The entire weight of that moment is difficult to ignore, not only the sadness but also the peculiar situation it puts the rest of us in. Nickerson’s suffering seemed genuine. The tears were uncontrollable. She apologized. If she could have, she claimed, she would have stopped it. Investigators are now closely examining a detail that contradicts all of that sincerity: Nickerson bought the pump-action shotgun Griffin J. John II brought into Silver Rail’s special education classroom about two months before the shooting. When asked how he obtained it, she refused to respond. Gryphon J. John II was a 16-year-old former…
Author: Jack Ward
RJ Mitte exuded a genuineness that most television rarely achieves. Walt Jr., the cereal-obsessed, sincere, and almost painfully hopeful son of Bryan Cranston’s Walter White, served as the show’s moral compass during the five seasons of Breaking Bad. RJ Mitte, a teenager from Mississippi who actually had cerebral palsy, played that son. He brought to the role something that no casting director could have written: the real-life weight of the condition. Mitte was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on August 21, 1992, as Roy Frank Mitte III. His early diagnosis of cerebral palsy affected every aspect of his life, including his…
West Virginia is not a place that most people would find on a map without being told. It is a small rural town in the hills of Mingo County. Millions of people became briefly but deeply familiar with it through a series of YouTube documentaries that were hard to put into one category. People were interested in, felt sorry for, and upset about the Whittaker family, who lived alone, had financial problems, and was very much their own. One of their own has now left. In those videos, BJ Whittaker was seen with her family. She died early in October…
The Florida Panhandle had spent days preparing for Hurricane Isaias by the time it made landfall close to Destin, Florida late on Friday nite. In both Florida and Alabama, thousands of homes were under mandatory evacuation orders. Three states had declared states of emergency. Even so, the storm arrived as a Category 2 with maximum sustained winds of 105 miles per hour. It caused damage that is difficult to quantify, such as roofs being torn off apartment buildings in Milton, a boathouse being flattened in Destin, and a hotel in Pensacola losing its roof due to wind gusts that, according…
Something went horribly wrong inside the Land of the Tigers on a Saturday afternoon in October as people were moving through Yorkshire Wildlife Park’s pathways. A man was attacked after entering the tiger enclosure, which was created especially to keep people and animals apart. Emergency personnel showed up promptly. There was a physician present. The Yorkshire Air Ambulance touched down close by. It was all insufficient. Just after 1:35 PM, the man was declared dead at the scene. The park, which opened in 2009 and is situated in South Yorkshire just outside of Doncaster, has established itself as one of…
Every October 10, people all over the world do the same thing. There are green ribbons, posts on social media, and emails at work that have links to breathing exercises. The good intentions behind World Mental Health Day have always made me worry that it might just become mindless background information that I quickly scroll past. “Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change” is this year’s theme, and it at least tries to go against that. The World Federation for Mental Health announced the theme in August, and the framing is intentional. The question is not whether mental health is…
Reading what Ryan Gardiner wrote in the wee hours of Thursday morning has a subtly devastating quality. They weren’t dramatic, that’s for sure. They were loving, gentle, and measured. He claimed that Danielle Quinn, his partner, “passed peacefully and as gracefully as ever, surrounded by an abundance of love” in his arms—exactly where he had promised. She was forty-one. Additionally, she had been battling a disease that most people are unaware of for nearly four years. Danielle Quinn, a content creator and finance manager from Glasgow, had amassed a small but significant online following—roughly 14,900 Instagram followers—largely due to her…
In August, the figures began to change, initially subtly. When September arrived, the UK Health Security Agency’s data became difficult to ignore: hospitalizations had increased to almost 4,939 from just 950 weeks prior, COVID cases had increased by 230 percent in a single month, and a sizable portion of those positive tests were linked to the same variant, XFG, or, as many on social media have begun to refer to it, “American Covid.” In a strict sense, XFG is not new. It has been circulating in various forms for around a year after it was originally sequenced in the US…