits abortions in almost all cases, and is now being challenged in a lower state court.) Protasiewicz and the groups supporting her are heavily stressing abortion in their ads and have aired nearly four times as many ads across all subjects as Kelly and his backers, according to AdImpact, a group that tracks ad purchases. (That disparity exists largely because Democrats have raised enough money to allow her to buy the ads directly through her campaign, which receives lower rates, while Kelly’s relying mostly on outside groups that must pay higher rates.)

That huge tactical advantage for her is one reason some observers are cautious about drawing too many conclusions from next week’s outcome. Conversely, Trump’s indictment yesterday might inspire enough Republican turnout to lift Kelly, especially because far fewer people vote in these off-year contests than on a typical November Election Day.

Yet a Protasiewicz win could put an exclamation point on a subtle but discernible shift in the state’s political direction.

Though close elections are usually the rule in Wisconsin, early in this century it often leaned Democratic. The state was part of what I termed the “blue wall”: the 18 states that voted for Democratic presidential candidates in all six elections from 1992 through 2012. (Democrats actually started their Wisconsin presidential winning streak in 1988.) Democrats also controlled both U.S. Senate seats throughout most of that same period, and the governorship for two terms after 2002.

But the tide began to shift around 2010, with the election of Republican Governor Walker and a GOP sweep of the state legislature. In 2016, two years after Walker won reelection, Trump dislodged Wisconsin from the blue wall, carrying it by 22,748 votes. Like Trump’s 2016 victories in Pennsylvania and Michigan, which had also been part of the “blue wall,” the former president’s Wisconsin breakthrough symbolized his success at forging a winning coalition that revolved around massive margins among non-college-educated and non-urban white voters.

Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School poll in the state, says Wisconsin today remains divided almost evenly between the parties: 45 percent of voters identify as Republicans, 44 percent as Democrats, and the rest are unaffiliated. Yet since Trump’s initial victory, Democrats have won most of the state’s key contests. The Democrat Tony Evers beat Walker for governor by about 30,000 votes in 2018 and won reelection by triple that amount last year. In 2018, Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin won a landslide reelection. Democrats also won big in state-supreme-court elections in 2018 and 2020. Biden carried the state by about 21,000 votes in 2020. The major Republican victories over this period have been narrow ones: Hagedorn’s 6,000-vote 2019 win for the state supreme court and the roughly 27,000-vote win last November by GOP Senator Ron Johnson over the Democrat Mandela Barnes.

Those results suggest that Democrats have come out slightly ahead from the demographic and geographic re-sorting of the electorate that Trump accelerated here. As in states across the country, Republicans have grown stronger in heavily blue-collar and white rural areas, primarily across Wisconsin’s northern and western counties where Democrats once competed effectively. But Democrats have been boosted by offsetting gains in the state’s most populous cities and towns, many of them relatively more racially diverse or better educated. (About 90 percent of Wisconsin voters are white.)

Craig Gilbert, a fellow with Marquette University Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, calculated that from the 2018–22 governor races, Evers improved his performance in all 30 communities that cast the most votes except for Kenosha (where he was hurt by a backlash against the 2020 riots over the police shooting of a Black man in the city). The places where Republicans are winning “simply aren’t growing,” while Democrats are generally improving in the places that are adding population, Devin Remiker, the executive director of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me. “It’s getting harder and harder for them to keep up with that trend.”

Democrats have benefited from improved showings mostly in two areas. One is the so-called WOW suburban counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington) around Milwaukee. Though the GOP still comfortably wins all three, Democrats have noticeably narrowed its margins. As Gilbert calculated, in Waukesha, which he described as “the most important Republican county in Wisconsin,” 21 communities have shifted at least 20 points toward the Democrats in gubernatorial races since 2014.

Even more significant has been the explosive Democratic gains in Dane County, the highly educated hub for biotech, insurance, and government jobs centered on the city of Madison, home to both the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin and the state capital. The Democratic share of the vote in Dane County has increased from about 70 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to 75 percent for Biden in 2020 to 79 percent for Evers in 2022; Dane actually provided Evers a larger net vote margin than Milwaukee County did, something that would have been almost unimaginable even a decade ago. Franklin says Dane has become a triple threat for Democrats: “It is growing fast, the turnout keeps rising, and the lopsided partisan margins keep growing.”

The flip side of the Democrats’ improving performance in Dane and the Milwaukee suburbs is rising concern in the party about lackluster turnout among Black voters, especially in Milwaukee. Some local leaders fear that a political competition between the parties focusing more on social issues such as abortion simply doesn’t engage enough lower-income Black voters, who are focused more on material needs such as jobs and health care. “If people feel like their issues are not going to be reflected, they are going to sit out,” Angela Lang, the executive director of the group Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, told me.

Lagging Milwaukee turnout next week would be another signal that Democrats, as in 2020, continue to face challenges not only with non-college-educated whites, but also with blue-collar voters of color. But if abortion rights, in effect, trump crime and allow Protasiewicz to extend the Democrats’ gains in white-collar suburbs, that could signal trouble for anti-abortion Republican presidential candidates in 2024—not only in Wisconsin but in the suburbs of any swing state. The Democrats’ rural and inner-city troubles in Wisconsin, which still might allow Kelly to eke out an upset win, testify to the fragility of a modern Democratic coalition bonded less by economic interests than by cultural values. But a Protasiewicz win, in a state that Republicans probably must recapture to regain the White House in 2024, would demonstrate again that there’s formidable power in that new coalition too.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

A grand jury has reportedly indicted Donald Trump on criminal charges stemming from his role in a hush-money payoff to the porn star Stormy Daniels. This historic event is a tragedy for the American republic not because of what it has revealed about Trump, but because of what it is revealing about us as voters and citizens.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Ron DeSantis chose the wrong college to take over. David Frum: Where do you stand? There’s exactly one good reason to buy a house. An American Tragedy

Donald Trump is about to be charged with crimes in New York. I do not know if he is guilty of any of these charges—we don’t even know the exact accusations yet—and neither do you. That’s for a jury to decide, and both Trump and the state of New York will have their day in court. In that sense, this is a good day for America, because it shows, in the most direct way possible, that no one in this country is above the law.

But this whole mess, no matter how it turns out, and no matter what other charges may come at Trump from elsewhere, is also an American tragedy. Trump’s status as a former president has not shielded him from answering for his alleged crimes. The indictment itself is shot through with tension, because Trump is, in fact, a former president and a current leading presidential candidate—which underscores the ghastly reality that no matter how much we learn about this crass sociopath, millions of people voted for him twice and are still hoping that he will return to power in the White House.

Trump’s defenders will argue that the New York case is just a local political vendetta, and that the potential crimes involved are relatively minor. As my colleague David Graham has noted, “Falsifying records is a crime, and crime is bad,” but this is like trying to get Al Capone on tax evasion, especially because “the Manhattan case seems like perhaps both the least significant and the legally weakest case.” David also notes that even some Trump critics wish Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had waited for Trump to be indicted on more important potential charges.

I’m not so sure. Trump has kept his supporters in a state of high tension over the past few weeks, first claiming that he’d be arrested on Tuesday, March 21, and then, in an appalling cultlike rally in Waco, bellowing that 2024 would be “the final battle” after previously warning that to indict him would be to court violence and civil unrest. Perhaps the New York charges have popped that bubble of tension; Trump can now go and whine about that while others prepare the case arguing that he has committed crimes against American democracy.

But to focus on which indictment should come when is to ignore that Trump has already admitted to his awful behavior in the events around the case. Trump (who sometimes refers to Stormy Daniels as "Horse Face") denies that he had an affair with the porn actor, but no one contests that he authorized paying her off, nor does his legal team deny that he lied about that money while standing in Air Force One—part of their risible argument that she was being paid hush money to keep quiet about an affair that never happened. They’re simply saying that technically, he didn’t violate any namby-pamby laws about ledger entries and campaign funding.

To our shame, we have too often let those kinds of arguments define the Trump legal saga. If Trump is brought to trial on the far more serious charge of attempting to strong-arm Georgia election officials, his defenders will claim that that indictment, too, is just local huckstering. They will find other excuses in the event that he somehow must answer for his role in trying to overturn our constitutional processes. And once again, even after looking at Trump’s own behavior, including his phone call to the Georgia secretary of state and the exhortation to the mob on January 6, too many Americans will focus on whether he committed an actual crime instead of coming to their senses and realizing that in any functional and healthy democracy, someone like Trump would have been shamed and forced into political and social exile years ago.

Trump, like the Republican opportunists who cling to him like remoras under a shark, doesn’t care about shame—he cares about getting away with it. Indeed, rather than leaving the public arena, Trump has reveled in it all, rolling around in the garbage of his own life and grunting happily about how the rules don’t apply to the real elites like him. Forget about Richard Nixon, who publicly resigned; Trump isn’t even Spiro Agnew, a man who seethed with rage at the felony corruption charges against him but had the sense not to brag about them. (Agnew insisted on his innocence for two months and then took a plea of “no contest” to a single tax-evasion charge, after which he mostly vanished from public view.)

No such luck this time. Win or lose in court, Trump is determined to bring us all into a summer-heat dumpster with him for as long as he can. And that leads to the last and most shocking thing about today’s news: Late this afternoon, New York local media reported that security was tightening up in certain areas of the city. That’s how we knew something was coming: The former president had already told us that he fully intended to trigger violence if the institutions of the law tried to touch him.

Tomorrow, all NYPD officers have reportedly been ordered to be in full uniform and ready to deploy. And again, somehow, we’ve just accepted this as the new normal. We no longer even blink when New York, a city scarred by multiple terror attacks against its innocent citizens, has to go on alert just to charge Trump with a crime. That one fact, more than any other, tells you how far down the long slide into vice and venality—and violence—Trump has dragged this country.

Every defendant, including Donald Trump, deserves the presumption of innocence. But when it comes to our civic and political innocence, Americans long ago lost whatever is left of ours.

Related:

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‘A Common American Death’

By Nicole Chung

His death certificate doesn’t tell me how he died. The causes of death are listed as “end-stage renal failure,” “diabetes mellitus,” “hypertension.” Yet I have no idea what forced my father’s body to shut down, his heart to stop, on that given night.

He’d had a cold, my mother told me, and had gone to bed early in the spare bedroom so he wouldn’t keep her awake with his coughing. Did his cough give way to a silent heart attack? she wondered. We know more about what did not happen than what did. At no time did he shout for help, or cry out in pain. There was no harsh death rattle, no deep gasps for a final breath he couldn’t find. My mother sat not 10 feet away from him on the other side of a thin wall, reading a book; if he had called out for her, made any sound of distress, she would have heard, and gone to him.

Read the full article.

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Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.