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President Donald Trump surprised just about everyone in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, when he announced on Wednesday that he was canceling an afternoon signing ceremony for the biggest housing bill to pass Congress in decades. He’s holding the bill hostage over his unreasonable demand that lawmakers first pass the Save America Act, the Republicans’ voter suppression bill, which doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate. As Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, a key supporter of the housing bill, said, “He could be over here trying to claim a victory lap. And instead, he’s saying no, no he doesn’t want anything to do with it.”The fate of the bill is unclear. (It passed with veto-proof margins, but then there’s the possibility of a “pocket veto.”) But if it becomes law, more than 60 measures will take effect with the goal of increasing housing by waiving some regulations, increasing grants to communities that encourage building, updating rules on manufactured homes, and preventing large investors from buying single-family homes. Many of the provisions were big asks from the abundance movement.Proponents of these measures hope that they will increase housing supply and therefore lower prices, putting homeownership back within reach for middle-class families. But there’s a smaller provision that could be just as important. The bill includes pilot programs to address a gap in the housing market that keeps families from getting mortgages on already inexpensive homes because it’s often not profitable for lenders to issue smaller mortgages. Addressing this gap could bring the best idea of the abundance movement—that public policy should focus more on increasing housing supply—to distressed and rural communities where aging, inexpensive homes already exist.The provisions deal with “small-dollar mortgages,” defined as those less than $100,000, for homes that are often called “naturally affordable”—which is to say, cheap. They’re often priced affordably because they’re small, old, in a less expensive neighborhood, or some combination of the three. Such homes are not a big part of the market, but they could be exactly what working-class families who want to move from renting to homeownership need, especially in certain areas of the country.“These small-dollar, or low-cost, homes comprise only about 3 percent of active listings; that’s about 32,000 homes that are under $100,000 today,” said Aniket Mehrotra, a policy coordinator at the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center​. “However, in rural areas of the country the share of active listings is greater.”Yuliya Panfil, director of the Future of Land and Housing program at the nonpartisan think tank New America, calls this “affordable housing hiding in plain sight.”  While many homes are simply too expensive for low- and moderate-income families to buy, these are well within their price range but difficult if not impossible to get mortgages approved for. “The result of these often-invisible challenges is that millions of starter homes sit in a financing no-man’s-land—too complicated for most buyers to access and too overlooked by policymakers to fix,” Panfil wrote at Bloomberg CityLab. “We are struggling to build new homes fast enough as millions of existing affordable homes quietly go to waste.”Researchers at the Urban Institute in 2018 documented the problems families face when trying to buy these less expensive homes. “Lenders weren’t originating small-dollar loans even where affordable properties existed, locking out working-class families not because of creditworthiness, but because the loan economics didn’t work for lenders,” said Alanna McCargo, a senior fellow for inclusive capitalism at the Clinton Foundation and nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute who worked on the original report. This dynamic keeps families out of homeownership, pushes them into less secure loans, or encourages them to buy more expensive homes they struggle to afford.It’s unclear what banks need in order to issue more of these loans, so the bill creates pilot programs to study and implement possible fixes, including requiring the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to study compensation rules and caps on fees to mortgage lenders to potentially encourage more small-dollar lending, and a Housing and Urban Development pilot program to increase access to these loans.But encouraging more lending isn’t the only solution. Much of this housing stock is in smaller cities far from the booming coastal megalopolises where abundance proponents live, and the homes are also aging. Even if families find willing lenders to buy an older home, the houses may not appraise or pass inspection. Families already living in them are also often locked out of financing to make necessary repairs that would enable them to put their homes on the market again and move on, freeing them up for new families to buy.The bipartisan housing bill only provides limited provisions on rehabilitating old homes, primarily for elderly and low-income homeowners, and doesn’t provide new funding for existing grant programs. “Focus on this bill is predominantly on building new housing,” Mehrotra said. “However, we have an aging housing stock in this country. The majority of our housing stock was built before 1980, which indicates that many homes are in need of repair, particularly in certain markets, like in rural areas, [and] in cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore, and so it is critical that we also prioritize home rehabilitation.” Developers are also often unwilling to renovate or rebuild older homes in neighborhoods where they can’t get their money back. Mehrotra said that proposed legislation to tackle that problem was not included in this bill but could be revisited in the future.Still, Panfil’s colleague at New America, Sabiha Zainulbhai, called the measures “exciting progress on figuring out how to unlock this critical housing supply for first-time and low- and moderate-income buyers, especially at a time when homeownership is inaccessible for a growing segment of the population.”There’s other work to be done on housing, of course, like more rental assistance for low-income families, which is a nonstarter in this GOP-controlled Congress. And while Trump sits on the housing bill, many American families have already given up on the homebuying dream because they simply can’t afford it. This bill won’t fix those problems overnight. “Implementation takes time, and families who need a small-dollar mortgage today and thousands of families already left behind by rising home prices over the past decade won’t benefit from this,” McCargo said. “But it’s a step in the right direction, and one we’ve been working toward for years.”This article has been updated to clarify the bill’s potential fate.

Madeleine Rotzler’s new film, O Horizon, offers an odd vision of dystopia, even as it’s billed as a “sci-fi comedy drama.” The film itself is not always much to look at, but sometimes a film in its very strangeness can reveal a great deal, precisely because of all that it obscures. After all, so much of what matters these days is happening out of sight, suppressed by algorithms, hostile media, and even more hostile governments, and increasingly one must learn to look under the surface of simple things. Rotzler’s film gets its title from the layer of decomposed plant matter on the forest floor, the “O horizon,” but it’s what’s lying beneath O Horizon that truly matters.In a near-future New York, Abby (Maria Bakalova) works in a neuroscience lab tracking the brain waves of monkeys, struggling to deal with the recent death of her father, played by David Strathairn. An intrusive, Siri-like AI assistant encourages her to visit a shabby-looking tech start-up called Seeking a Friend Store; there, a lone employee played by Adam Palley offers to recreate someone you’ve lost or are missing. After uploading a parcel of photos, documents, and other archival material to its servers, the company creates a digital avatar that you can call on your phone whenever you like. After some initial reluctance, Abby creates a digital version of her dead dad, and soon begins talking to it as a means of managing her grief as she tries to go forward in her life.As an AI chatbot, her dead father acts like all AI chatbots: supportive, deferential, complimentary. The AI is always there with a new prompt to fill up dead air (“Tell me something fun that happened today,” “What’re you up to tonight? Having fun?”) or a little ego boost (“Dr. Williams is so lucky to have you. You’re excellent.… Somehow you’ve managed to develop excellence in all that you do. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise”). It’s always working to keep her engaged and affirmed, and anytime there’s any friction between the two of them, it backs off, eager to keep her on the line. If Strathairn’s dialogue wasn’t actually written by ChatGPT, the script does an excellent job of imitating it, and the bot’s lines have all the hallmarks of an LLM: cloying and irritatingly sentimental.These are strange scenes. For narcissists, incels, and sociopaths, the appeal of a chatbot is that it will always tells them exactly what they want to hear, so you can imagine how uncomfortable it is to listen to such a thing telling someone else what they want to hear. As the platitudes and clichés dribble out of Abby’s phone, not even an actor with Strathairn’s delivery can save them.We never learn how much Abby pays for her subscription, but in real life these businesses have a financial incentive to get their users hooked, so to speak, on their product. As Mary-Frances O’Connor, professor of clinical psychology at University of Arizona, told Scientific American’s David Berreby in 2025, the danger here is that people struggling with grief can be uniquely vulnerable to Big Tech’s long-honed engagement and gamification strategies. Researcher Nore Lindemann has further noted that “users are likely to become dependent on their bots, which may make them susceptible to surreptitious advertising by deathbot providing companies and may limit their autonomy.” That vulnerability offers real possibilities. For emerging companies like You, Only Virtual, HereAfter AI, Super Brain, and Silicon Intelligence, grief represents an exciting new market. Researchers are already beginning to identify the obvious financial incentives for such companies to alter the “informational bodies” of the dead to increase engagement and revenue. Rather than moving people through the process of grieving, AI companies would seem to benefit more from keeping them in the phase of acute bereavement, distorting their memories to give them what they want, all the while promising the false allure of being perpetually free of loss. Indeed, one wonders if Abby’s dad was really this asinine in life, or if Seeking a Friend Store has already tweaked his personality to keep her paying subscription fees.While Rotzler’s movie doesn’t much explore the ethical implications of what it might mean to get addicted to a product that promises to take the pain away, it does depict what a world without pain might look like. And it turns out to be a truly banal one. For it’s not just the dialogue. Strathairn’s chatbot doesn’t push back or try to challenge or trouble Abby in any way, and strangely, O Horizon’s plot does not try to challenge or trouble the viewer, either. Throughout its hundred-minute run time, hardly anything happens. There is no real conflict, no real rising tension, no climax, no real denouement. O Horizon gives you what AI thinks you want: no struggle, no tension, nothing unpleasant, no pushback.At one point, the AI develops the ability to call Abby of its own initiative—you think this may signal a turn in the narrative, some malevolent warning about technology getting out of control, but it doesn’t. At another point, Abby begins dating a man named Douglas (Avi Nash), and the viewer thinks maybe he will turn out to be a jerk, but he doesn’t. The viewer thinks perhaps her AI dead father will get jealous, or otherwise turn haywire. He doesn’t. You may think Abby will have to learn to let go of her father to be with her boyfriend, but she doesn’t! The few conflicts that do arise have such low stakes that they are resolved within minutes and forgotten almost immediately. No character conflict has any kind of lasting ramification or seems to matter for any serious length of time. Anytime it seems like there might be any kind of friction, the plot backs off.It’s as if the story is as deferential and sycophantic as AI itself. O Horizon gives you what AI thinks you want: no struggle, no tension, nothing unpleasant, no pushback. It is a movie made by real humans, but it feels like it’s made by AI, made without an awareness of what makes film interesting or ultimately pleasurable. For one of the most basic reasons we experience narrative art, be it a film or a novel or a television show, is some kind of tension, some kind of drama. No one actually wants a smooth, flat surface. We do not want art to smile placidly back at us for one hundred minutes telling us we’re excellent, that the world is lucky to have us, that nothing matters.We’ve known this for thousands of years; it’s one of the most basic lessons of Aristotle’s Poetics. Catharsis—the purging of negative emotions that happens through the experience of watching something difficult; of dealing with a character’s actual pain and suffering; of being engaged with issues of actual tension, drama, hardship, impossible decisions, insurmountable odds, tragedy, and resolve in the face of despair—matters not just because it allows us a safe venue to release these emotions, but because it gives us perspective on our own troubles and hardships. Grappling with pain through art is one of those very existential things that makes us human, that allows us to experience the world fresh and anew. That word itself—catharsis—has remained so elusive since Aristotle’s days, so hard to pin down, precisely because it’s hard to say exactly what it is we need from great art. There is no simple definition, no easy formula, no predictable algorithm that can deliver it to us. It seems cheesy to have to say this, but we live at a moment when AI-generated art that fails to deliver this is being passed off as legitimate, and sometimes just stating the obvious becomes an act of resistance against this dreck.Dulled of sensation, the world of O Horizon is emptied. The same opiate that griefbots would offer the grieving, Rotzler’s narrative offers her viewers: soporific, painless.In a strange way, the fantasy of painlessness is particularly fraught for Rotzler. Her previous films appeared under her maiden name, Sackler. Her grandfather, Raymond Sackler, was one of three brothers who founded Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company behind OxyContin; her father, Jonathan, sat on its board and was its vice president for years.While Rotzler herself has never worked for Purdue Pharma, in 2023 Artnet reported that a number of the production crew of O Horizon became uncomfortable during filming, viewing Abby’s relationship with her father as being an autobiographical depiction of Rotzler’s relationship with her own father, who died in 2020, and an attempt to whitewash his image.In the decades when Jonathan Sackler was involved with Purdue Pharma, it generated billions of dollars by distributing Oxycontin throughout the United States and abroad. In 2007, the company pleaded guilty to misleading the public about the addictive properties of OxyContin, and the year Jonathan died the company reached a settlement in which it admitted that for years it had “knowingly and intentionally conspired and agreed with others to aid and abet” doctors in dispensing the drug “without a legitimate medical purpose.” (The consulting firm McKinsey & Company additionally agreed in 2024 to a $650 million settlement for its work in helping “turbocharge” Purdue’s sales of OxyContin during the epidemic.) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that between 1999 and 2018 alone, 450,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses.The father of O Horizon is a kindly, generous man—a sculptor, a fan of David Bowie, and a reader of scientific journals. It was this depiction that apparently caused friction among the crew during filming. “The script is extremely parallel to Madeleine’s experience of the loss of her dad, and clearly very related to what he did with drugs,” set dresser Caroline Pigou told Artnet. “Everyone on the crew would talk about how fucked up and weird it was that this movie was getting made in the first place.”Rotzler has insisted that the film is not autobiographical. “This film is about artificial intelligence and there are no parallels between my father or his work and the characters in the film,” she told Artnet through a representative. Fine. That’s her take. Still, the film’s theme of painlessness is one that resonates with the family business of selling pain relief; and the film’s obliviousness to the shallowness of the AI bot’s consolations echoes with Purdue’s years of denying the dangers of its opioids.Everywhere, it seems, we are faced with bullshit technology and bad art that offer false promises to take away all our pain.It’s not the first time Rotzler has proven determined to ignore the ways in which her films might seem to audiences to be in conversation with her family’s scandals. In a New Yorker feature on her earlier work, the documentary It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It and the feature O.G., both filmed inside an actual penitentiary in Indiana, Nick Paumgarten wrote that “one might suppose that Sackler’s concern and sympathy for the incarcerated is some kind of expiation,” given that so many incarcerated Americans are there for opioid-related offenses, but she “thinks this is baloney.… It pains her to think that the perception of her project, and of the hard work of everyone involved, would be tainted in some way by her pedigree.” In Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Patrick Radden Keefe relates how Jeffrey Wright, the star of O.G., emailed her before the film opened, asking her to address the “elephant” in the room: why so many of the men were in the prison where they’d been filming. “You never spoke to me about any of that. I was aware and only once tried to broach the subject with you. You didn’t open up about it.” As the premiere approached, Wright wanted to know: “Do you think you should take into consideration that this will become part of the dialogue around these films?” According to Keefe, she never wrote Wright back.If there’s an animating impulse in O Horizon beneath its facile resolution of grief, it’s denial: the steadfast inability to contemplate how this story of a daughter conjuring a smoother, simpler version of her late father might play to audiences who have followed years of news of the opioid epidemic and the Sacklers’ central role in it.O Horizon is not much of a thing in and of itself. But it offers an almost perfect distillation of our relationship to pain in 2026. Everywhere, it seems, we are faced with bullshit technology and bad art that offer false promises to take away all our pain, all the while completely misunderstanding what that pain is, why we suffer it, and what it means to actually endure it.Rotzler’s uncle Richard Sackler once wrote of those overdosing from his company’s drug, “These are criminals.… Why should they be entitled to our sympathies?” Why indeed. I think of Susan Crathern, whose son Kevin broke two teeth on the playground when he was 10 and was given OxyContin for the pain, his mother assured by the dentist that it was not addictive. Ten years later, he died from an accidental overdose after years of struggling from addiction. In her 2020 testimony to Congress on the damage wrought by the opioid crisis, Crathern wrote: “In my mind his death is a truth that can’t be true.”This is how grief actually is for too many people, down in the wreckage, where it is a paradox that can’t easily be solved, one that can’t be glibly assuaged with pabulum and clichés, a thing not to be solved with subscription fees, engagement algorithms, and prefabricated compliments but faced with rage and guilt and sorrow and carried every day without reprieve. For too many people’s lived reality, grief is the unimaginable weight of memories, the ugly truth that can’t be true. There’s no money to be made from it, so it gets hidden away, pushed down out of sight, past the detritus, down here, below the horizon.

Donald Trump dreamed of turning the Lincoln Reflecting Pool “American Flag Blue” in advance of celebrations for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4. Instead, he got a pungent, bright green embarrassment. National Parks employees have yet to fully remove the algal bloom that sprang up after Trump’s ill-fated paint job, despite applying vacuums, hydrogen peroxide, and nanobubbles to the problem; the next step will be to drain the now-swampy basin for the second time this month and restore the blue sealant that has been floating to the surface in unsightly chunks. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Washington D.C.’s Department of Energy and the Environment was conducting an investigation into what killed the multiple ducks that have been found dead in the pool’s waters. It’s all a bit too on the nose. The tacky $16.4 million vanity project was carried out in part by giving a $1.7 million no-bid contract to a firm called (appropriately enough) Greenwater Services, which is owned by an already scandal-laden Trump loyalist, John J. Cafaro. On June 15, workers reported that one or two of the four algae-killing machines Greenwater used weren’t working at any given time. Trump has—without evidence—blamed the algae problem on “vandals,” alleging that anonymous hoodlums sabotaged the pool with knives and fertilizer; this does not seem to be true. Still, as of June 24, the Parks Police, National Guard, and U.S. Marshals have been patrolling the usually placid site. As of Tuesday, six arrests had been made. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt claimed—also without evidence—that those detained included “longtime donors to the Democrat Party, to Barack Obama, to ActBlue.” Newly installed fencing around the pool is apparently meant to deter what Interior Department spokeswoman Katie Martin has called an “increase in vandalism by leftist activists.” Trump pledged to drain the metaphorical swamp. Instead, he’s created one.Algae, however, are much more than either smelly sludge or a tidy narrative device. While algae play several critical roles in freshwater and saltwater ecosystems, algal blooms like the one now bedeviling the Reflecting Pool are “a growing problem,” said marine biologist Gregory Dick. He’s the director of the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, or CIGLR, a partnership between the University of Michigan and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. “They’re becoming more frequent as water pollution becomes more of an issue, and they grow more in warming condition,” he explained. “The Reflecting Pool is not an exception.” The government’s newfound war on algae contrasts starkly with its repeated attempts to defund the experts who protect the public against harmful algal blooms not appearing on Washington, D.C., landmarks. The Trump administration’s cuts to research funding and federal agencies like NOAA have already undermined the federal government’s essential role in monitoring, responding to, and understanding harmful algal blooms. Deeper cuts outlined in next year’s federal budget would lower the public’s defenses against those blooms just as climate change helps them proliferate.Trump’s talk of vandals and knives notwithstanding, you don’t need conspiracy theories to explain how algal blooms happen. Experts suspect that the Reflecting Pool algal bloom began as a cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. Those generally grow thanks to abundant nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen, warm temperatures, and calm waters. “The Reflecting Pool has those three ingredients,” Dick said. There’s no official definition for what constitutes a harmful algal bloom, and the one in the Reflecting Pool hasn’t received that designation. But they tend to give off a foul smell and are known to kill birds. Cyanobacteria produce a toxin called microcystin that can fatally poison animals and cause nausea, vomiting, and skin rashes in humans. A 2014 microcystin outbreak in Lake Erie left nearly half a million people in the greater Toledo area without running water for three days.An enormous amount of local, state, and federal resources are needed to keep the country’s waterways safe. NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab—which houses CIGLR—monitors and responds to algal blooms throughout the Great Lakes watershed, including Lake Erie. Researchers there use a range of technologies to keep tabs on algae in real time. Remote sensors let them track the distribution of harmful algal blooms. Buoys and remotely operated vehicles measure nutrient levels in the water, and scientists analyze physical samples to understand which species of algae are present at any given time and what environmental conditions cause them to give off certain toxins. If the scientists spot a potential threat, NOAA alerts municipal water treatment plants so that they can proactively safeguard the water sources that some 40 million people use to hydrate, cook, and shower. Algal blooms pose dangers not only to public and environmental health but to local economies that rely on revenue from tourism and fishing operations, which depend on the Great Lakes Lab to help determine when beaches should be closed down and which fish are safe to catch and sell. In spite of its crucial role in monitoring blooms, the lab lost roughly 40 percent of its staff last year. That was thanks to cuts imposed by the Department of Government Efficiency, which laid off newly hired and promoted staff and encourged federal employees to accept buyouts and retire early. The lab still hasn’t received all of the funds it was appropriated by Congress. The White House’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2027 also includes an 18 percent cut to NOAA’s overall budget; it would completely eliminate funds for “Ocean, Coastal and Great Lakes Research.” Funding for the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies—the technical backbone of the National Hurricane Center, which houses researchers that forecast harmful algal blooms—is also at risk.Thankfully, these sorts of proposals tend to be aspirational. The budget Congress passed last year avoided the steepest cuts to NOAA outlined in the White House’s FY2026. So far, Project 2025’s authors in the Trump administration have not been able to follow through on their pledge to dismantle and privatize the agency. But those funds remain under constant threat. What was already a bare-bones team at the Great Lakes Environmental Lab, or GLERL, pre-DOGE has had to make do with a lot less.The reduced funding has already had some very concrete effects. Some of the Lab’s autonomous sample processors—which collect samples and measure water quality—“did not go out last year because of funding delays and lack of personnel,” Dick said. “Reduction in support and capacity for places like GLERL would have big impacts on boots-on-the-ground operations” he added, endangering researchers’ ability to provide up-to-date measurements and forecasting to (among many others) beach managers, drinking-water treatment facilities, and charter boat fishing captains. Dick worries too that continued cuts will hamper researchers’ ability to understand how algal blooms are responding to rising temperatures and climate-fueled extreme weather. Cyanobacteria thrive in warmer temperatures. Heavy storms can wash their favorite nutrients into the water, fueling algal growth. Lake Superior, for instance, was long thought to be “the coldest and cleanest of all the Great Lakes,” Dick said. In the 2010s, it suddenly started seeing substantial algal blooms, following a series of 500-year storms that washed off nutrients from the landscape. Lake Superior is also among the fastest-warming lakes on earth; over the past 30 years, summer surface water temperatures have increased by five degrees.Unlike Lake Superior, the Reflecting Pool has long hosted algae. As Washington’s summers become increasingly swamplike, eliminating the algae altogether may well prove impossible. As it has stretched out over the last several weeks, the Reflecting Pool debacle has been something of a microcosm for Trumpist governance, combining handouts to inexperienced loyalists with gaudy kitsch and baseless accusations against the left. It is also about as good a summary as any for the right’s approach to a climate crisis that’s fueling harmful algal blooms the world over: When it becomes impossible to keep denying a problem you helped cause, blame it on your political enemies and try to throw them in jail.

In 2019, I began a large-scale reporting project: I sent out surveys to 10,000 people incarcerated in the United States in women’s prisons on murder or manslaughter charges. I was trying to understand the scale of “criminalized survival,” as it’s been termed: wherein a person—almost always a woman or girl—is arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated for actions she took to protect herself or a loved one from physical or sexual violence. I received more than 1,000 replies. I found that at minimum, 30 percent of my respondents were criminalized survivors, and I knew I had to write a book. I would interweave my survey findings with three deeply reported stories of individual survivors. Early on, I settled on two women as my subjects, but I hadn’t found a third. Then, a few years into the project, I came upon TC Brooks’s letter. She wrote that she was serving 25 years to life for killing her stepfather after “abuse, more abuse.” She had spent most of her time in prison working to heal and help others. TC included a booklet she had created to educate prisoners about domestic and sexual violence. She’d signed the cover: “Caged no longer on the inside, I sing a song of rebirth. Free from the inside.” Immediately, I began trying to get in touch with TC. Her story was remarkable. She would soon become the third subject of Unreasonable Women.On July 10, 2019, TC sat before the parole board for the fifth time. She compared the process to being a human roulette ball; she’d been trying to stop the wheel for decades, but it kept spinning. And she kept bouncing around, hoping for some good fortune to strike.The hearing was overseen by Kevin Chappell, a Department of Corrections career man who had been working for the prisons even longer than TC had been inside them. He had risen in the ranks from guard to lieutenant to administrator to deputy warden, employed in men’s facilities across the state, from Folsom to San Quentin.TC once again detailed the extensive sexual abuse she had endured, the abuse that led to her murder conviction, and she recounted her fear of being subject to scrutiny and doubt. She once again vowed rehabilitation and accountability, once again unpacked her traumatic past, a past that she had held deep shame about for so long, before a group of imposing strangers. Chappell wanted to know why TC hadn’t been able to prevent her own rape on the night of her crime. He wanted to know why she hadn’t spoken up sooner about the sexual abuse she had experienced. She wished she could tell him the truth: ’Cause I didn’t wanna be in a room like this, sitting in a chair like this, talking to a man like you.After two hours, the board broke to deliberate. When they returned 20 minutes later, they told TC and Lilli Paratore, a staff attorney at a legal nonprofit, that they would, in a rare continuance, need additional time to make their decision. They needed to investigate TC’s “violence risk.”On December 6, 2019, TC and Paratore returned to the parole hearing room at the prison. Commissioner Chappell told TC that while they had taken her youth into account, they could not consider the abuse a mitigating factor.“We found no information to corroborate your claims of the severe sexual or physical assault at the hands of the victim,” he said. TC still posed “an unreasonable risk to public safety.” She’d be heading back to the California California Women’s Facility. There, he continued, she should focus on creating “healthy boundaries in regards to your relationship with your mom.… I think you’ll learn a lot about yourself in that regard.” She could apply for parole again in a few years. He wished her luck.TC was accustomed to parole denials, but she was crushed that the commissioner had doubted her about the abuse. “It took so many years and so much courage to face those demons,” she said. “How dare he?”When Chappell spoke to her, she had been hot with anger, but she had to suppress it. If they saw a hint of fury, she was never, ever getting out. Paratore also presented as calm, though she had internally gone, she told me, to “a place of rage.” She spent weeks writing informal appeals late into the night, arguing that the board had revictimized TC. The questions Chappell had asked, Paratore believed, “reveal a disturbing lack of understanding by the panel about the dynamics of power and control in abusive relationships and how fear, shame, and embarrassment prevent survivors from coming forward about their experiences.”A month later, in January 2020, TC and Paratore reconvened. They decided that parole wasn’t happening. “Unless her story changed significantly and she just lied,” Paratore told me. “Which, you know, I can’t counsel a client to do.”Paratore wondered: Maybe there was a different route, one she hadn’t quite put her finger on. She discussed it with her colleagues. Nancy Lemon, the domestic violence expert and law professor, had remained invested in TC’s case. Lemon knew Nancy O’Malley, the elected district attorney in Alameda County, a woman whose predecessor had successfully tried TC.The D.A.’s office, no matter who led it, had always opposed parole, which was typical for prosecutors. But a new law had recently come into effect in California, allowing a D.A. to support a resentencing for someone who may not have had a fair trial outcome. Lemon and Paratore thought that if O’Malley got to know TC’s case, her office might suggest a new sentence to a judge, who in turn could hand TC a sentence that would mean she’d served her time.O’Malley met with Lemon and Paratore but made it clear that she didn’t want to be involved in resentencing. In Paratore’s interpretation, it was a political gamble: Were TC to reoffend, the D.A. didn’t want to be linked to letting her out. However, in a highly unusual move, Paratore told me, O’Malley said that if TC requested a commutation from the governor, asking that her sentence be shortened, she would back the request.Paratore began to immediately compile a packet to be sent to Governor Gavin Newsom. As promised, O’Malley wrote a letter of support for TC. She asked that TC not be allowed to live with her mother, since the relationship was problematic. Otherwise, she wrote, “as all parties are seeking the outcome in the name of justice, I hope to see Ms. Brooks released soon.”Newsom had a clear path to letting TC go. The same D.A. who had always opposed release now endorsed it. There were no roadblocks for the governor.In January 2021, Paratore submitted TC’s packet.On March 12, the Central California Women’s Facility was still under Covid lockdown. Nobody was allowed out of their pods except for critical workers, like laundry or kitchen employees.“Brooks, open your door,” an officer said over the intercom.TC poked her head out.“Put on your states. You’re going to B Yard.”“The Cop Shop” in B Yard was a building where the warden took calls, and where, as far as the prisoners could tell, the rest of the guards sat around all day, eating food from large tubs they’d brought in from home. It was also where the phone conferences were held.TC sped across the grounds.“Where you going, Brooks?” an officer asked.“Gotta go to Bravo yard,” she said. “To the program office.”“What for?”“I’m goin’ home.”“You sure?”“I’m pretty sure.”She approached the Cop Shop and took a seat on a bench. A few prisoners filed in and out of a room. Then it was her turn.The warden was waiting. She stood before him.“Brooks?”“Yes, sir.”“What’s your number?”“W45882.”“You know why you’re here?”“I believe I do. Am I gonna get a phone call?”“You are. Do you know who’s gonna call you?”“The governor’s office.”The warden looked her over and leaned back. “What do you think of your stay here?” he asked.“It was a long haul,” TC said diplomatically. “I’ve learned a lot.”“I read your file,” the warden said. “The past got you here. And I am sorry about your past.”The phone rang. The warden answered and then handed the phone to TC.A woman was calling on behalf of Governor Newsom. She had the pleasure and privilege, she told TC, of informing her that Newsom had signed her commutation paperwork. He agreed that she deserved a second chance. TC was ordered for immediate release, within the week. Was there anything she wished to say to Mr. Newsom, the woman asked.“Tell him I appreciate the second chance, and he will not regret this decision,” TC said. “I promise him, I’m gonna be a feel-good story he can tell.”She headed back to her cell. She needed to concentrate on getting her affairs in order. She had been confined for 31 years.She had seven days to go.From the book Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival, by Justine van der Leun. Copyright © 2026 by Justine van der Leun. Reprinted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

You were always funnier than most, so I’m waitingfor this joke to land. When I hear the phrase “graveerror,” I think of you being lifted out of the ground& your mother loving you better. I think of yourtombstone hitting your stepdad over the head.Grave error: the words slipping from their mouthsas your skin turns back elastic, as flesh reattachesto your bones. Old friend, it’s been 10 years.Grief would be easier if you were dead. Instead,our songs, your voice, the sticky dampnessof your skin is vivid enough in my mind that Ican make a reader see you like I did. They canfeel the goose bumps forming on my skin as youlifted me up out of my misery. I still see things& go “damn, he would love this.” I still expect youto come across some corner while I’m walking& tell me it was all a grave error. You’ve been alivethis whole time. The poet wants their words backlike I want you to connect the setup to the punch line,tell me why I’ve been sleeping with a corpse.

In one corner above a field: a kid’s drawing of the sun. But with fat, round rays, like yellow petals, and a smiling lion’s face—cleft lip attached to a pink, upside-down triangle nose; black ovals for eyes. Something in me has awoken. A spark. A love. A sensation, by definition, must be felt. And then die off. No one still talks about the dentist who killed the lion named Cecil. I shut that in a box, along with learning that cats wounded in the wild don’t heal—that they die without the strength to hunt. I don’t understand much. Not suffering. Not the nature of risk. My fears—captive, domestic—yawn and flex their feet. Another version of me was sixteen and drove a yellow truck named Frisky. She drank with her friends beneath the shade of a tree. She could let her thoughts out. But she never put them down.

It was rumored to have been made from the treeOf the first spinning place. Some said the sideOf a Spanish slaver spit from the sea.Others church bench, chunk of stage, courthouse wall.A widow swore her grandfather had helpedDrag it from his swamped fields after a storm.One leg longer than the others, it leanedLeft. It belonged to no one and was ours.Years pressed down on it with tobacco ash, peachPits, coffee rings, the impress of elbows,A knife-mark widened by a thousand thumbs.You can’t run your hand across the surfaceWithout passing through three or four fablesAnd a splinter that always finds the hand.Such a common thing in an uncommonWorld: this table, so worn down that it shines.There’s room here. There’s never any room here.It’s hard to keep clean. We all eat off it.

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