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Pregnant in Gaza With Nowhere to Go

As war killed all hope around her, Nevin Muhaisen fought to bring a new life into the world.

Faced in wartime with bringing a fifth child to term, Nevin Muhaisen told her husband, “When God sends a baby, He will handle the rest.”

By Nicholas Casey  17 Jun, 2024

Before the leaflets fell from the sky telling her to evacuate, before all that was left of her home was its western wall, before the food shortages left her baking her own bread, before her daughters slept under a chalkboard in an abandoned kindergarten, before a sniper killed an in-law who was bringing back blankets because it was getting cold — that is, before the war came to Gaza and obliterated most of what she remembered of life there — Nevin Muhaisen, a middle-school teacher and mother of four, was listening to her doctor give her some good news. Nevin, he said, was pregnant.

[Embedded audio available]

It was early August last year. Nevin had dressed that morning, put on some makeup and gotten her daughters — Zaina, Lina, Maise and Doa’a — ready for the day. Her husband, Mahmoud, flagged a taxi, and the couple set out from the warren of buildings in her neighborhood in eastern Gaza City to a leafy street near the center of the capital. She looked up at the clinic. The doctor worked most days in Al-Shifa Hospital and had come highly recommended. There was a long wait to see him; the high demand must have been a good sign, Nevin thought. And now, 90 minutes later, she was there with Mahmoud hearing the news. Nevin had been aware she was having another child. But the doctor knew something that even the mother did not. “You’re carrying twins,” he said.

The couple walked down a boulevard in front of the clinic, past the men playing backgammon in the park and the hookah bars where smoke hung heavy in the summer afternoon. She was 36. Mahmoud was 39. Theirs hadn’t been a love story in the romantic sense: Nevin’s two aunts married Mahmoud’s uncles years before, and their families arranged for Nevin and her sister to marry Mahmoud and his brother. But even at their first meeting, she laughed and felt relaxed with Mahmoud. Their life together began in a tiny bedroom in her in-laws’ apartment where the couple lived for two years before they moved into their own home in Shajaiye, the neighborhood where both their families lived. Zaina and Lina, now 14 and 13, came into their lives first, the two girls growing close because just a year separated them. Next came Maise, now 11, who loved order and memorizing the Quran; and then Doa’a, who, though the youngest at 7, was the most stubborn and strong of the sisters.

The couple stopped for some lemonade in a cafe and thought about the new life they would now be bringing into Gaza. Yes, there had been wars after the births of each of her last three children. But it had been close to 10 years since they had needed to evacuate. And what if one of the twins was a son? Or both? They had never had a son. But they were struggling financially, Mahmoud pointed out, especially because of the home they just built. Nevin was about to start work at a new school, and there would be more income, she replied. As one partner expressed doubts, the other resolved them. Nevin assured her husband that she had been a mother four times before and knew everything would be fine. “When God sends a baby, He will handle the rest,” she said. They took a taxi home.

The Muhaisen family in their home in Gaza in April, 2023.

The good news, however, was followed by bad. After several checkups, the doctor told Nevin that he could no longer find a heartbeat on one of the twins. It was the first trimester of the pregnancy, when miscarriages weren’t uncommon. The other fetus was still growing, the doctor said. It was Oct. 2.

On the warm morning that followed just five days later, she would have rather stayed asleep. “It’s time to wake up!” her daughter Maise said. Not during any of her pregnancies had the mornings been so difficult; she thought of the two flights of stairs at her school, the stairs that had felt impossible to climb because of her exhaustion each day. Now Maise, who had gotten up before the rest of the family to do her morning prayers, was gently shaking each of her sisters awake, starting with Doa’a, who still slept next to her mother. Nevin lifted her head from the pillow and wiped the sleep from her eyes.

Suddenly, a boom. Maise was back in the bedroom, screaming and flinging open the windows. There was no mistaking the noise now — rocket fire — first a crack, like thunder, and then a long hiss that petered out into the sky. They had been startled before this year by that sound. Hamas had called them “test rockets,” new weapons for its next war against Israel, they said. But there were too many this time to be a test. All of the children were screaming now, looking at their mother for what to do.

At the moment when this family needed answers, there were none — only the morning programming on television, continuing on as if nothing had happened. The rockets kept hissing into the air. Finally the newscaster from Al Jazeera was talking about the attack. But it wasn’t just about the rockets now; it was about an incursion into Israel.

Nevin, center, and her daughters, from left, Maise, Doa’a, Zaina and Lina watching the news in March.

Immediately her thoughts turned to the practical. There would be no school that day. The children would stay home, and she and Mahmoud would walk the length of their crowded neighborhood in search of sugar, flour, feta cheese — anything that was for sale, at whatever quantity they could carry. There had been some luck, she thought: Nevin had just gone to the pharmacy and picked up a month’s worth of folic acid and vitamins for her pregnancy. No war had lasted much longer than the prescription, she thought. Maybe they would just close the door and wait out whatever happened.

Yet when she returned, Nevin could see little safety in her surroundings. She now saw windows that could shatter into a thousand tiny knives and blind her daughters. Walls that might crumble in an airstrike and bury all of them. This had been her dream home, one they spent two years completing before moving in just the year before. Their final purchase had been the curtains in April. That night, the children slept in their living room as Mahmoud stayed up, listening to the news.

Nevin awoke the next morning to a Facebook post that was circulating from an Israeli lieutenant colonel. The message was in Arabic, and the tiny red boxes on the map below it showed the blocks that Gazans were now ordered to evacuate. One was theirs.

The thought of leaving Shajaiye was impossible for her. How could she abandon her home over a Facebook post? Nevin and the adults of the family — Mahmoud, his parents, Nevin’s brothers-in-law and her sister — deliberated over what to do next, and finally made the decision to leave. The parents would depart first, then Nevin’s sister-in-law, whose home was closest to Israel. The attack would come soon, they knew.

Nevin looked up. “Leave me here and you go,” she said.

“You’re pregnant!” someone shouted back.

Nevin, trying to buy time, refused to leave until she could make something to eat. She took her daughters with her to the kitchen. No one interrupted her at first. She cooked the green beans and rice slowly; she ate them and packed the leftovers. Mahmoud took her by the arm. They flagged a taxi for the next neighborhood, Zeitoun, with only a few things packed in the girls’ school bags, hoping to be back for more when the attack was over.

In an abandoned kindergarten, they moved the tiny desks and chairs and laid down their blankets. Another room was their kitchen. As they slept, explosions poured down in the area of the evacuation map and began to level it.

For days, Nevin begged her family to come with her back to their home in Shajaiye, and finally they relented. She breathed a sigh when they saw the building was still intact. Nevin’s body was exhausted from the pregnancy again. She took a nap on the sofa and woke up to the sound of artillery in the distance. She needed to go, but first she needed to sit on each of the beds of her children. She needed to look at every piece of furniture again. This was the last time she would see her house during the war. Nevin knew she was saying farewell to it.

On Saturday around 2 a.m., all their phones rang at the same time. The message, recorded in broken Arabic, called for another evacuation, a much larger one this time. Everyone in Gaza’s north was ordered to move south immediately, more than a million people. A day later, the ground outside the school was covered in Israeli leaflets telling them to flee. Still, Nevin did not want to go. Then her mother, Halima, who had already left for southern Gaza, called. “You need to come to Rafah, think of your daughters,” she said. “You’re pregnant.” It was Nevin’s 13th week.

Getting to Rafah meant driving nearly the entire length of the Gaza Strip, more than an hour’s car journey across a war zone. It took Mahmoud three hours to find a taxi driver willing to go to Rafah. He wanted six times the normal price, and he wanted to leave right away.

They raced down mostly empty roads, Nevin bracing her stomach with both hands to cushion her belly whenever they sailed over a speed bump. One roundabout was filled with the charred remains of cars and trucks, smoke still rising from a recent bombing. “Why were they hit?” Maise asked.

In Rafah, Nevin’s fear abated only at the sight of her father, Jamal. His embrace was warm, and the house, though not theirs, almost felt like home. More relatives kept arriving; in all three dozen family members packed themselves into a living room and two bedrooms. Mahmoud went to a less-crowded house — just 14 people. The couple slept apart for the first time since they were married.

Nevin’s life before the war had been largely confined to Gaza City, but as the days went by she felt little sense of liberation in Rafah, with its strange accents and unfamiliar streets. Approaching the fifth month of her pregnancy, she saw a doctor for the first time since the war began. There was backup power that day, and the ultrasound machine was working. Her baby was a boy, the doctor said.

“His name will be Sobhy,” said Mahmoud, Arabic for “bright like the morning.”

One day when the airstrikes sounded far away, Nevin pushed herself to venture outside into the market. A faint blue feeling of longing grew in her for her neighborhood, which was still being bombed. She wanted her son to be born back home in Shajaiye, she thought. She was someone who grew attached to things and places. Her pillow, her sofa. Her land. She wondered: Do places feel nostalgia for the people who have left them as people do for the places they have left? After a month in Rafah, the apartment now too crowded, Nevin and her family left for another city called Deir al Balah.

A house in Deir al Balah where Nevin, Mahmoud and their daughters temporarily moved along with 40 others.

She began to bleed near the end of November. A temporary cease-fire was announced, and for days, the world watched to see if the war might be ending. Nevin, well into her second trimester, kept bleeding. She thought: I am losing the other child now.

That any hospital could take Nevin was itself a miracle. Al-Shifa, where her first doctor had practiced, had been wrecked by a near two-week siege. Al-Nasr Hospital in the south would be next. At the strained emergency room that accepted Nevin, strangers were looking for outlets to charge their phones and begging nurses for clean water. The doctor told her that Sobhy would be fine. But she needed to stay in bed for at least a month.

And so Nevin lay on her mattress on the floor in Deir al Balah, listening to the news of the temporary cease-fire on an Israeli radio broadcast in Arabic — they told their side of the war, but it was the only signal that reached her bed. Prisoners were exchanged for hostages; an extension was announced, the broadcast said. But Nevin’s hope fell when a deadline passed and she could hear the airstrikes again. She now knew this war would not be over by the time Sobhy was born. Doubts filled the dark bedroom where a dozen other family members slept. She didn’t want to think about the premature babies who died in their incubators at Al-Shifa after the generators ran out of fuel.

In December, there was no bread in the bakeries. There were three dozen relatives living in the apartment now, all of them hungry, more always coming as their neighborhoods were demolished by soldiers who controlled them. The electric stove was useless — there had been no electricity since she arrived — and so someone started ripping the wires out of it; where the motors and coils had been, they added coal and a match. The stove was ruined, but at least it was heating up. Nevin could feel the baby kicking as she kneaded dough. They spent five hours baking, trying not to breathe in smoke.

The weeks went by, and the war ground on. Nevin hated this life. She hated the people who took the bags of aid and resold them at prices higher than before the war. Salt and sugar were 10 times more expensive now. They no longer could afford potatoes. She hated the parachutes landing with boxes of supplies; it was humiliating. She had taught her daughters to be strong women, yet here they were, living like caged animals awaiting death.

Lina, Doa’a, Zaina and Maise (left to right) in April, 2024.

One morning in February, as Nevin was tidying the room, she could see that her daughter Zaina had scrawled some numbers on the wall in pencil. “What’s this?” Nevin asked, looking at the arithmetic.

Zaina, the eldest daughter, had inherited her mother’s eyes but not her attachment to places. Zaina wanted out of Gaza. She wanted to be a surgeon one day and study in Germany; she didn’t want her life spent saving children her age from bombs. Her mother, Zaina knew, could get on a list to leave Gaza to give birth in Egypt. The numbers on the wall, Zaina told Nevin, were her calculation for how much it might cost. It was thousands of U.S. dollars, an impossible sum.

One night when there was finally a phone signal, Nevin called a Palestinian friend in Romania. The women didn’t know each other well — they had only met on Facebook, where they had common friends — but it helped Nevin to talk to someone outside Gaza.

“Let me help you get out,” the woman said.

Nevin knew the sentiment was genuine, as it always was with Palestinians abroad. But a divide separated the women, like the pane of glass that separates a visitor from an inmate at a prison. Only one woman was sitting in a war. The two said good night to each other, and Nevin tried to sleep, jammed on the floor with her daughters and more relatives seeking shelter.

There were now 38 people in a fourth-floor apartment meant for a single family, without running water or electricity. The war had left Nevin no privacy: just the buzz of a drone watching her from above or a child of a cousin stumbling through the door when she needed a moment alone in the bathroom. The kindergarten floor had been better than this — they had space in that classroom. The children told Nevin they were bored, that they wanted to go home.

Something started to snap in their mother. She looked over at her husband. “I need to see the beach,” she told Mahmoud.

Nevin had always loved the sea in Gaza. No matter how trapped she felt there, when she walked to the shore, when she saw the Mediterranean carrying on endlessly to the horizon, she felt as if she was looking at infinity, and for a moment, Nevin felt free. Before they reached the beach, Mahmoud and Nevin stopped at a tent camp to check in on a relative there. The couple then set off again and Nevin could feel her body relaxing as she approached the shore.

Yet when they reached the top of the bluff, there was only silence. There were no waves that day, no seabirds and no families like before. There were just Israeli warships.

Below, a child was fishing, alone. He couldn’t have been 12. What was he doing there? Some instinct told Nevin to climb down and warn the boy that the warships could kill him at any moment. But that same instinct told her that she was a mother of four — of five, soon — and that the ships could kill her too if she got any closer. “Let’s go,” she told Mahmoud.

It was now Nevin’s eighth month of pregnancy. Sobhy moved so much that she could no longer sleep many nights. The boy was telling her that he was almost ready for the world. But the world was not ready for this boy.

There was no doctor. Nevin pictured going into labor at night. No taxi would dare to drive her then. If the phone lines were disconnected, there would be no calling an ambulance. Zaina’s hope of passage for her mother to give birth in Egypt seemed to fade with each day; Israel was preparing to invade Rafah, the very city they would need to reach to escape. Besides, there was no money to leave. “I am now chasing a mirage,” she said. “The nightmare of me giving birth here is now going to happen.”

Nevin in March, 2024.

Nevin looked at the figure in the bank account. Then she looked at her daughters who were playing a game beside her. She looked at the numbers again. This was no mirage. This was the money they needed to leave Gaza.

The war had brought tanks and airstrikes to Nevin’s life, but it had also brought her a guardian angel. After her late-night call with Nevin weeks earlier, the Palestinian woman in Romania started collecting funds to pay an agency to arrange for passage for Nevin so that she could give birth in Egypt with her family. The friend had pushed donation links to Palestinian contacts throughout Europe. Now the money was there, enough to move Nevin and her children from Gaza for good.

A week passed as the agency made arrangements to put them on the humanitarian list. Nevin only told Mahmoud and her daughter Zaina, fearing she might jinx their luck. Finally at midnight the phone rang. Nevin took the call out of earshot. Everything is in order, the caller said. It was time to go. The agency made no promises about Mahmoud, but other Gazans assured Nevin that wasn’t unusual; he would likely be waved in with his family at the border. The next morning Nevin told her sister there was something she needed to say. Mahmoud was standing in a corner, near her sister’s husband. Nevin tried not to cry. She tried not to think of the years the four had spent together, two brothers and two sisters, two families that had lived through peacetime and conflict. She tried not to think she was abandoning them now.

She just tried to get one phrase out, to start. “We are leaving,” Nevin said.

On a Wednesday in March, Nevin got into the taxi with her four daughters and Mahmoud, one hand on her belly above her unborn son as they headed to Rafah. The road was a graveyard to Palestinians, only traversed by Israeli tanks. Rubble sat where there had been towns. A vast tent camp stretched out to the south, eventually to be bombed in an airstrike. Nevin had spent so much time in hiding during the war, she had no idea until now just how little remained of the place that she was leaving.

In March, Nevin and her daughters on their way to the Rafah border crossing to enter Egypt.

In Rafah, they stopped to see her father and mother. Jamal, the strong man who raised her, was more gaunt than she had ever seen him; he had lost 30 pounds in the war and was now about to lose his daughter as well. Nevin and Jamal had always had a tradition when she said goodbye after visits. They would embrace, kiss and then her father would give her 15 shekels. “That’s for you to get some sweets,” Jamal said this time. “I am praying for the child to come healthy.”

Fifteen minutes later, they were at the border: a Palestinian checkpoint, a no man’s land and then Egyptian officials standing before a vast desert. One Palestinian lugged a mattress. A large number were wounded. Just 500 people had papers to cross south that day — 500 of two million people who were trapped in Gaza. An official started collecting passports.

“He can’t pass,” the official said. He was pointing at Mahmoud.

Nevin had spent the entire war worrying about her unborn son. But it was her husband who was facing problems that day. She pleaded with the border guard: She was pregnant, she needed the father beside her when she gave birth, she said. Was this a question of a bribe? The Palestinian guard grew angry, pushing the family back in the direction of Gaza. He threatened to cancel all their papers. “Enough!” Mahmoud yelled. “You’ll go without me.”

At the Rafah border crossing, just before Nevin and the girls left Gaza and entered Egypt.

She couldn’t believe what was happening; they were within sight of their freedom. The war had taken her home from her, her mother and father, her sister, her privacy, her beach, her life — she was giving them all up, willingly now. But she could not, in this instant, give up her husband too.

The next moments moved by quickly. They approached the no man’s land where a bus was to take them to the Egyptian side; Nevin and the girls went above with the passengers, their bags of belongings in the hold. Mahmoud talked to the daughters, trying to calm their panic.

“Don’t cry, I’ll be coming soon,” he said.

It was Mahmoud who she saw crying when Nevin looked out the window as the bus pulled away. She had never seen her husband cry like that.

Nevin and her daughters sending a message to Mahmoud.

Sobhy Muhaisen was born just after 4 p.m. on March 24 at El Fayrouz Hospital in Ismailia, Egypt. He weighed six pounds and 10 ounces, a bit less than his sisters when they were born, but he was healthy, a nurse assured her; there had been no complications. Nevin had gone into labor just 15 days after arriving in Egypt.

The anesthesia still hadn’t worn off when Nevin asked her family for the phone. She wanted to speak to Mahmoud.

“Did you name him Sobhy?” was the first thing he asked from Rafah. Yes, that’s what she had named him, “bright like the morning.”

In early May, Mahmoud got permission to join his family, as Israel prepared to seize its border with Egypt making the crossing impossible for Gazans. They met him at the bus station in Ismailia on a brutally hot afternoon, and Nevin showed Mahmoud their son for the first time.

Sobhy at 13 days old.

Sobhy had made it from her womb and into the world outside, just as her family had escaped Gaza and into the world outside. Nevin realized this was as close to a happy ending as this war would ever provide her family: Sobhy was now lying in Nevin’s lap, with any possible future before him. His mother wanted him to learn English. She wanted him to be an important person one day.

Yet Nevin also knew this was unlikely to happen here in Ismailia. In May, Sobhy’s doctor found a small hernia in his digestive tract, and Nevin had to pay for his surgery in a private clinic because the public ones did not take Palestinians. The same laws barred her daughters from attending Egypt’s public schools so they were taking online classes organized by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Israel had never welcomed Gazans, but Egypt, in its own way, didn’t either. As Nevin sat in a rented apartment in a strange neighborhood, she looked at other countries, equally unfamiliar, where they might finally settle: France, Italy, the Netherlands.

The life of the Muhaisen family as refugees had now begun.

In Nevin’s dreams, she traveled back to her home in Shajaiye; in her nightmares, she could see an Israeli settlement built on its ruins.

Nevin had wanted to stay in Gaza. But in the end, she chose motherhood over land. She chose Sobhy.

Read by Rasha ZamamiriNarration produced by Emma Kehlbeck and Krish SeenivasanEngineered by David Mason

Sobhy napping at home in April, as Doa’a and Maise watch cartoons.

Additional research and translation by Abu Bakr Bashir.

A Disaster of the U.S. Military’s Own Making

Austin Valley’s death exposed the Army’s most urgent challenge: a suicide crisis among soldiers in peacetime.

The dress uniform of Austin Valley, a 21-year-old who became one of at least 158 active-duty Army soldiers to die by suicide in 2023.

By Janet Reitman  19 Jun, 2024

Austin Valley had just arrived at his Army base in Poland, last March, when he knocked on his buddy Adrian Sly’s door to borrow a knife. The base plate of his helmet was loose and needed fixing, he told Sly. The soldiers had spent most of their day on a bus, traveling from their former base to this new outpost in Nowa Deba, near the border with Ukraine. It had been a monotonous 12-hour journey with no stops and nothing to eat but military rations. Sly thought his friend looked exhausted, but then so did everyone else. He handed Valley an old hunting knife, and Valley offered an earnest smile. “Really appreciate it, man,” he said. Then he disappeared.

[Embedded audio available]

A boyish-looking 21-year-old, Valley grew up in a military family in rural Wisconsin and declared his intention to join the Army at age 7. He enlisted on his 18th birthday, so intent on a military career that he tried to sign a six-year contract until his father, a Gulf War veteran, persuaded him to take it more slowly and commit to three. Stationed at Fort Riley, in Kansas, he made an immediate impression on his superiors. “He was one of the best workers that I’ve seen in the military,” a squadmate says, recalling how Valley, who drove an armored troop carrier, thought nothing of crawling into its guts to check for broken parts, emerging covered in grease, a flash of mischief in his deep brown eyes.

Valley left Sly’s door and walked into the forest. A fresh snow had fallen, and the larch trees towered above him, their branches bare and ghostly. Valley carried the borrowed knife and some nylon cord he’d probably procured from another fellow soldier. He texted his parents: Hey mom and dad I love you it was never your fault.

Thirty minutes passed before Erik Valley, Austin’s father, saw the text. He called Austin’s cellphone several times but got only his voice mail. He contacted Austin’s unit at Fort Riley and eventually reached a sergeant; Erik explained the situation and forwarded Austin’s note. “Could someone please check on him and let me know what’s going on, please,” he said.

Word of a soldier’s disappearance spread quickly across the Polish base. Sly recalled sergeants pounding on doors and shining their flashlights. “Where’s Valley?” one asked him. Sly and several others from Valley’s unit took off into the woods. Seeing fresh tracks in the snow, one soldier followed them until he heard a faint gurgling sound. Drawing closer, he saw Valley, hanging from a tree. He was alive, but barely conscious. The soldier cut Valley down, while another called for the medics, who sped off with him into the night. His friends would never see him again. The following morning, Valley was taken to the U.S. Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and then returned to Fort Riley. Four weeks later, he was dead.

Valley at the U.S. Army National Training Center in California, in a photo found on his phone.

Valley was one of at least 158 active-duty Army soldiers to die by suicide in 2023. According to the investigative-journalism nonprofit Voice of San Diego, young men in the military are more likely to die by suicide than their civilian peers, reflecting a suicide rate that has risen steadily since the Army began tracking it 20 years ago. That these deaths are occurring within a peacetime military contradicts a common misperception that soldier suicide is closely linked to PTSD from combat. In fact, those at the highest risk for suicide are active-duty personnel who have never deployed. During the first half of 2023, 102 soldiers from Valley’s 4,000-person brigade were hospitalized for suicidal ideation. “Unfortunately, I think suicide has just become a normal part of Army culture,” one former officer at Fort Riley says. “It doesn’t even surprise anyone anymore when it happens.”

Since the end of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has maintained its global footprint, even as the force has shrunk. (Last year, the Army had to lower its recruiting goal after it fell short by 10,000 recruits in 2022.) But the Army’s “operational tempo” — the amount of time soldiers spend on deployments or training missions — is as high or higher in some units than it was at the peak of the war on terror. American soldiers are currently training foreign troops in Eastern Europe as part of a NATO mission to support Ukraine; conducting military exercises across the Far East and South Pacific as a counterweight to China; and also monitoring Africa and the Middle East for terrorism threats.

“Senior leadership, in my view, became habituated to the go-go tempo of the past 20 years — it’s all they ever knew, and now it’s seen as normal,” says Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired Army brigadier general who has served as an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on mental health. “It’s not normal. It’s a climate rooted in constant pressure, constant movement and constant trauma. And the legacy of that trauma and combat cascades down on the soldiers.”

The Army’s motto is “People First.” But a yearlong investigation into Austin Valley’s death — including more than three dozen interviews with family, friends, fellow soldiers, senior Army leaders and mental-health specialists, as well as a review of Valley’s medical records, social media posts and text messages — shows that the Army failed to live by it. The Army’s mental-health system, experts say, is focused more on ensuring that units meet their personnel goals than on the welfare of soldiers. A result is some of the highest suicide numbers the Army has ever seen — despite the millions of dollars in suicide-prevention research the Defense Department has invested over the past two decades.

In February 2023, the most recent of the department’s independent suicide-prevention committees published its findings in a 115-page report, one of several released since 2008 that have often repeated the same basic findings and recommendations. “My expectation is that this study will sit on a shelf just like all the others, unimplemented,” says M. David Rudd, a clinical psychologist and the director of an institute that studies military suicides at the University of Memphis. The committee cited high operational tempo, ineffective leadership and poor quality of life on many bases as areas of particular concern. “I would argue that the well-being of your troop force is central to having a ready military,” Rudd told me. “Unfortunately, the Department of Defense doesn’t see it that way.”

After Military.com published a story about Valley and I began reporting on his death, the soldiers in his unit were instructed by their leadership not to talk to me. Nearly 20 of those soldiers, as well as some officers and senior enlisted personnel, did so anyway. Many of them spoke on the condition of anonymity, as they are still on active duty and fear reprisal, but Adrian Sly, who left the Army late last year, disillusioned by its handling of Valley’s and other suicides, is one of several people who were eager to use their names. “We’ve had countless suicides and suicide attempts,” he says, “almost all of them swept under the rug. The Army failed Valley, time and time again, just like they’ve failed all of us.”

A senior officer in Valley’s brigade I spoke to says the military has created a mental-health crisis so acute that he regards it as the Army’s new war. “Every generation of soldiers is defined by the conflicts that killed them,” he says. “For the greatest generation, it was World War II; for baby boomers it was Vietnam; for Gen X it was Iraq and Afghanistan. This new generation, what’s killing them is suicide.”

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Go here for resources outside the United States.

Valley joined the First Infantry Division at Fort Riley in March 2021 as a gawky teenager. He had dreamed of becoming an elite Army Ranger, but after failing to make the cut for Ranger school, he quickly recalibrated and decided to follow in his father’s footsteps: Erik Valley was an infantryman who had commanded a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, a hulking troop carrier that looks like a modified tank. Austin idealized the life of a soldier, says his mother, Diane, who is divorced from Erik. He was drawn to the infantry’s ethos of brotherhood and teamwork, which he absorbed over countless hours playing military-themed video games as well as in conversations with his recruiter.

Valley was assigned to the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Battalion 70th Armored Regiment; he joined C Company, known as Carnage, a unit with a fleet of Bradleys. According to The Army Times, some armored units have been shown to have some of the highest operational tempos in the Army, with deployments roughly every 18 months. Since the early aughts, the Army has overhauled its training methodology at least twice, switching, in 2017, from one that allowed soldiers a year of low-intensity duties after a deployment, known as a reset period, to one that provides for no break in activity at all. Under this model, known as Sustainable Readiness, soldiers return from eight- or nine-month training missions and almost immediately get ready to deploy again. “It is not sustainable, what we are asking people to do,” one high-ranking sergeant says.

Valley had only recently arrived at Fort Riley when his unit, which had just returned from a nine-month deployment to South Korea, began to plan for its next long deployment, to Poland. “The op-tempo was like nothing I had ever seen in 16 years in the Army — and that was Iraq and Afghanistan,” the senior officer in Valley’s brigade says. Most of Carnage’s Bradleys dated back to Operation Desert Storm and had been rarely used during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now soldiers were tasked with fixing them to ensure as many vehicles as possible could deploy with the unit. Often, this required troops to cannibalize components from their most broken-down Bradleys. “We would spend all day fixing a vehicle that would just break the next day,” says one former soldier from Valley’s unit, Hector Velez. One brigade medic told me he spent most of his three years in the Army working on vehicles.

Senior leadership tried to rally their soldiers around the mission of deterrence. “Officially,” says one close friend of Valley’s stationed in Europe, “we’re ‘giving Russia the middle finger’ by ‘showing them we can deploy anywhere by any means with all our gear.’” Unofficially, he adds, “I have no idea what we’re doing here.” Low morale, or what soldiers called a sense of purposelessness, was palpable. “Sometimes we sat around and joked all day about killing ourselves,” says a platoonmate of Valley’s who recently left the Army. “I mean, we were all depressed. Everyone in the Army is depressed.”

Among themselves, soldiers in Carnage talked about feeling disposable — like broken parts on a Bradley. Valley cracked jokes or stuck cigarettes up his nose to lighten the mood among his friends, but with his superiors, he endeavored to do everything perfectly. He tried to memorize the thousands of parts to his Bradley and kept a running list on his phone of not only his own vehicle’s deficiencies but the others’ as well. “Austin worked his ass off,” the squadmate says. “He did everything they asked of him.” There was one evening, Erik Valley recalls, when Austin called him from work, “really pissed off” because no one had been sent to relieve him so he could get dinner before the cafeteria closed. He thought his leaders had forgotten about him. “That shocked me,” Erik said. “Forgot? Something like that would never have happened in the Army I joined in 1987.”

By the spring of 2022, Valley had dropped 8 pounds from his already lanky 150-pound frame. He had trouble sleeping, waking several times during the night. In the morning, he would wake up feeling sluggish and irritable and then drag himself through another 12-hour day. He seemed affectless; one of his supervisors said it was as if he were “moving and talking in slow motion.” When he went home to Wisconsin for a week’s leave that May, Diane immediately noticed the change in her son. “He was saying things like, ‘Mom, I’m so tired, I don’t care about anything anymore,’” she says. “That’s not Austin.” Worried, Diane urged Austin to get help.

Valley’s mother, Diane, with her son’s uniform in her home in Kewaskum, Wis.

That July, Valley walked into one of the clinics at Fort Riley for an intake appointment with a counselor. Though Army bases now offer a range of programs to improve mental health, from confidential stress-management sessions to yoga and meditation, the primary resource is clinical counseling through the Army’s Behavioral Health department, referred to colloquially as B.H., which both providers and military personnel describe as dysfunctional. “It’s like a cesspool,” the former officer at Fort Riley says. “They simply don’t have the resources to give soldiers the help they need.”

There are approximately 21 B.H. officers and civilian counselors in the clinics at Fort Riley serving over 12,000 soldiers. Tara Fields, a former provider at the base, told me its hospital has been running on roughly 40 percent staffing for years.

Valley explained how he was feeling to a counselor and was given an appointment for the following month. By then, his condition had worsened. His unit, the 2-70, was in the last months of preparing to deploy to Poland. He had recently been promoted to gunner, a position he coveted, but he worried about not being “good enough.” He was sleeping even less than he had before, plagued by nightmares and racing thoughts he called the “what ifs”: What if I jumped in front of that tank? At the clinic, he took a test to assess whether he had suicidal ideation, a six-question survey given to every soldier who receives mental-health counseling, at every visit. When asked if he’d wished he were dead or could “go to sleep and not wake up,” Valley answered yes.

After a single 60-minute appointment, the counselor suggested medication. Clinicians at Fort Riley have been instructed to assess and diagnose patients thoroughly before taking this step, but counselors I spoke to, citing their heavy caseload, said that the rule is not always followed. (Sly says he was offered medication before he even sat down for an official session.) Valley was prescribed an antidepressant called mirtazapine, the generic version of the drug Remeron. Because of that, he was given a special designation and issued what’s known in the Army as a profile, a health care form provided to a soldier’s command that details his condition and treatment plan. (Soldiers who have received one are commonly referred to as being “on profile.”) Valley’s profile noted that he should not handle heavy machinery while on the medication. Several days after it was issued, he was taken off the gunner position.

“They told me it wouldn’t really affect my job,” he texted Sly.

“They lied,” Sly replied. “B.H. always [expletive] lies.”

Valley’s profile stipulated a 90-day period of medication adjustment, during which he would be marked “nondeployable” unless given a special waiver. Granting medical waivers to troops so they can deploy is a longtime practice in the Army, provided a soldier is not in crisis. “I think being with their teammates in that deployed environment where they are surrounded by their buddies 24/7 is arguably a better environment for them to be in than to be left back in garrison,” one high-ranking official at Fort Riley told me. But it is also a product of the pressure put on units to maintain mandated troop levels for training missions like the one in Poland.

Several Army leaders I spoke with told me they believed the practice of granting waivers to soldiers on profiles for mental-health concerns had become more common over the past five or six years, as unit commanders struggled to meet personnel quotas. These quotas are set at the highest level of the Army and passed down to brigade leaders, who have no choice but to fill them. For the NATO mission in Europe, Valley’s brigade was required to deploy at least 80 percent of its soldiers within the first month of its deployment.

“No one wants to admit that it’s all a big numbers game, but that’s what it is,” one of Valley’s former sergeants says. “If your roster says you need 160 soldiers to make your quota, it doesn’t matter if 40 are broken, 10 are almost dead and the rest are on profiles — you’ll somehow find a way to count them.” I spoke to one soldier previously hospitalized for a suicide attempt, who said his unit commander overrode his profile just so he could deploy and come back a few weeks later — once the quota was met.

In October 2022, a month after starting medication, Valley was asked by his superiors if he would be amenable to telling his behavioral-health counselor that he wanted a waiver to deploy. Valley later told his friends that Carnage Company’s two seniormost leaders presented the scenario in stark terms. The whole unit would be in Europe, except for a small rear detachment of soldiers who were either too sick or had some other reason they couldn’t deploy. He didn’t want to be left behind, they said, especially since they would be training with Polish troops. It was the closest thing to a combat mission that he, as an infantry soldier, could have at this point — and given the war in Ukraine, who knew? Maybe they would see some action. “In his words, they told him that he would ‘probably feel like a shitbag’ if he didn’t come out,’” Sly recalls.

None of his friends thought a waiver for Valley was a good idea. “Those of us who worked with him every day knew he was struggling,” Sly says. “But the leaders guilted him into it, and being Valley, he didn’t want to let them down.”

Though the Army insists it is working to remove the stigma around seeking behavioral-health support, unit leadership often undermines some of its most basic safety protocols. In Carnage, soldiers I spoke to told me, everyone was aware of who was on a profile and who wasn’t — sergeants kept track of their soldiers’ mental-health appointments on a large whiteboard. “That profile really lowered his self-esteem,” Hector Velez, the former soldier in Valley’s unit, recalls.

Adrian Sly, an Army buddy of Valley’s who left the service last year, says that ‘‘the Army needs to be held accountable’’ for Valley’s death.

Valley was still working long hours as the unit scrambled to ready its vehicles for deployment. Though the medication helped with his insomnia, it often left him so lethargic that he nodded off at work or slept through morning formation. Every time that happened, one of Valley’s platoonmates says, the platoon was “smoked” — made to repeat intense physical tasks like push-ups or laps, as a form of discipline. They would line up next to a log, hold it above their heads and move it from shoulder to shoulder, he said, “while Valley stood there and watched.”

At Valley’s next appointment with a counselor, in late October, he said he would like to deploy with his unit, insisting he was feeling much better. His medical records were riddled with red flags. He was still reporting suicidal ideation at least once or twice a month. A provider who knew Valley might have scrutinized his records more carefully, but according to many soldiers at Fort Riley, there is little continuity of care within the mental-health clinics. Valley had never seen this provider before, and he insisted that in spite of his reported suicidal ideation, he couldn’t even remember the last time he had a suicidal thought. The provider took Valley at his word, noting that he was stable on his medication and that therefore she had “no imminent concerns” about suicide.

Ultimately, the decision on whether to request a waiver for Valley fell to his battalion commander, Lt. Col. Michael Kim. As the date of its deployment neared, the 2-70 was having trouble making its quota. They were hovering around 75 percent, according to one officer who recalls meetings where his colleagues agonized over how to increase the numbers. Carnage, with about 150 soldiers, had by some accounts a particularly high number of soldiers designated “nondeployable.” Commanders were scrambling, numerous sources told me. “Instead of saying, ‘OK, who is nondeployable,’” one former platoonmate says, “it was more like, ‘Who is the least nondeployable we can still deploy?’”

The Army’s procedure for sorting through that question is a meeting known as a profile scrub that happens on every base before deployment. According to the former officer at Fort Riley, battalion leaders and medical and B.H. personnel discuss every soldier on profile, writing their names on a whiteboard. The meeting takes place in front of all the staff or company commanders, many of whom do not need to know about soldiers’ medical status, she notes. Then the doctor goes through the list and tells the battalion commander if each person is waiverable or not. One of Valley’s former sergeants told me that there was robust discussion within the company about whether to move forward with a waiver request for Valley. “As I recall, the initial consensus was ‘no,’” he says. “And then battalion called, and it became ‘yes.’”

Since 2008, military command has tried to exert more control by making mental-health units answerable to brigade leaders, who write their annual evaluations and control their career prospects. Commanders can exert pressure to adjust treatment plans or request waivers to allow soldiers to deploy, and providers, many of whom are themselves young, inexperienced and overworked, feel they are unable to push back. “You have to make a choice,” one B.H. officer told me. “Your career or the lives of your soldiers.”

In 2021, a counselor at Fort Riley who refused to sign off on returning a severely depressed pilot to duty was removed and threatened with investigation, according to multiple sources. The counselor’s caseload of patients was given to other clinicians. Soon after the counselor was removed, one of those patients, a lieutenant being treated for suicidal ideation, committed suicide.

When I spoke to the B.H. officer about this, she blamed the system for this tragedy. “Putting unit readiness above a soldier’s welfare is unethical and negligent, but there is no accountability for the higher chain of command to do the right thing for these individual soldiers,” she says. “The accountability is: Meet these training timelines, meet these deployment schedules, meet these personnel quotas.”

In mid-November 2022, as the first wave of soldiers from the 2-70 deployed to Poland, the battalion’s B.H. officer, Capt. Melissa Samio, filled out a waiver request form citing Valley’s “symptom improvement” and his stability on medication, writing that he was now “good” with “no required follow-up.” Based on his medical records, it is unclear whether Samio, at least the fourth B.H. provider Valley had seen since his first appointment in July, had met Valley before this date. Two days later, a memo using the same language was submitted by the 2-70’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kim.

Now that his deployment was becoming real, Valley began to have second thoughts. He told his family that his medication wasn’t working anymore, though he continued to feel the side effects. “We all thought he was overmedicated,” his father says. Valley told his parents that one of his rotating cast of counselors didn’t think his deployment was a good idea. They never learned which one, because this information was not reflected in the records they obtained. Valley’s latest counselor, a civilian social worker at the hospital, diagnosed his increasing anxiety over deploying as “undue concern.”

“No one is listening to me,” Valley said to his mother. He had told the platoon medic that his medication was no longer effective and reported that he was having “active” thoughts of suicide. There is no mention of this in the social worker’s notes. “What I’ve observed,” the former officer at Fort Riley says, “is that a lot of the providers are just so burned out and so detached and overwhelmed, you could tell them just about anything, and it doesn’t get in.”

By Thanksgiving, with most of his buddies already gone to Poland, Valley was resigned. “The Army’s gonna do what it’s gonna do,” his father recalls him saying. On Dec. 5, Valley’s waiver was approved. On Dec. 7, in a last attempt to stave off deployment, he scheduled an emergency session with the social worker and reported that he was now having active thoughts of suicide, “with method.” She made a few important notes — stating that Valley’s depressive symptoms had worsened, and recommending a follow-up appointment — but as Valley didn’t say he had an active suicide plan, he was again reported as not under “imminent threat.” The social worker marked Valley as “psychologically fit for duty.”

Four days later, he left Kansas for Poland.

“Today is my birthday, but it doesn’t really feel like it,” Valley wrote in his journal on Dec. 17, 2022. He was 21. He had arrived a week earlier at L.S.A. South, his unit’s base in the Polish woods near the border with Germany. It was a raw facility, with little more than a dining hall and a recreation tent where soldiers could play video games or watch TV. The soldiers were housed in 50-person tents arranged around a two-mile track, with a helicopter landing pad in the center. The winter was bleak and desolate, with temperatures in the single digits; it was dark for half the day. A few of the soldiers who had deployed to Afghanistan told their friends they’d had better conditions in Helmand.

The unit had come to Poland as part of the joint U.S.-NATO mission to support Ukraine and prevent further Russian aggression. For the members of Valley’s company, they might as well have been back in Kansas, remaining mostly on base, doing the same sort of vehicle maintenance they did at Fort Riley. They had deployed with more than 80 percent of their equipment, meeting their readiness quota, but according to several soldiers, most of their vehicles barely worked. “If we had an enemy who had functional weapons and knew how to use them, we’d stand no chance,” Sly says. (The Army said in a statement that its vehicles were in a “high state of readiness.”)

Valley spent his birthday thinking about suicide. He went out to smoke a cigarette in the hopes of easing his mind, but he wrote in his journal that it didn’t help. He had envisioned how he would do it: He would go to the base’s shooting range, gun holstered, and then, just when the ready-to-fire order was given, he would put his pistol to his head. He told no one about this vision. Instead, he told Brandon Uttaro, the friend he confided in the most, that he probably shouldn’t be trusted with a weapon.

Senior Army officials told me that any soldier who is deployed after receiving a waiver for a health condition must be sent to a location where they can receive a similar level of care. This was not possible for Valley. There were only two B.H. officers embedded with the 3,000-odd soldiers of 2nd Brigade, split among bases in Poland, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Romania and Germany. Half a dozen or so counselors with the Army’s confidential counseling service also deployed with the brigade but could usually be reached only by phone, as they, too, were spread across the region. Valley asked about the availability of therapy almost as soon as he got to Poland, but was told it could take weeks to get an appointment. Providers were booked solid for telemedicine sessions and rarely made it out to remote bases like L.S.A. South, where the only reliable resource was the chaplain.

Valley spoke to the chaplain but told friends it didn’t help. “I don’t know what I can do anymore,” he told Uttaro in a text message. “I’ve tried everything.” Uttaro had recently been sent to Kosovo, and he urged Valley to talk to his leadership. “Please?” he said.

“I don’t want to get kicked out,” Valley said.

“It’s better than being dead,” Uttaro said.

In late December, Valley was transferred out of Carnage to serve as the driver for the battalion’s sergeant major. He now lived and worked in a different part of the base from his former squadmates, whom he rarely saw. “I feel like a big piece of me was stolen,” he texted Uttaro.

One of Valley’s sergeants, Howard Fritch, told me that shortly after Valley arrived in his company, he pulled Fritch aside and told him that he didn’t think he should be in Poland. Fritch, who had not been advised of Valley’s mental-health history, was “confused about how he got sent out,” he says, and approached one of his superiors. No one in company leadership had been made aware that Valley had been struggling. “We were not advised of anything,” Fritch says.

By early February, according to a note in Valley’s medical records, his company leadership was informed that he was exhibiting depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation, but Valley still received no formal behavioral-health counseling. Instead, Fritch and another soldier told me, some of Valley’s squadmates were instructed to keep an eye on him. They did the best they could, making sure Valley ate his meals with them and went with them if they left the base to go out in town.

One weekend, one of Valley’s buddies managed to get them weekend leave, and they went to Berlin. During that trip, he seemed like his old self, his friend says. They went clubbing, got drunk and visited Checkpoint Charlie, the famous Cold War border crossing between East and West Berlin. When they got back, he seemed better, his friend says. He even talked about enrolling in college so he could become an officer. But after a few weeks, he was down again.

In early March, Valley’s girlfriend broke up with him. Valley, according to many of his friends, had a hard time accepting it. Around this same time, he was taken off mirtazapine and put on the antidepressant Celexa. Valley had been complaining that the mirtazapine no longer worked for him, but there are no notes in Valley’s medical records that explain why this switch was made or if the prescriber was aware of Valley’s psychiatric history.

Either way, several Army behavioral health care specialists I spoke with found the choice of Celexa troubling, as it is part of the class of antidepressants that comes with a black-box warning, because it can increase suicidal thinking in some young patients. “I’d argue that a 21-year-old soldier who has a history of suicidal ideation and is still adjusting to a new environment warrants a closer look before putting them on that drug,” says one B.H. officer informed of the details of the case.

“I’m losing my mind,” Valley texted one of his sergeants about a week after starting the Celexa. He begged for help: “I need an actual B.H. person.” On March 9, after three months of asking for therapy, Valley was finally given an appointment with Melissa Samio, one of the two B.H. providers embedded with the unit, who was now stationed in Bulgaria. Samio hadn’t seen Valley since she requested his waiver at Fort Riley in November. Now, during a video session, Samio asked Valley how he was feeling. “Really, really shitty, ma’am,” he said, according to her notes. He told her about his breakup and said that he had thought about suicide that morning. “Everything’s falling apart,” he told Samio. Concluding that he was an “intermediate risk” for suicide, Samio issued a new 30-day profile that barred him from carrying or firing a weapon. After the session, she reached out to the battalion primary care officer to arrange for Valley to be evaluated in person. The officer, Samio later noted, never called her back.

Under Samio’s orders, Sergeant Fritch was assigned to administer Valley’s medication, and a small group of fellow soldiers, designated as “battle buddies,” was instructed to watch him around the clock, even when he went to the bathroom or shower. Most of them, Fritch told me, were in their early 20s. Fritch himself was 24. David Rudd, the University of Memphis psychologist, sees the assignment of suicide watch to nonclinicians as dangerous. “It’s a myth that somehow a unit can effectively do a suicide watch,” given their lack of specialized training, he says.

For all of its stated commitment to suicide prevention, the Army only recently released its suicide-prevention policy, three years after promising it. The policy does not provide additional guidance for how soldiers or officers are supposed to respond if someone in their ranks is contemplating suicide beyond what’s offered in the annual 60-minute module that has been in place for years — a program called “Ask, Care, Escort.” The soldiers in the 2-70 said this mainly consists of asking someone if they feel suicidal, “and if they’re honest and said yes,” Sly explains, escorting them to someone higher up.

Items honoring Valley in his mother’s home. “I will never get out of this hole,” he texted her after his first suicide attempt. “It’s dug too deep.”

“I’m so sorry you have to do this,” Valley apologized to his friends. He texted his father to tell him. “I just want to feel normal,” he said. But the next day, he felt worse. During an emergency session with Samio that evening, Valley said that he was suffering dramatic mood swings he described as “happy, sad, insane” and had spent most of the afternoon ruminating about suicide. Samio changed her assessment of Valley to “high risk.” Still, she agreed to allow him to travel to Nowa Deba the next morning with a small group of soldiers selected to help set up the 2-70’s new base. After the session, Samio made another call to the battalion primary care officer to request that Valley be seen by the medical team before his departure, but it is unclear if she reached him, and Valley left the base without being checked out.

As the bus wound its way along the snowy highways, Valley stared at his phone. A friend in Kansas had sent him his ex-girlfriend’s Tinder profile. He texted his friend Brandon Uttaro in Kosovo. “I’m serious about killing myself now,” he said.

“Don’t,” Uttaro urged him helplessly from 900 miles away.

Valley texted one of his sergeants. “I need to talk to you later.” The sergeant didn’t respond. Valley texted a few others.

Yo, I really need to talk later.

Hey man I’m really sorry I’m going nuts.

He called a buddy at Fort Riley, twice. His friend didn’t call back.

Many hours later, after Valley vanished into the woods, Fritch blamed himself. He had been assigned to room with Valley and went with him to dinner, then back to their quarters to unpack. But then Fritch got a phone call to check on some vehicles, and Valley said he was tired and wanted to sleep. “I left him alone for five minutes,” he told me. This gave Valley the opportunity to leave his room and gather the supplies he needed from friends like Sly, who, as they were now in different companies, had not been told about the suicide watch. Sly was angry not to have been informed, and he was even more angry about what happened after Valley was cut down from the tree and saved. “The Army was given a miraculous second chance to help him,” he says. “Despite that chance, they changed nothing.”

At the hospital in Germany, Valley was diagnosed with acute adjustment disorder and borderline personality disorder. “A diagnosis of borderline personality disorder during a three-day hospitalization is highly questionable, especially in a 21-year-old male who was considered a good, strong soldier,” says Dr. Stephen Xenakis, the retired general, who is trained in child and adolescent psychiatry and reviewed Valley’s records this year with his parents’ consent.

He found nothing in Valley’s behavioral-health history to support a diagnosis of B.P.D. His symptoms — suicidality and feelings of emptiness or low self-esteem — can be present in many other more common psychological illnesses, like depression. Young adults with personality disorders generally do not perform well in the military, Xenakis points out, and have frequent conflicts with superiors and other interpersonal issues. But Valley’s superiors, and his counseling records, consistently describe him as “polite,” “forward-thinking,” high-functioning and eager to improve.

Borderline personality disorder can qualify a soldier for rapid discharge from the Army. Because it is considered a pre-existing condition, soldiers who receive the diagnosis can be denied disability benefits and may even receive less-than-honorable discharges, effectively blocking their access to any military benefits, including those granted by the G.I. Bill.

Valley was adamant that he did not want to be discharged. The inpatient-care team in Germany noted that he had responded well to treatment, including a new prescription for Prozac. They recommended that, before a decision was made about his status, Valley be “afforded a greater opportunity to engage in more extensive care.” But instead of creating a plan for that treatment, they sent Valley back to Kansas only with the recommendation that he attend therapy sessions once or twice a week. It would prove to be a crucial misstep.

Valley was released from the hospital on Friday, March 17, with papers indicating that he was no longer suicidal, but his next B.H. appointment wasn’t until the following Monday. Escorted by his company commander, Capt. Alex Savusa, he flew back to Kansas. His mother says she had spoken to Savusa on the phone and was assured that Austin would be hospitalized, and she was shocked when her son called her to say he was back at his barracks. “He told me he was on duty,” she says. “My reaction was, Whoa, whoa, whoa — what’s going on here?” Accompanied by a friend, Austin was going off-base to eat, shop and visit his storage unit. Like his ex-wife, his father was horrified. “He’d just hung himself and now he was free-ranging,” Erik says.

Bradley Fighting Vehicles at the Fort Riley U.S. Army installation in Kansas, where Valley once served as part of the 2nd Battalion, 70th Armored Regiment.

At the brigade’s headquarters at Fort Riley, a handful of officers and senior enlisted soldiers had been tasked with managing the roughly 1,000 troops who had not deployed. There was no plan in place for what to do with Valley over the weekend, and Savusa and the brigade’s senior enlisted officer for the 2-70’s rear unit once again relied on the ad hoc battle-buddy system they had in Poland. Valley’s friends checked in and spent time with him, but no one followed him to the bathroom or did anything else that might have felt intrusive. “He wasn’t, like, physically watched, because anybody who goes through that stuff doesn’t want to be, like, in prison,” one of his battle buddies said. I asked this soldier how you watch someone without physically watching them. “You can’t,” he admitted. “It’s a messed-up system.”

The following Monday, Valley was escorted by a sergeant to the hospital, where he had a behavioral-health intake appointment and was once again assessed as a “high risk” patient. Fort Riley has an intensive outpatient program that would have required Valley to visit the hospital for counseling three or more times a week; he expressed interest in this program, but according to one officer apprised of the situation, the head of behavioral health at the hospital said he didn’t think it was necessary. Instead, Valley was put on the schedule for weekly therapy sessions. “I’d never seen anything like that — this soldier hung himself,” he told me. “I was just speechless.”

Valley went back to his room and texted his mother. “I will never get out of this hole,” he said. “It’s dug too deep.” He added that he wanted to go to sleep and maybe not wake up. Diane forwarded the message to Erik and his wife, Stephanie, an Army Reserve officer and registered nurse. Erik called the behavioral-health department at the hospital but was told that privacy laws prevented them from sharing information about a patient. “We weren’t asking for information,” Stephanie says. “We were trying to provide them with information so they had a clearer picture.”

By the middle of Valley’s first week back at Fort Riley, Stephanie called Savusa and tried to appeal to him as a fellow officer as well as a parent. “I really had to ask him, as a peer, if he understood the seriousness of this, and the implications,” she recalls. As a critical-care nurse, she had worked with suicidal patients. Without regular monitoring, a person would probably try suicide again, she told the captain. Savusa, she recalls, was sympathetic but said they simply didn’t have the manpower for a sustained watch. “He told me, ‘It’s not the Army’s job to babysit these children,’” she says. (Savusa declined to comment.)

The bedroom Valley shared with a stepbrother at his father’s house in Kewaskum, Wis. He declared his intention to join the Army at age 7 and enlisted at 18.

Valley’s family believed he was being denied access to appropriate care. “He kept saying he needed help, and no one was helping him,” Diane says. “For two weeks straight, he would call me every night and vent, and every night I’d have to talk him down.” Austin’s conversations with his family took on an erratic and desperate tone. He told Diane that he thought he had a parasite growing in his head. He accused Erik, who had been managing his money while he was deployed, of trying to steal from him, and told a friend that his dad had insulted him after his failed suicide attempt. He accused his sister, who texted him regularly, of abandoning him. One night he called his mother, sobbing that he needed help and saying that he wanted to take all his pills. The next day he texted to apologize, writing, “I’ve been having weird mood swings.” A bit later, he added: “I’m not going to get better mom. This is with me forever now.”

Valley’s superiors, one of whom told me they met every week to discuss his situation, saw a much different Austin. Shortly after arriving at Fort Riley, Captain Savusa tried to impress upon Valley the need to demonstrate his commitment to staying in the Army. Fearing an early discharge, Valley took this warning seriously. He accepted whatever responsibility he could, serving as a battle buddy for a fellow soldier who had been sent back from Poland for surgery. He struck his leaders as a soldier who was trying his best to get better — and, as they saw it, was gradually improving.

In a few weeks, he had gone from having a regular escort to his appointments to being able to roam around the base relatively freely, with regular text and phone check-ins with his sergeants. (According to Valley’s phone records, these generally took the form of brief text exchanges between Valley and his squad leader, Sgt. Armando Cazarez. “Up?” Cazarez texted. “Up,” Valley wrote back.) He started working out at the gym and bought a car. “The situation as I understood it was: ‘He’s saying he’s fine, he looks fine, he’s acting fine. There’s no major red flags,’” one of Valley’s former sergeants says. “If you knew Valley, that is exactly how he would try to seem to his leaders.”

Valley’s discharge papers from the hospital in Germany stated “No alcohol.” Alcohol use can worsen behavioral-health conditions and can also interact negatively with psychiatric medication. Despite this warning, by the start of April, Valley was drinking heavily. As with other behavioral-health recommendations, it is the soldier’s command that has the final decision, and one officer from Valley’s unit told me that prohibitions against alcohol use are almost never enforced. Valley was also left to administer his own meds, and he told one buddy that he had stopped taking them. The friend, unaware of Valley’s medication protocols, told no one. “What I want to know is,” Diane says, “where were the people with a mature mind-set to stop any of this?”

That same week, Valley asked for a four-day pass to leave the base over Easter weekend. The medical team had approved Valley for Fort Riley’s intensive-care program, which he was scheduled to begin on April 11. An official agonized over whether to give Valley the pass. But the behavioral-health officials, loath to impose too many restrictions on Valley, encouraged it. The official gave in.

On April 6, in the evening, Valley left the base with some friends and headed to Manhattan, Kan., where they spent the night barhopping. At some point that evening, Valley saw his ex-girlfriend walk into a bar with another guy. He proceeded to drink himself into a stupor.

“It [expletive] me up,” he told a friend the next morning. He sounded as if he were still drunk.

That afternoon, he walked into a pawnshop to buy a gun. Federal law prohibits people who have been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward or institution from purchasing a firearm, but Valley had voluntarily checked into the psych ward at the Army hospital in Germany after his suicide attempt. Army records show that Valley was marked as “high risk” and was prohibited from handling weapons on base, but federal law dictates that the policy can’t extend beyond the installation’s gates. It also does not apply to personally owned firearms. Without any red flags appearing on his federal background check, Valley was able to buy a Taurus 9-millimeter pistol, which he brought back with him to Fort Riley later that day. He texted Uttaro to tell him. “How the [expletive] you have a pistol on high risk?” Uttaro asked.

“America,” Austin replied.

On the night of April 10, Valley spent several hours drinking heavily in his barracks and then drove to his ex-girlfriend’s apartment in Topeka. He arrived just before midnight, and called her, but she didn’t answer. “Can I just get one last kiss,” he texted. “It’s an emergency.”

“Go to the emergency room then,” she replied.

“I don’t think you understand,” he wrote.

Valley vomited in the parking lot and texted her a few more times. Then, carrying the pistol, he entered the building and pounded on her door. She called the police and locked herself in the bathroom. Valley forced his way into the apartment; a police unit, sirens wailing, grew closer. By the time officers arrived, he was bleeding from a gunshot to the head.

Valley’s father, Erik, a Gulf War veteran, and his stepmother, Stephanie, a former Army Reserve officer. Both were in contact with Army officials before Valley’s death, trying to make the gravity of his condition clear.

Valley was taken to a hospital in Topeka, where he was admitted to the I.C.U. and put on life support. The Valleys received a call from a nurse and immediately drove 12 hours to Kansas. No one from Fort Riley had reached out to them, Stephanie told me, and for most of the night, Valley lay in the I.C.U. alone. “The abandonment,” Stephanie says. She held Austin’s hand, thinking of something she had said to Savusa. She warned him in their phone conversation that following a suicide attempt, the most dangerous time for a second attempt is in the following month. Austin shot himself on April 11, 2023, exactly a month after he hanged himself in Poland. The next morning, he was declared brain-dead.

Word reached Poland immediately that a soldier from the unit had died by suicide. The chaplain gathered the soldiers who had gone to Nowa Deba with Valley back in March and told them who it was. He encouraged them to talk to their buddies if they needed support, and reminded them that they had good leaders. The squadmate who had found Valley in the woods told me he stood there in disbelief. For a month, he had suffered nightmares about the experience. There had been no real discussion within the unit after Valley’s suicide attempt, no real acknowledgment that it had happened. A B.H. counselor had visited Nowa Deba, but offered little meaningful support. “He advised me to drink water,” the squadmate says. After hearing about Valley’s death, he told me, “I went back to my room and sat there for a long time and didn’t leave until the next day.”

The soldiers of the 2-70 were told to go back to work and instructed not to post about Valley on social media. A few days later, at Nowa Deba, Valley was given a cursory memorial service. For many, it felt to them as if their grief was brushed aside, along with the gravity of what had happened. Their leaders advised the soldiers not to feel guilty, as there was nothing they could have done, Sly told me. He disagreed: “There were plenty of things that plenty of people could have done.”

A thick layer of humidity hung over the Valleys’ five-acre property in Kewaskum, Wis., when I visited last summer. Sitting at his kitchen table, Erik, a burly, bearded man in his mid-50s, was hunched over his laptop, scrolling through photos on Austin’s Facebook page. “Like here,” Erik said. “See how happy he looked? He was doing good here.” Taken during a training exercise in the Mojave Desert in March 2022, the photo showed Austin in a flak vest, wraparound shades and a green watch cap, posing with his buddies on a rocky hillside. “I miss my son every minute of every day,” he said.

Valley’s dog tags.

For months, Erik Valley spent his days going through the boxes of papers Austin left behind, combing through Austin’s phone and text messages, as well as his medical records, which Erik notes are incomplete, to try to piece together an explanation of how his son was allowed to try to kill himself — twice. There have been four investigations into Valley’s suicide, one conducted by the Topeka Police and three by the Army. Erik has filed several Freedom of Information Act requests for more of Austin’s medical and other records and has enlisted the help of Wisconsin’s junior senator, Tammy Baldwin, who wrote to the Army on the Valleys’ behalf, but they have not received the Army’s final investigative report.

Of the 20 or more soldiers interviewed for this article, most now say they’re leaving the Army. Sly finished his contract in November. “I couldn’t do it anymore,” he says. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to have faith in this Army if it’s so willing to just abandon the individual for the sake of the collective and still manage to fail the collective.”

Last June, Diane received a text from one of Austin’s battle buddies saying that a supervisor had asked him to make a statement that Erik was “a reason that everything happened” because of the harsh comments Austin claimed he’d made about the first suicide attempt. That soldier told me that the supervisor who’d approached him about it was Staff Sergeant Cazarez, who was tasked with checking in on Valley at Fort Riley and who seemed worried that The Times was reporting on the suicide. “I really wasn’t supposed to talk to you,” the soldier says. (Cazarez, who has left the Army, denied that he asked soldiers to implicate Erik; the Army said in a statement that “no member of the command asked soldiers to lie.”)

Erik was outraged when he heard what Cazarez had reportedly asked the soldier to do; he denied that he ever stole from Austin or ridiculed him after his suicide attempt. “People want to shift blame from themselves to me,” Erik says. “That’s just dereliction of duty, plain and simple.” Erik told me that he’s been “pro-military” all his life. “The Army I joined was all about honor and courage, and doing the right thing, telling the truth,” he said. “So show me your integrity by holding those responsible accountable. Otherwise, soldiers will continue to die, and during peacetime, not combat, for no good reason.”

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Additional research by Amber Von Schassen.

Janet Reitman is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her upcoming book from Random House traces three decades of political and economic upheaval that have broken people’s faith in the promise of America. David Guttenfelder has documented the U.S. military at war for more than a decade as a photographer, including years spent in Afghanistan and Iraq. His coverage also includes the struggles of service members who return home and are at a high risk for suicide.

Read by January LaVoyNarration produced by Tanya Pérez and Krish SeenivasanEngineered by Devin Murphy

How Cornhole Went Pro

It might be America’s most-played sport. Now it’s quietly becoming a TV success story.

By Devin Gordon  21 Jun, 2024

The best part about watching professional cornhole on TV may be listening to it. As aural A.S.M.R. goes, it ranks right up there with golf. First comes the satisfying plunk of the bag landing on the board’s slanted 18-millimeter grade-A Baltic birch surface, followed by a whispery thhhnnn as it slides upward toward the hole. And then if the shot is true, the polymer-resin pellets inside the bag rustle — shh-chh — as it drops through. Cornhole bags are the scalp massager of sports equipment.

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You wouldn’t know it if you were watching on ESPN+, but on a Friday night in April there were only about 250 spectators surrounding the floodlit court at the low-slung John A. Alario Event Center in Westwego, La., and they observed a respectful silence during shots, as if this were the All England Club during Wimbledon and not suburban New Orleans on the cusp of a weekend. So the only sounds you heard if you were following the action remotely were plunk thhhnnn shh-chh, plunk thhhnnn shh-chh.

This same night, at the Smoothie King Center across the Mississippi River, the hometown Pelicans were playing the Sacramento Kings for one of the N.B.A.’s last playoff spots, and about 2.6 million viewers tuned in to the broadcast on TNT and truTV. Meanwhile, the live audience for the American Cornhole League’s 2024 Kickoff Battle, Shootout Singles division, was far smaller — but credit each of those fans for being determined to find it. They either had to visit the A.C.L. website, IPlayCornhole.com, and open the Cornhole TV livestream; or follow along at one of the A.C.L.’s social media channels; or subscribe to ESPN+, scroll down on the app to “Also Live,” then slide past more than a dozen N.C.A.A. baseball and softball games to the next-to-last tile. Over the course of the tournament, across six ESPN telecasts, the A.C.L. drew an average of just over 50,000 viewers. If you were one of them, though, you got treated to some epic, nail-biting action. That’s the other fun part about watching pro cornhole on TV: These players are incredible.

“I like to call it sticky content,” Trey Ryder, the voice of the A.C.L. on ESPN, told me during a pause in play. “Because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the same story over and over: The guy that walks into their living room, it’s on TV, and they go, What in the world is this? And then they see one round, and then all of a sudden 20 minutes went by.”

According to a 2023 Ipsos survey, cornhole is the most-played sport in America, ahead of bowling and swimming and far ahead of golf. “I played it like anybody else — with a beer in my hand,” says Greg Weitekamp, the chief operating officer of Tupelo Honey, which produces all of the A.C.L.’s telecasts. “And you couldn’t play it without the beer, because you had to balance yourself, right? The beer in one hand, and the bag on the other side.” For most of us, cornhole is a sport we play in a backyard or in a parking lot while we’re waiting for another sport to start. It’s a straightforward game with no discernible strategy beyond “throw the bag through the hole.”

Participants at the American Cornhole League’s 2024 Kickoff Battle event in Louisiana in April. The league’s pro division has 250 slots.

That version of cornhole and the world-class cornhole on display at the Alario Event Center bear little resemblance to each other. Consider the sheer variety of shots that the pros execute. There’s the “airmail,” when you throw the bag with a high arc and drop it straight through the hole, a critical skill if your opponent lands a “blocker,” a defensive maneuver in which the bag stops in front of the hole. Another option is the “roll,” which is when you land your bag (plunk) right in front of your opponent’s and use its momentum to somersault (chh-chh-chh) over the blocker and into the hole (shh-chh). That will blow your mind. But it’s nothing compared with the rarest shot of all: the “bar of soap,” which is when your opponent’s bag is blocking the hole and your bag hits it hard enough to knock it over the hole before yours falls through it. It’s the 7-10 split of cornhole.

Each competitor in a professional cornhole match gets four shots per round — 3 points for each bag through the hole, 1 point for each bag that stays on the board — and if you sink them all, that’s called a four-bagger. It’s the equivalent of hitting four straight N.B.A. three-pointers, only a cornhole shot is taken from farther away (27 feet versus, at most, 23 feet 9 inches) and the A.C.L. pros do it all the time. The best of the best hit four-baggers in half of their rounds.

Jeremiah Ellis, a U.P.S. driver and a father of four from Columbus, Ohio, is a rookie on the tour who joined the A.C.L. last fall after dominating a junior circuit and winning a tournament that earned him the title King of Cornhole. The A.C.L.’s pro division has just 250 slots, and in order to qualify, Ellis, who is 32, had to outduel hundreds of players at the league’s annual pro qualifier. Like Shohei Ohtani when he joined Major League Baseball from the Nippon Professional Baseball league, Ellis is a rookie in name only. Everybody already knew who he was before he had won a pro event. In fact, the A.C.L. is hoping that Ellis, with his fiery disposition — his email address used to begin “BagginNBraggin” — will become pro cornhole’s first name-brand athlete. He’s an airmail specialist, and he plays fast, pressuring his opponents into making mistakes as they adjust to his pace.

The standout match on this Friday night was the championship round of the Shootout Singles, featuring Ellis and a four-year veteran of the tour named Eian Cripps, a local Louisianian. Traditional cornhole is a race to 21, with points awarded based on how much you outscore your opponent during each round. If, for instance, you get a four-bagger and your opponent sinks three and then misses the board with the fourth, that’s 12 for you and 9 for your opponent, so you get 3 points for the round. This format isn’t very TV friendly, though. In March, Ellis won a match that lasted 41 rounds. Sometimes matches are over in five. That’s too unpredictable for a live TV broadcast with a set schedule, so the A.C.L. added a more compact “shootout” format: 10 rounds, highest score wins. Cornhole translates smoothly onto television. A split-screen format shows the thrower on the left and an overhead shot of the board on the right, giving viewers a bird’s-eye perspective of the bag play.

Cripps took control of the match with a roll shot past three bags (!) that drew a roar from the spectators. (It looked even more dazzling on ESPN+.) Then, several rounds later, he finished off Ellis with a four-bagger, pumping his fist and bellowing, “Let’s go!” as he sank the clincher. He was mobbed by family and friends and A.C.L. pros. This was the first tour victory for Cripps, and he pocketed $3,600 for it, which may not seem like a lot of money, but it’s the most he had ever seen. He is only 14 years old, after all.

Jeremiah Ellis

Eian Cripps

During a post-match interview, Ellis struck an upbeat tone. “It’s just a steppingstone,” he said. Before joining the A.C.L., Ellis spent six years in the American Cornhole Organization, a smaller circuit with a spottier schedule, weaker competition and no TV deal; its winners might take home $1,000. For much of that time, Ellis had his eye on the A.C.L., which debuted after the A.C.O. but grew much faster. He would watch A.C.L. tournaments on ESPN with his son, and his son would ask why he wasn’t on television, too. “That’s the league I wanted to play in,” Ellis told me. “They have everything.”

The A.C.L.’s 20-date tour schedule requires a lot more travel, however, and Ellis didn’t have enough vacation days with U.P.S. But last summer he received a fifth week of vacation, and now he was using a couple of days here in Louisiana. He was still hunting his first A.C.L. tournament championship — his runner-up finish to Cripps was the closest he had come, but it meant he would leave town with at least $2,400. He would also be back the next night for the first-to-21 format, known as the National Singles. “That’s more my game,” he said. He was ready to go 50 rounds if that’s what it took.

The American Cornhole League’s first ESPN appearance was on July 21, 2017, and for half of the telecast, the A.C.L. commissioner, Stacey Moore, was certain that would be its last. They were doing everything wrong, apparently. “When you’re on that four-letter network,” he says, “that’s basically a badge of honor, right? It’s like, ‘OK, you’re legitimate.’ ” And then 15 minutes into the telecast, he says he got a long, angry email from an ESPN producer. “I was like, Are they going to take us off air? I was freaking out.” The tournament was being broadcast from the stage of a theater in Cherokee, N.C., and they could only afford to use the house lights, so the players were casting shadows. The cheap green carpet laid down beneath the cornhole boards looked like puke on TV. There were only four cameras, which limited the shot angles. The scoring system, according to the ESPN producer, was too confusing, and the sound mix was out of whack.

The A.C.L.’s Kickoff Battle had eight cameras and a budget of $500,000.

Moore told this story with a smile, because it was clear from where he was standing now — seven years later at the Alario Event Center, with a $500,000 budget, eight cameras, a playing surface surrounded by LED advertisements for Mike’s Hard Lemonade and so many hot lights they made the board surfaces faster — that it had a happy ending. Moore was easy to spot because, other than the on-air play-by-play announcers, he was the only person in the venue wearing a button-down shirt, paired on this night with red Gucci-branded Adidas. He’s a lifelong Carolina guy, North and South — raised in the North, attended grad school in the South, now lives in Charlotte — and a serial entrepreneur with an intense competitive streak.

Moore, who is 54, has been involved in lots of businesses (online seafood, gift wrap sold in schools), and the inspiration for a pro cornhole league struck during one of his less-successful ventures, the digital publication Inside Tailgating, which is “dedicated to promoting the tailgating lifestyle.” He enjoyed cornhole just fine, but the tailgaters were obsessed with it. They set up their boards in the morning, slipped Buds into koozies and played for hours. Tempers flared. He knew this was the next great TV sport. In 2015, he started the American Cornhole League in Charlotte, which lured top players from the A.C.O. with promises of prize money and more serious competition and endorsement opportunities — a true professional league. And of course, there would be television, which was the key to his master plan.

But there he was in 2017 blowing his shot on Day 1.

Then, about halfway through the telecast, Moore recalls, one of his lieutenants bolted from the production truck. “He’s like: ‘Do you have any idea what’s going on right now? Twitter has absolutely exploded. Your broadcast has gone viral.’ All these people were sitting in sports bars and just saying, ‘I can’t believe cornhole is on TV — this is awesome.’ ” A few days later, ESPN and Moore began negotiating what would become a two-year deal to air dozens of hours of pro cornhole across its various platforms. They have since renewed the deal three more times, including this year, and expanded A.C.L.’s availability.

The television business is a mess. Traditional linear channels, which operate on a schedule, are hemorrhaging viewers to streaming platforms. The sole refuge amid the disruption — the rare predictable moneymaker left — is live events. Live sports are like gold bars in a recession. They’re appointment viewing in an era in which we have become accustomed to watching whatever we want whenever we want. “I have a TV subscription, but literally, if you took live sports off, I would cancel my TV subscription,” says Ryder, the A.C.L. announcer. “The only reason that I am watching television nowadays is for live sports.”

The streaming platforms, meanwhile, are throwing money at live sports the way they used to throw it at Martin Scorsese to make three-and-a-half-hour movies. N.F.L. fans will pay for Amazon Prime to watch “Thursday Night Football,” soccer fans will pay for Peacock to watch the English Premier League and a very small but fervent audience will pay for ESPN+ to watch cornhole. “What has been made pretty clear,” says Brandon Katz, a senior entertainment-industry strategist for the media-consulting firm Parrot Analytics, “is that live sports are the last vestige of hope for linear TV in terms of staving off decline and a significant value provider for streaming.”

This is why NBC has reportedly offered $2.5 billion per year to snatch N.B.A. rights away from TNT (which is currently bundled with Max), why Apple is spending $250 million per year so its streaming service is the only place where you can watch Lionel Messi play league matches for Inter Miami, why CBS Sports acquired the television rights to the Sport Fishing Championship (as well as some A.C.L. events) and why ESPN just struck a deal to air 28 matches of League One Volleyball, a new women’s pro league. And it’s why Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery — ordinarily corporate rivals — are teaming up to create a monster sports bundle, called Venu Sports, that is expected to debut this fall and gather the N.B.A., the N.F.L., Major League Baseball, Formula 1, the World Cup, Ultimate Fighting and, yes, the American Cornhole League, along with dozens more sports, onto a single platform.

ESPN’s relationship with the American Cornhole League accelerated shortly after its messy debut, when it joined the roster for ESPN Ocho, the annual Coachella of quirky niche sports like ax throwing and air guitar, which first aired on Aug. 8 (Ocho/Ocho) and was inspired by a joke in the 2004 movie “Dodgeball,” starring Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn. Cornhole was “very, very low risk for us,” says Brent Colborne, ESPN’s senior director of programming and scheduling. “It’s fun. Anyone can play this thing.” Let’s try it, the thinking went at the time. Viewers loved it, and it quickly became the linchpin of the Ocho’s roster. This August, in fact, for the third year running, the Ocho will be largely broadcast from the A.C.L.’s production facility outside Charlotte.

Cornhole’s ratings don’t move the needle much, or really at all, for a behemoth like ESPN, but its audience is loyal, and the sport’s inclusion among the network’s offerings gives customers one more reason to subscribe to ESPN+. The strategy, Katz says, is to use the platform’s limitless bandwidth to offer something for everyone — “a cornucopia of sports options.” (No pun intended, he swears.) It’s also cheap content. The production budget for that debut cornhole broadcast from Cherokee was just $30,000, and the A.C.L. footed the bill in exchange for ESPN’s coverage. Costs have increased as the sport has grown, but even still, Katz says, ESPN’s “path to what we would call commercial success” is much shorter for cornhole than it is for “Monday Night Football.”

Trey Ryder (left), the voice of the A.C.L. on ESPN, with the broadcaster Jeff McCarragher at the league’s Kickoff Battle.

In order to stay afloat, all of the subscription platforms are trying to find their own cornholes, and the competition for niche properties has turned into a frenzy. CBS Sports pounced on the rights to the fledgling Sport Fishing Championship — deep-sea fishing for really big fish — as soon as its organizers unveiled the circuit in 2022. “I actually received a phone call from them the day after we announced it,” says Mark Neifeld, the S.F.C. commissioner. More than 50 million Americans go fishing every year, he notes, “and participation in a sport drives viewership.” (According to Walmart, 100 percent of its Supercenters have a fishing aisle.)

The S.F.C. wasn’t just hoping to score a television deal — it exists only because of television. A sport-fishing venture of this sort wasn’t even possible until just a few years ago, when low-orbital satellites from Elon Musk’s Starlink service made it feasible to deliver a live, high-resolution TV broadcast from the middle of the ocean. “We essentially built a league in front of the technology shift,” Neifeld says.

No cutting-edge technological breakthroughs were necessary for cornhole. The A.C.L.’s challenge was much simpler: convincing people that a backyard pastime could be transformed into a legitimate professional sport.

The American Cornhole League’s next forking-path moment presented itself a month into the pandemic, when Moore decided that the A.C.L. would beat the major pro sports leagues back into action. At this point, the entire industry was in full panic mode. Moore was worried that the A.C.L. wouldn’t be able to pay its vendors. Tupelo Honey was facing an empty calendar. ESPN was airing marble races in prime time. It dawned on Moore, though, that cornhole had social distancing built into it and was a two-player sport, with a small production footprint that could be operated quasi-remotely. Those features helped the A.C.L. score four hours of live programming across three ESPN channels — the big time! — every weekend during the summer of 2020. Cornhole was no longer just a curio on ESPN Ocho. It was a real business.

The A.C.L.’s pro-am style SuperHole Series pairs N.F.L. players with league members. Among those participating in Louisiana were Juwan Johnson, a tight end for the New Orleans Saints; Derek Carr, the Saints’ starting quarterback; and DaQuan Jones, a defensive tackle for the Buffalo Bills.

Moore isn’t delusional. He knows that there’s a ceiling for pro cornhole’s audience. But he thinks it’s much higher than most assume, and he’s always studying the biggest pro leagues for ways to emulate their success. Because those leagues have stats, analytics and numbers for fans to nerd out on, he added cameras to collect throwing data like bag speed and apex height. He created the shootout format, as well as a pro-am style circuit called SuperHole that pairs A.C.L. pros with N.F.L. players, because it turns out that N.F.L. players are crazy for cornhole. (Saturday night’s SuperHole event featured Derek Carr, the New Orleans Saints’ quarterback.)

For pro cornhole to reach its peak, though, Moore needs one of his A.C.L. players to become a viral-clip generator and turbocharge the league and the whole sport, the same way Caitlin Clark has done for women’s basketball. He needs a superstar. It could be Jeremiah Ellis. It could be Eian Cripps. Or it could be Brayden Wilson, an exceedingly polite seventh grader from outside Austin, Texas, with a cherub’s face and a silver cross around his neck.

During Brayden’s warm-up tosses for his semifinal match in the men’s National Singles on Saturday night, ESPN+ flashed his capsule bio: “Occupation: Student.” He is the youngest pro in the A.C.L. He just turned 12. Physical superiority offers no advantage in cornhole, but being too young to drink beer is a sizable one. (Moore loves the novelty of the occasional child prodigy, but in part because he’s trying to build a league of full-time competitors, he wants to cap the number of underage pros at 5 percent of the field.) This was going to be Brayden’s first appearance on TV as a pro, and he was giddy.

“I’m more nervous than he is,” said his father, Stephen, who owns an air-conditioning business in Bastrop. “My heart’s pounding. You don’t want a kid to fail, but you know they got to go through things in life. I told him: ‘Look, they want to grow the game. They want the Tiger Woods of cornhole.’ I said: ‘You can be that person. I believe in you.’ ”

At home in Texas, Brayden spends more time practicing cornhole than doing homework, throwing bags for two hours a day. His friends think it’s awesome being pals with a kid who is already a professional athlete, and they stick up for him when he gets teased at school for going all in on cornhole and not, say, football, as you’re supposed to in Texas. “Some kids — sometimes they get jealous,” Brayden said before his match against Gavin Cano, a grizzled veteran at age 20. “They’re like, ‘Oh, you play for a living?’ I’m like, ‘Heck yeah, I do.’ ‘You make money?’ ‘Yeah, I do.’ ”

The crowd at the Kickoff Battle on Saturday night.

The problem with playing a pro sport on live television is that friends and family watching back home might witness you getting your butt kicked. In the race to 21 points, Brayden fell way behind, 13-2. During a TV timeout, Stephen called his son over for a quick pep talk, and whatever he said must have worked, because Brayden soon charged back, the beer-buzzed crowd growing wilder as the gap narrowed and then erupting when Brayden took the lead, 19-17. On ESPN+, Trey Ryder chuckled with delight. Was a star being born in front of our eyes?

Nope. Another problem with playing a pro sport on live television is that pro sports don’t give a hoot about your narratives. In the final round, Cano hit a magnificent shot, knocking in three bags at once — shh-chh, shh-chh, shh-chh — and tallying 4 points for the round. Final score: Cano 21, Wilson 19. After they shook hands, Brayden lowered his head and tried to fight back the tears, but the cameras caught him wiping them away. He joined his family in the stands, where his father rubbed his shoulders. “I’ve never been more proud of him after a loss,” he told me later, his voice quavering.

Waiting for Cano in the championship match was the King of Cornhole himself, Jeremiah Ellis. And this time he didn’t have to worry about his kids back home in Ohio watching him lose to someone not much older than they were. He rolled past Cano for his first pro A.C.L. title, collected his trophy — a miniature A.C.L. board, like a plaque with a hole in it — and added to his total winnings for the weekend: $8,900. He celebrated so much on Bourbon Street later that night that he missed his flight home to Columbus. (A month later, at the A.C.L. tour stop in Las Vegas, he would win again.) His dream is to make enough money from cornhole purses and endorsement deals that he can retire his brown delivery uniform in favor of his official red-and-black cornhole kit. But for now, this weekend in Louisiana would have to be just another steppingstone. On Monday morning, he would be back at the wheel of his U.P.S. truck.

Devin Gordon is a writer based in Massachusetts. He is the author of “So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets, the Best Worst Team in Sports.” Angie Smith is a photographer based in Los Angeles and Mexico City who has photographed the comedian Jacqueline Novak, a #VanLife road trip and Democrats in Wisconsin for the magazine.

Read by Eric Jason MartinNarration produced by Anna Diamond and Krish SeenivasanEngineered by Alec K. Redfearn

Serena Williams’s Next Challenge? The Rest of Her Life.

By David Marchese  15 Jun, 2024

A lot of people reach middle age having achieved some career success and ask themselves: Well, now what? Apparently this happens even if you’re Serena Williams.

Williams, who’s now 42, retired from competitive tennis a little under two years ago. She won 23 Grand Slam tournaments, more than any woman in the Open era and one shy of the record. Her level of fame and achievement — both on and off the court — broke boundaries for Black women and female athletes in general. She is, by most accounts, the best ever at what she did.

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Since retiring, Williams has directed that drive at new projects. She has a venture-capital fund, which mostly invests in founders who are women or people of color, and she just started a makeup line. She and her husband, the Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, also have two small girls: Olympia, who is 6, and Adira, who will turn 1 this summer. So it’s not exactly like Williams has been idle. But the tennis court still calls.

She has gone back to it, in a way, with a new eight-part documentary called “In the Arena: Serena Williams,” which will stream next month on ESPN+. She told me that revisiting her career through the series has really been the first chance she has had to sit back and take in all she has accomplished.

One thing that I was thinking about while watching the documentary is really the kind of amazing competitive spirit that you had, and I’m curious about where that competitive spirit goes or how it changes once you’re no longer playing sports. You’re doing the different projects: the venture-capital fund, the makeup line, you’ve written a children’s book. Did you feel as if you had to find a new outlet for it? For me, it was a necessary thing. I needed to not be done and sit down and wake up and be like: “Oh, my God. What just happened?” It was definitely too fast to throw myself full-heart, full-body into everything, but that’s kind of what I needed to do to survive after I’ve been playing tennis all my life.

Because you were worried about the prospect of not having new challenges once tennis was done? It wasn’t about not having new challenges. It was more around the fact — listen, what you’ve been doing since you’ve been born, do you even know how to do anything else? My whole mission in life was playing tennis. What are you doing today? Practice. What are you going to do? Train. And if you get injured, what are you doing today? Rehab. And that had been my life for over 40 years. You don’t go from a 40-year career to just going: “OK, what are you doing today? Nothing?” [Laughs] So when my career did end, literally the next day I had a huge team meeting for Serena Ventures. We were talking about companies — I had fully taken over. And again, I think it was too much, but it was my way of coping, because I couldn’t go from having purpose for all my life to having no purpose.

Does the “having purpose” aspect of things also include the scheduling and how you’re spending your time? Did you want to maintain a strict or rigorous schedule for yourself? You know what? No. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. But now I’m wanting to figure out a way to take a break, which I probably should have done earlier, but I don’t know if I would have mentally survived that. I probably would have been back on the court playing tennis. But now I need a breather. I really desperately need a breather. So I’m trying to navigate all that now.

Is there a particular understanding that you want your daughters to have about what you accomplished in tennis? It’s tricky. Olympia told me the other day, “You’re famous.” And I’m like: “Oh, not really. I’m just your mom.” So I don’t know. I just feel like when the time comes — and, honestly, when it’s settled in for me too — I’ll definitely have that conversation with them, and I’ll let them know the potentially, the important, you know, the … I don’t want to be too presumptuous, but the impact I have had on sport and beyond. [Laughs]

Serena Williams (left) celebrates her victory over Steffi Graf with her sister Venus and father, Richard, in 1999.

Your dad famously saw something in you and your sister Venus when you guys were little and then worked so hard to help you achieve it. Do you see something in your daughters in the way that your dad saw something in you? That’s a really good question. I don’t know. I always look at my dad, and I think, How were you able to do that? Because I’m like, Oh, they’re so cute. I just want them to relax and I don’t want to over-push them. But I would be devastated if I wasn’t pushed, because we wouldn’t be having this interview and there would never have been a Serena Williams. So I feel so fortunate that I had an opportunity to have that extra oomph. But for whatever reason, I’m having a hard time connecting to that extra push, and that’s something I’ve been trying to figure out myself, how to give that extra motivation to my daughters, because it’s definitely worth it, I can confirm from experience.

It worked out pretty well for you! It worked out well. [Laughs] But what do I see? The 8-month-old is so tiny, but Olympia is such a bright light, and she’s so athletic, to the point where it’s just not even humanly possible. Even Venus, she was like, “That kid has more talent than you and I combined,” and she’s not lying. So I can see how my dad may have seen some potential in us. I’m just trying to figure out a way to harness all that. I already told my dad, “Maybe you have to coach her, because I’m too nice.”

You’re too soft. I’m too soft, yeah.

I can imagine it’s an interesting thing that a lot of parents have to think about. You do the hard work and push yourself on some level, maybe so that your kids don’t have to do the hard work. But then you also want them to achieve. You don’t want them to not reach their potential. It also takes a lot of commitment from the parent, and that’s why I have so much respect for my mom and my dad. Because I was like, “OK, Olympia, we’re going to play tennis every Wednesday.” And now I’m like, “Ugh.” [Laughs]

Do you ever talk with Venus about why she still plays? Do you understand why she’s still out there? Venus loves tennis. I think the question would be best answered by her. I do not want to speak for her. But we both love tennis. Honestly, I feel like I would still be playing if I didn’t have to stop and have a family.

In the documentary, you’re reminiscing about winning your first Grand Slam, and you say that after that you really had a bull's-eye on your back, that the other players on tour were like, “We gotta beat the Williams sisters.” What did you think that was about? I definitely had a red “X” on me. And it was hard. People assume that you’re not friendly, and that’s usually not the case. You’re just there to win, and people don’t really want to talk to winners in a singles sport. It’s like they say, Birds of a feather flock together, and there’s only one winner, so who are you gonna flock with? If I were playing soccer, it’d be a completely different situation, because you have a team of players. I had my mom and my dad, and we kept ourselves really close because we had to. But yeah, I do feel like it shook the world. I mean, come on: A Black girl wins a Grand Slam at 17 years old, and she’s from Compton! Obviously they took notice. Tennis had been dominated by Caucasians, so it was like: “Whoa. We’re having a change in our sport. We don’t like that. This isn’t normal. Let’s not let her win.”

Do you find any of the same racial dynamics at play in — I didn’t say “race." I didn’t say that it was racial. To be clear, I said that it was a change. You’re going to notice if it was an Asian person winning everything when there were only white people winning before. So I happened to be Black, and it happened to be me, and I happened to win a Grand Slam, and I happened to be young, and it was like: “Whoa. This hasn’t happened since the ’50s, so we’re not used to this, so we want to make sure we make our comeback too.”

Did you see “Challengers”? Yes, I did see “Challengers.” [Laughs]

Thoughts? I thought it was good! I wanted there to be more of an ending. I told Zendaya: “Listen, is there more? Like, I want more. Did they win?” I mean, I don’t want to give away the ending.

Did those interpersonal rivalries and dynamics ring true for you? I thought it was pretty accurate. Sometimes you can become really connected to whoever you’re with, or “codependent” is a better word. I feel like I was codependent with Venus. So I actually felt like there was so much accuracy in there about things that we don’t think about as tennis players or even talk about as tennis players. There’s definitely a lot of co-depending. You can also be a loner in tennis, so I don’t know. Listen, I liked the movie. That’s all I can say.

I saw this news come out of the Trump trial, that you were in the president’s contacts. You guys would talk to each other? I mean, is this what this interview is about?

When somebody has a chance to talk to a president, I’m curious what they talked about. I talk to a lot of presidents. I spoke to Barack, I spoke to the Clintons. I spoke to every president since I’ve been alive, including Ronald Reagan, I’ll have you know.

What do you think they’re looking for in talking to you? What do they want to know? I don’t know, I’m not going to go there.

Fair enough. You know, I am always curious with athletes about the memories that they have from their careers. Does your mind go to the big wins or the losses? I’m the kind of person that be like, “Ugh, I hate it that I lost.” I try to forget my losses, to be honest. I actually refused to go down memory lane during my career, because I always said that’s when you get satisfied. If I’m looking at me and I’ve won, like, 18 Grand Slams, I’d be like: “Oh, my God, that’s amazing. Why am I doing this?” And I didn’t want to have that mind-set, so I never really looked back.

Being the subject of a documentary is obviously something that most people don’t get to experience, seeing your life’s story played back to you in a narrative fashion. What is that experience like? I am always amazed at people and the excitement they have for what I’ve done. I’m just a normal person. You know? I’ve been so in a box of staying focused and just doing the best that I could on that day. So now having the opportunity to hear people talk about it gets me super-emotional. It’s like: “Wow, honestly, I just didn’t know. I just didn’t know.”

Tell me more about that. Because you were so in it you couldn’t see outside of it? Yeah. I mean, obviously I knew. But I would literally win Wimbledon, and I remember having a conversation with my dad, being like, “OK, Dad, that was great, but I know I can win the Open.” I never took much time to settle in my wins. I was always looking for the next quote-unquote “high,” for lack of a better word.

And it was always more competition? It was always the next win.

Williams with her daughter Olympia after her victory at the ASB Classic in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2020.

Do you still find yourself looking for the next quote-unquote “high”? I have so much more excitement now with just relaxing. [Laughs] This has been a process of trying to find my new normal, and now I’m getting to a point where my day ends at 12, and I have a massage at 1:30, and it’s kind of nice to have an opportunity to just take a deep breath in and a deep breath out. I’m trying to enjoy this.

Two weeks later, Serena and I spoke again.

So, one thing that you and I talked about in our first call — [Serena’s daughter interrupts in the background] One second. [Serena to her daughter] What did you say, Olympia? Um, I’ll think about it, but yes.

Was that Olympia? Sorry, I’m just with my daughter today because she’s out of school. So, summertime, yeah.

Well, speaking of Olympia, one of the things that we talked about last time was the uncertainty you felt about how much to try and put your child on a path toward greatness. What are your husband’s thoughts about that? I mean, I assume he wasn’t put on a path to excellence in quite the same way as you were. So does he have the same uncertainty? [Olympia interrupts again] I’m so sorry.

That’s totally OK. I actually think it’s easier for my husband to be more of a motivator than I am, but I’m still trying to find that balance. I always say I wouldn’t trade anything that I’ve done. So why in the world am I not pushing my daughter a little bit more?

Do you find that Olympia responds to being pushed? To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I’ve even pushed her enough to see if she’s responded, which is disastrous! Do better, Serena.

So, [Maria] Sharapova beat you twice pretty early on in your career. Who?

Sharapova. And then you never lost to her again. I think you beat her something like 18 times in a row after that. Did you just decide, This person is never beating me again? Oh, man, you didn’t see it? I think that’s Episode 3.

Oh, they only showed me the first two! God, I’m so sad. You have to see the rest. You gotta wait for it. There was a reason why I didn’t lose to her, and I explain that.

OK. I know you don’t like talking about your losses. But you were so dominant for so long in Grand Slam finals. And then you went zero for the last four. Did that have to do with the pressure of trying to catch Margaret Court’s Grand Slam record? I think so. I should have won two or three of those. One I should have lost for sure. I don’t think, even looking back, I could have won at least one of them. But definitely at least two of them I could have won. It was just too much pressure I put on myself, and I couldn’t relax. That sucks. Honestly, it does. But nothing I can do about it now.

Williams and Maria Sharapova after a match that Williams won at the Australian Open in 2015.

How often do you think about not getting 24? Never actually. I never do. Which is good, right? I had such an amazing career, and quite frankly, I should have had 30. I feel like I could have had way more than 24.

You know, you posted on social media the other day, a little cryptically — Oh, boy, here we go.

That you were ready to hit balls again. What were you referring to? It wasn’t cryptic. I literally am ready to hit balls. I haven’t hit in a long time. It’s my life, and I love it and I miss it so much. I did learn I shouldn’t post it on Twitter, because people think I’m coming back, and I’m like, “No.”

What are you and Olympia going to do today now that she’s off school? What’s the plan? We’re just hanging out all day. I’m going to play Roblox with her later. We had a pedicure this morning. We’re just having a girls’ day.

Retirement sounds good. It’s fun. It’s different. It’s a life I’ve never experienced. You have to understand: For my entire life, since I can remember, it’s been about one thing. I don’t know anything else. And so this is all new to me. It’s like a whole new career. And of course I prefer playing tennis, but that’s because I’ve done it my whole life. Of course you prefer doing something that you’ve done since you could walk. That’s kind of rare in a career. Usually people work to get a career, but I’ve been doing this since I could walk. So definitely a different feeling.

It sounds like you really miss tennis. Yeah, I do. And I like that I miss tennis. I would hate to be like, “Oh, I hated that so much.” That would be such an awful, sad thing for me. Because tennis meant so much to me. And I didn’t realize it meant that much to me, to be honest. I didn’t realize that I would have such an amazing relationship with tennis after it was all said and done. It’s a good miss. It’s like a nostalgia. I love that.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.

A Stranger Bought a Set of Highly Personal Letters. Can I Call Him Out?

The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on whether the intimate details of one’s life should ever be sold by someone else.

By Kwame Anthony Appiah  25 Jan, 2024

I recently learned that my former husband’s stepmother put up her and his father’s estate at auction and included all of his keepsakes stored in their attic. This included a large collection of letters that my former husband received as a young man.

While he may have been at fault for leaving his things to clutter the attic for several decades, his stepmother might have taken a little care and destroyed highly personal items, like letters, rather than put them on the auction block.

My question, however, has to do with the person who purchased the lot that included the letters. This young man, an Ivy Leaguer, had the gall to contact my former husband to ask for more information about the people whose letters to my former husband he has now acquired. My former husband is not a celebrity or public figure, nor are any of the letter writers. The letter writers include my former husband’s close friends, his mother and perhaps myself. The student requested contact information, which my former husband did not provide.

I know it is not unusual for novelists and songwriters to mine other people’s attics for material. But I would hope that such artists would keep their sources confidential and would change any identifying details.

While I know artists aren’t held to the same ethical standards as social scientists, their work should be consistent with professional, ethical practices that guard the privacy and psychological well-being of would-be subjects. The fact that this student contacted my former husband to get names suggests that he has in mind a long-form nonfiction piece. The student has provided scans of select letters, but is holding on to the complete collection with apparently no intention of returning it.

When my former husband told this sad tale, I could see his blood pressure rising, temples pulsing and face turning bright red; I could hear the suppressed emotion in his voice. I don’t think there is any legal recourse, but I am investigating possibilities. I believe that for private citizens to have their pasts collected and prodded, for unknown purposes, is ethically if not legally unacceptable.

I would like the student to know that if he publishes anything based on the letters, I will be sure that any potential employers or future publishers can do a social-media search to learn that he is unethical and unkind. Or would you say that my doing so would be unethical as well?

— Name Withheld

From the Ethicist:

It was thoughtless, I agree, to sell off a cache of letters that included some that were intimate and came from living people. The thought of strangers’ digging through letters written in the spirit of love and friendship can be upsetting. That the person who has acquired these letters has failed to grasp this suggests a certain lack of empathy. But it doesn’t establish that he lacks a moral sense, because you don’t really have any idea what he plans to do with this material.

And there are constraints on this. When you acquire letters, you don’t thereby acquire the copyright in those letters, and copyright protection typically lasts until 70 years after the author’s death. So he has to deal with the murky issue of what counts as the “fair use” of such intellectual property. There are also a few privacy torts that individuals can try to pursue in the courts (e.g., intrusion upon seclusion; public disclosure of private facts). Even though he isn’t a party to a covenant of confidentiality, as someone in A.A. is, it remains true that, as you imply, exposing details of the intimate lives of private people is generally wrong.

Yet there are legitimate uses of the material. He could use it creatively in the construction of a work of historical fiction in which no actual people are recognizable. For that matter, he could use the material, properly anonymized, in a work of scholarship. Many social historians would grimace at your casual assumption that personal letters are best destroyed.

Threatening this young man that you will try to derail his career if he does anything with the letters strikes me as a very bad idea. Such a threat has the feel, if not the legal form, of blackmail. And it’s the wrong place to start. The right place to start is to tell him your and your former husband’s concerns and ask him to bear them in mind. You could even ask him to notify you about his use of any material in letters from you. If he thinks everything he’s doing is above board, he should be happy to agree.

Readers Respond

The previous question was from someone who was concerned about a potential violation of privacy in a creative writing workshop. She wrote: “We have a writing group whose members share their fiction and nonfiction with one another. One of our members attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and has begun to write about others who attend. She does not mention their names, but the descriptions of the members include profession, physical appearance, hobbies and other specifics that might identify them. She has not mentioned to these people that she is writing about them and does not plan to, but she would like to publish her stories for the general public. She has a degree in creative writing and notes that well-known authors have written about members of their A.A. groups, e.g. Raymond Carver. What are the ethics of writing about others in a substance-abuse support group without their consent?”

In his response, the Ethicist noted: “What do we talk about when we talk about anonymity? Membership in an A.A. group involves a great deal of trust, and those who benefit from membership have a profound obligation to respond to that trust with trustworthiness. In general, I don’t think we should begrudge writers their inspirations, including those that come from our own lives. There’s always a chance of that when you have friendships with writers. But what’s shared in an A.A. meeting is emphatically not meant to be put to public use, and breaking a confidence is breaking a confidence even in the service of art. … To be sure, your colleague can’t be expected to avoid writing about absolutely anything she learns in the meetings. And it may be hard to draw a sharp line between a recognizable use of the details and a creative adaptation of them into fiction. But that’s exactly the sort of thing that, in the spirit of trust, it would be appropriate to discuss with people in the A.A. group, whose candor has been predicated on a strong norm of discretion. Alcohol isn’t the only thing that can be abused.” (Reread the full question and answer here.)

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It is perfectly acceptable to write about an A.A. group. It is absolutely unacceptable to write about your A.A. group. The letter writer might want to take the Ethicist’s point to the writing group and ask the author if she has told her A.A. group what she is doing—and if not, why. All authors may use the people and events in their lives — for inspiration, not to expose the private pain and confidences of others for profit and prestige.— Gae

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I agree entirely with the Ethicist’s answer. I’d add that she’s not just risking her own expulsion from A.A., which she presumably depends on for her own support. She could stir up distrust, which would also put the welfare of others in the group at risk, if they’re driven away from these vital meetings. She might not understand how easy it is to identify people through social media these days. If so, she needs to have that, and A.A.’s rules, explained to her. Or else she’s self-centered enough to value the benefits of publishing these stories over the privacy, reputations and mental health of others in the group. And in the (I think unlikely) event her group agrees to discuss publication of their stories with her, surely that would improve her perspective and enrich her writing. Why avoid that, if she honestly seeks success as a writer? — Bennett

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I agree with the Ethicist. The person in the A.A. group who plans to write other people’s life experiences must be told that these details must not be repeated in any way, even verbally. — Ellen

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As a storyteller myself, I am somewhat piqued by this writer’s choice to so directly deploy the confidences shared by her A.A. group in her stories. Setting aside the whole breach of trust issue for a moment (not that it can be set aside), her methods betray critical tenets that lie at the heart of any artistic endeavor: creativity and imagination. Yes, many great stories have often been accredited as being drawn in some capacity from real life. But the wonder of these works resides in the ways that their writers managed to fashion something beautiful — and, in many instances, completely unrecognizable — from the facts which gave rise to them. In my view, unless she processes this matter honestly with her A.A. group, nothing good will result from the course she’s chosen, neither artistically nor relationally. If doing so is beyond her capacity, however, then she should at least have the creative integrity to craft original work that, while inspired by these accounts, is substantially alien to the source material. — Kambani

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I write in 100% support of The Ethicist! I have been in A.A. for 42 years. The writer in question has missed this most important principle: Anonymity is one of the principle foundations of A.A. and is exercised to protect its members. I am certain that if she consulted her sponsor or other group members that she would be asked to never share information from the group. The only person who has the right to break my anonymity is me. Sharing explicit details about someone else is dangerous. Alcoholism is a fatal illness and no one has the right to put other members’ lives at risk! — Judith

Is It OK to Secretly Medicate Your Manic Husband?

The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on marital deception.

By Kwame Anthony Appiah  21 Jun, 2024

A woman I know often complains about her “manic” husband. He is a war veteran in his late 50s who owns a very successful business and is the primary breadwinner for their family. (They have no children.) The wife, a woman in her early 60s who works part time and is dependent on his income, recently told me she dissolves melatonin in the water he takes with him to work in order to “calm him down.” She said, “I told him it was a nutritional supplement, something to help him because he sometimes doesn’t eat lunch.” I looked a bit shocked at her confession, and she immediately justified her actions by saying: “You don’t have to live with him. He doesn’t take his medications. Now he’s calmer.” She did not ask his permission to add melatonin to his drinking water.

Melatonin is not regulated in the United States — though in many countries it is available only by prescription — so legally speaking she is not “drugging” him without his knowledge or consent. And since he is under 65, this would not fall under elder-abuse laws in my state. But I am seriously considering revealing this subterfuge to her husband, whom I know. (She did not swear me to secrecy; in fact, I sensed from the way she told her story that I was not the first to hear of this.) Unfortunately, I have no confidence that confronting her would have an impact; she likes him better now that she’s secretly giving him substances with no regard for his long-term health or the deception. If my wife did this to me, I’d be apoplectic. I’d appreciate your counsel. — Name Withheld

From the Ethicist:

First, any benefits from this “treatment” could well be a second-order placebo effect. As an expert I conferred with confirmed, there’s no serious evidence that melatonin is a useful treatment for mania, and there’s no evidence to support this daytime, waking-hours use of melatonin at all. The main thing that melatonin has been shown to do is help induce sleep. Taking it during the day is an especially bad idea, because it can disrupt your body’s internal clock, and because daytime sleepiness can lead to accidents. In any case, if your friend’s husband is meant to be on other medications, he should consult with a doctor before taking melatonin (or any other drugs) regularly.

But it doesn’t matter whether I’m right about any of this. Medicating mentally competent people without their fully informed consent is wrong. Giving drugs to a spouse in this way is an abusive betrayal of marital trust. What you’ve learned about isn’t a past indiscretion; it’s a significant and ongoing wrong. He should be told what’s happening. Before you take that on yourself, though, do try talking with the woman about the implications of what she’s doing, and encourage her to come clean.

Readers Respond

The previous question was from a reader who felt judged by her friends over a serious decision she made. She wrote: “I went on a date with someone, and we went back to their apartment. In the middle of sex, I caught this person, who uses they/them pronouns, recording me on their phone. … In the morning, I confronted them, and they apologized and deleted the video. They said that was their first time recording someone during sex and a spur-of-the-moment decision, albeit a bad one. When I arrived home I felt more dehumanized than angry, as if I were a sex toy. I told my friends what happened, and they were very upset, and urged me to file a police report. … I decided to contact my date and inform them of the gravity of their actions and told them never to do it again. I also decided that I didn’t want to press charges. I do not want to subject myself to a lengthy legal process, repeating and reliving this story over and over, as well as having to tell my family or put my life on hold. … My friends don’t agree with my decision, despite understanding why I would not want to press charges. … they think I should do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do. I fear that they think less of me now because I am ‘protecting’ my date by giving them the benefit of the doubt.”

In his response, the Ethicist noted: “I understand why you’re being pressured. We want to see justice done; an investigation could reveal whether there’s a pattern of criminal offenses here. But what strikes me is that your friends aren’t acting like friends, giving priority to your own needs and interests; they’re acting like strangers, focused only on what they think would be best for the world. They want you to do something that has an unpredictable chance of benefiting unknown others, but that would also, you believe, cause you a great deal of stress and disrupt your life. Your obligations to others in the dating pool might be more substantial if you were confident your date hadn’t learned a lesson — but you have another perspective, and you’re entitled to it. Survivors of sex-related crimes have to be allowed to decide for themselves whether to go to the police. Caring friends will support them if they do — but won’t shame them if they don’t.” (Reread the full question and answer here.)

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An excellent response from the Ethicist. From my experience, the needs and welfare of the person who has been wronged are paramount. Instead of imposing their views on her, the letter writer’s friends need to support her. — James

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I agree with the Ethicist but would like to add that this situation represents a form of sexual misconduct, and when dealing with victims/survivors, the recommended practice is to support the victim’s choice to report or not report. It’s part of re-empowering them and restoring their agency. Also, survivors need empathy and part of demonstrating that is respecting and supporting their choices. — Shawn

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Was the video truly deleted? Most deleted photos and videos live on for a month or more in a photo app’s “recently deleted” folder, where they can be transferred to other devices and media. The very trusting person who wrote to the Ethicist should probably try to find out. The truth might cause a change in perspective. — Paul

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My sister was the victim of assault on a date, but she didn’t tell me until weeks later. I was so angry and upset for her, but this was why she didn’t tell me right away. Apart from feeling the shock and associated trauma, she was concerned I would pressure her to report and/or take matters into my own hands. I realized that she didn’t trust me to respect her decision not to go to the police. From my criminology studies, I know the rate of conviction is extremely low. The whole process is traumatizing for victims, and the odds are absolutely stacked against them in court. While everything in me wanted to see this man be held accountable, I also knew what my sister would be up against with the system. Never mind the legal fees, media coverage and public opinion piling on top. I totally understand the letter writer’s decision here, and her loved ones should respect it, too. — Jay

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By sharing her ethical dilemma, the letter writer has probably helped to educate many more people than would otherwise be possible. — Susie

My Favorite Way to Make Salmon Even Better

Dried limes can take your weeknight meal to the next level.

By Yotam Ottolenghi  19 Jun, 2024

Much can be said about salmon. Its life cycle is so remarkable that its sheer survival seems to invoke some odds-defying metaphors. Tenacity, audacity, resilience: If anyone wants to anthropomorphize salmon, its heroic qualities are there for the taking. To get through life’s upstream struggles, we all just need to be a bit “more salmon.”

Just as heroic are those who are calling urgent attention to what we are doing to the planet — and how it affects salmon: industrial pollution of its river habitat; systematic harvesting of wild fish from the sea; fish farming and the spread of sea lice; climate change. The sobering list goes on. In “Salmon: A Fish, the Earth and the History of Common Fate,” Mark Kurlansky links the fish’s fate and the future existence of our world.

Recipe: Black Lime Salmon

“If the salmon does not survive, there is little hope for the survival of the planet,” he writes with knowing and provocative frankness. Salmon holds a mirror to both human heroism and hubris.

But for all that’s written and said, the salmon fact that always hooks me is this: Between being born and reproducing years later, salmon travel many miles, journeying far and wide from the freshwater rivers of their birth to the salty seas. When it’s time to reproduce, they don’t return to the shelter of just any freshwater stream. They return to the same spot where they were born.

Take a moment to really think about that: all the tributaries and rivers that they could have taken, all the time that passed. It is cause for wonder. It’s a bit of a mystery, as well, but salmon are thought to possess highly accurate receptors that, sensing small differences in Earth’s magnetic field, can be used as a homing device. In conjunction with magnetic sense, they also use their sense of smell to identify and find the streams where they were born.

Good things happen when two star ingredients

— salmon and dried limes — share a plate.

The power of smell and its ability to connect us all, fish or not, so directly to our ancestral home hit me profoundly as I opened the oven door to reveal this month’s dish. It wasn’t just the salmon, though. It was the dried Persian lime I’d quickly blitzed and rubbed over the fish before baking. What was already a distinct aroma — citrusy, musty, tangy-sour, slightly fermented and floral all at once — was dialed up with the application of heat. It connected me immediately to the lemon tree in my mother’s garden: a small specimen, really, that with its intense scent looms large.

The salmon might be the hero of this dish, but the dried limes, another culinary expression of the citrus family that I tend to go on about incessantly, should also be granted hero status.

The pleasure I get from cooking with them stretches back to their preparation. Boiled in a salt brine, limes are dried in the sun for several weeks, allowing every drop of liquid to evaporate and leaving a concentrated sour flavor with a sweet aroma that always reminds me of hard candy.

These little balls of flavor can be a transporting secret to so many dishes. They can be pierced once or twice and added, just as they are, to all sorts of stews and soups: They’ll either disintegrate with everything in the pan or can be lifted out before serving, once their fragrance is spent. Blitzing them in a grinder with a few other spices might just be one of my favorite things to do. For anyone who wants to know more about how to cook with these limes — also called noumi basra, black limes or limoo amani — Najmieh Batmanglij’s “Food of Life” is the cookbook to get.

After brushing such a mixture over a beautiful salmon fillet, very little else is needed for this dish to be called supper. You could, of course, add more citrusy echoes here — a grating of zest, a drizzle of juice — and I could carry on talking about my favorite subject, lemons and limes. But for now, I will take in the aroma and, like the salmon, connect with the home stream.

Grab a Matchbook From Your Favorite Spot and Thank Me Later

Collecting these small keepsakes can help keep the places you love alive.

By Britta Lokting  18 Jun, 2024

When the legendary Jazz Standard club closed, in late 2020, I mourned the loss of yet another New York cultural institution. My favorite spots were shutting down one after another, sinking me and the city further into a collective depression. I texted the news to my parents; it was there, when my parents were in town, that they introduced me to the Mingus Big Band and to the music of Joni Mitchell, whose songs I fell in love with after we saw a cover singer perform. I never considered that something might kill a venue that had been so central to my youth.

There is one place, though, where the Standard lives on: my matchbook collection . On the front there’s a burnt orange, Rothko-style square lurking behind the words “JAZZ STANDARD.” On the back you’ll find a graphic of a trumpet, right above the club’s address and phone number. I couldn’t recall ever picking up this matchbook, but I imagine a handful might have been displayed by the entrance or on the low tables downstairs. Either way, here was proof that the club once existed. I couldn’t resurrect the Jazz Standard, which originally opened in 1997, but at least I had this modest memorial to its life. Since my early 20s, I’ve been amassing a collection of matchbooks from places I’ve gone, many of them now shuttered as casualties of the pandemic — a restaurant in my hometown of Portland, Ore., where I went for wood-fired pizza; the bar where I debriefed with friends and family after seeing movies; my old co-working space.

I became a matchbook collector, or phillumenist, when I first moved to New York City from Portland 11 years ago. I briefly lived at home after college and felt stuck; New York was an opportunity to begin a new life separate from my parents. I never intended to stay for more than a couple of years: The city was fun but also chaotic, tiring and unsustainable. It was with this mind-set that a former boyfriend and I spent our first year eating and drinking our way through Manhattan as a way to explore everything the city had to offer. I pocketed matchbooks from every establishment that had them, gathering analog keepsakes of my early adult life.

Eventually, I fell in love with New York and decided to stay — but discovered that the city is protean, sometimes painfully so. Frequently, I would return after a week away to find new scaffolding erected, a dress shop vacated or a diner emptied. It was difficult to stay grounded, as if I were being tossed around by the comings and goings of city life. This whiplash felt especially pronounced after I came home one evening to find a crowd drinking on my block. It turned out that the neighborhood dive bar I relied on, Milady’s, was abruptly shutting down and that regulars had come to say goodbye. As my relationship to the city changed, so did the way I thought about the matchbooks: They became a way to document what may one day disappear.

This has given birth to a reflexive habit. The first thing I do when I enter an establishment is scan the room for matchbooks. I’m always disappointed when I don’t see any. Without them, the particulars of place are no longer something I can hold onto, abandoned to our culture of screens and digital memory. With their slogans, doodles, aphorisms and inside jokes, matchbooks are objects of beauty that evoke an establishment’s singular character. Looking at one can trigger the din of a specific night out or a snippet of conversation, even the hours spent alone.

When I began freelancing as a journalist, in 2016, I missed the camaraderie of my old co-workers and the frenzy of the newsrooms where we worked. To combat my solitude, I often walked around the corner to a Mexican sandwich shop on East Fourth Street called Miscelánea for lunch. It had a to-go counter and a little outdoor seating. I always ordered a vegetarian torta and sat on a stool by the window, reading a magazine; sometimes I browsed the jarred goods. I rarely spoke with anyone, but the familiarity of the tiny restaurant made me feel less isolated. Its closure in 2019 punched a hole into my routine. Now I only have the consolation of Miscelánea’s matchbook: a simple white design with diagonal stripes and the word “FUEGO” on the front.

People once took care to create these tiny representations of what a place means in the patchwork of city life. Yet even matchbooks carry their own mortality. Once a place vanishes, so too does the production of its matchbooks. Because of this, I’ve been too scared to actually use mine. Instead, they’re on display on a bar cart in my apartment.

So far this year I’ve slipped a matchbook into my purse from the Francis Kite Club, a Manhattan bar that was formerly a queer-friendly club; while attending a Purim party at the Upper East Side speakeasy Keys & Heels; and before a dinner at Ernesto’s, where I took friends from out of town to eat and gossip. Later that night I added the restaurant’s oversize and somewhat bulky matchbook to my growing assortment. The name Ernesto’s appears on the rough red cardboard in bold type above a row of stick-figure fish. Years from now, I hope it will still bring to mind the restaurant’s light-filled interior or its location near a busy patch of the Lower East Side. But it will also bring to mind conversations with friends, and beautiful spaces that helped ease my loneliness. The city will keep changing — I can’t stop that — but I’ve built a personal archive of New York that will last.

Britta Lokting is a New York-based journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post Magazine and other publications.

He Memorized the World With Google Maps. Now He’s Exploring It.

Few people are better than Trevor Rainbolt at identifying obscure locations online — but there’s even more joy in watching him visit them IRL.

By Tomas Weber  19 Jun, 2024

Back in 2021, a 22-year-old from Arkansas named Trevor Rainbolt shuttered himself in his Los Angeles apartment to memorize the world. For months, he spent his time studying Google Street View from his desk chair. Delivery drivers handed over his meals; a barber came to style his hair. After a while, his memory grew planetary. When you see cabbage-like plants thriving along the sides of a Russian country road, he learned, you’re most likely looking at Sakhalin Island. On a bridge lined with pea-green pavement? You’re above a river in Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan province. If your vista, but for the sweep of golden grasslands, screams South Africa, you’ll be in Eswatini.

Rainbolt’s growing topographical erudition was in the service of winning at an online game called GeoGuessr. The game presents the player with a randomly selected image of a stretch of road on Google Street View; at the top of the screen is a timer, and at the bottom is a world map. The aim is to use signs, infrastructure, vegetation and any other distinctive elements to locate the images as swiftly as possible on the map. Rainbolt is the game’s most famous player and a legend in the community. His millions of online followers scroll through videos in which he sits at his desk, pallid and poker-faced, intuiting the location of some remote lane in a blink.

He recognizes the precise rusty hue of Beninese soil. He can sense when grass is Mongolian. His astonishing skill extends beyond the game, too. He geolocates old family photos sent in by his fans, and when a TikTok influencer tried to gatekeep the source of New York’s “best” bagels (“you’ll never taste this goodness”), Rainbolt used subtle visual details to identify the restaurant. (It was Bagel Market.) His ability is uncanny, even unsettling, and he performs it with the shtick of an evil genius. “Nice,” goes his deadpan catchphrase, mumbled when he lands on or near his target. “We’ll take that.”

Rainbolt knows nearly nothing about lands beyond Street View’s reach. Up until a year and a half ago, he owned no functional passport and had never left North America. Late in 2022, though — after an evening spent, as usual, on GeoGuessr — he felt an unfamiliar pull. He imagined himself strolling the exotic roads he had memorized on his screen. He thought about glimpsing distinctive bollards I.R.L., seeing the world’s telltale street lamps in 3-D fullness. He had a yearning to view streets.

So Rainbolt sold his possessions, gave up his apartment and decided to live off earnings from his GeoGuessr content. He applied for an expedited passport; the day after it arrived, he purchased a flight to Germany. Back then, the country’s most recent Street View images were from 2009, and he was curious how the streetscapes might have changed. “Germany got an update,” he thought, after he landed. When we spoke over a video call last month, I asked what it felt like to “discover” a place he had already taxonomized in his head: Did memorizing Street View spoil travel? It was true, he told me, that walking around reminded him of playing the game. “You feel oddly familiar with a lot of the world,” he said — “like you’ve been there before.”

After a month in Germany, Rainbolt headed for sunnier climes. Open to him were around 100 nations with coverage; he prefers to go to places that are on Street View, he said. For a year, he spent each month in a different country. In Laos, he paid a driver to ferry him to his favorite road: a rural track, skirted by limestone hills, that chases the twisting Nam Lik River southwest of Vang Vieng. He arrived during the dry season. The view was greener and more vivid in the images he had seen — but it was still beautiful, and his tears were of delight.

On his travels, Rainbolt continued his daily GeoGuessr videos. But he also began posting more videos in which he wandered around the material world. “Wow,” he said in one video, hiking along the coast of the Portuguese island Madeira — “this is, like, real.” Afterward, he went to a bar and filmed himself playing GeoGuessr on his phone. The swing between these types of content was surreal enough to confuse some viewers. “What’s going on?” an X user asked in response to a video about the trip to the Laotian road. “You look like you’re lost in the middle of a desert, bro.”

It turns out that touching Thai grass for the first time is infinitely more thrilling if you’ve obsessed over its texture and hue on your computer.

When I first encountered Rainbolt’s GeoGuessr videos, it was his erudition that intrigued me. He is conversant with the regional bus-stop signs of Sweden. He knows that the only place in Finland where the outer road lines are dashed is an archipelago called the Aland Islands. He knows that wooden houses on stilts suggest Acre, Brazil, and that an image-processing glitch has, on Street View, opened a rift in the skies above northern Montenegro. Rainbolt knows the world in a strange new way, like a Marco Polo who has seen only what you can spy from the roadside.

Then I started watching his more recent content. His real-world vlogs can be clumsy, but they are every bit as engrossing as his virtuosic geolocations. Maybe it’s just the faint dystopia of it all: Rainbolt is a man whose experience of moving about the world is destined to be that it reminds him of Google Street View. There is a very short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” about a life-size, one-to-one scale map, laid out over the territory it represents — an absurdist response to the fantasy of exhaustive knowledge. But that is precisely the kind of cartographic perfection to which Google aspires and which Rainbolt has devoted himself to internalizing: a map so big it can crowd out the world it models.

This could have made Rainbolt a guy who lives inside an everything map, doomed to discern reality through a vapor of data. But as I watched him flinging a basketball toward a hoop on a Portuguese court he first got to know on Street View, I realized there was another reason I didn’t want to stop watching: The map seemed to have heightened Rainbolt’s attention to reality, nurturing his love of the world.

Rainbolt’s most banal moments are now served with little tinctures of epiphany and recognition. It turns out that touching Thai grass for the first time is infinitely more thrilling if you’ve obsessed over its texture and hue on your computer: It’s the excitement of a face-to-face meeting with a longtime correspondent, a first date with an old crush. Rainbolt has used the internet’s cartography to turn up the world’s intensity, fusing the virtual with the real to make both more pleasurable. “Depression can’t be real if there’s mountains,” he said last July, in a video announcing that he would soon be summiting Mount Kilimanjaro. His route: a trail that a Google Street View camera ascended 10 years earlier.

On Rainbolt’s first full day outside North America, a blue car with a camera on its roof drove past him as he stepped outside to pick up lunch in Germany. The vehicle was crawling through town, gathering new data for Street View.

Open, if you’d like, Google Maps, and find Hochstrasse, a street in Ratingen. Activate Street View outside the Hotel Bergischer Hof. You can see Rainbolt on the sidewalk in a green hoodie, swinging a plastic bag of doner kebab. Click up the street. He is sprinting after the car now, hurling himself across an unmistakably German pedestrian crossing, sliding into the frame’s edge. Miraculously, unlike the faces of everybody else in the image, Rainbolt’s is not blurred out. His eyes are fixed on the camera. It was, he told me, an intense moment. What, he wondered, could possibly be a better experience?

Tomas Weber is a writer who lives in London. He has written for publications including Wired, FT Magazine, Scientific American and The Economist’s 1843 magazine.

Judge John Hodgman on Afternoon Ice Cream

Can your partner be compelled to eat dessert at your preferred time?

By John Hodgman  20 Jun, 2024

Miranda writes: My fiancé will only have ice cream if it’s the last thing he eats in a day. But I want ice cream anytime. Order him to join me for an afternoon ice cream!

I’m glad you wrote to me before the wedding so I can pronounce this marriage canceled. But there’s one slim chance for wedded happiness: Eat your ice cream, and let him eat his ice cream — and don’t worry about it. You’re meant to be companions, not twinsies. My spouse will never watch “Blade Runner.” I will never watch “Friday Night Lights.” We will both watch “Broadcast News” together nine days a week. People like what they like, and even in an (ideally) lifelong union, so long as there aren’t secrets, it’s important to cultivate (and tolerate) private happinesses. That said, my spouse once saw a grown-up order a sundae for breakfast at the airport and has never stopped being grossed out. Lucky for you, you’re not marrying her, you’re marrying your lovely fiancé — because I pronounce this wedding back on.

Table of Contents

New York Times Magazine: The 6.23.24 Issue

All articles

Pregnant in Gaza With Nowhere to Go

A Disaster of the U.S. Military’s Own Making

How Cornhole Went Pro

Serena Williams’s Next Challenge? The Rest of Her Life.

A Stranger Bought a Set of Highly Personal Letters. Can I Call Him Out?

Is It OK to Secretly Medicate Your Manic Husband?

My Favorite Way to Make Salmon Even Better

Grab a Matchbook From Your Favorite Spot and Thank Me Later

He Memorized the World With Google Maps. Now He’s Exploring It.

Judge John Hodgman on Afternoon Ice Cream