prompts and give you more accurate responses. But you don’t have to pay $20 per month for access to this software. That more powerful GPT-4 AI chat experience is also free through Microsoft’s Copilot AI tool, which is available on Mac and Windows PCs, via Copilot apps for iPhone and Android, and at copilot.microsoft.com. “But don’t let it speak for you in an unnatural way—using words that you wouldn’t use, for example—or people will know that AI wrote it,” Edwards cautions. RD Delivering—on and off the Field Andrew Lewis is the pitching coach for a collegiate summer baseball team in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He’s also an OB-GYN. One balmy night, his pitching and catching lives converged: Dr. Lewis got an urgent call at the top of the seventh inning—his patient was in labor. He sped to the hospital. Nurses threw a gown over his uniform, his patient pushed twice, and he was back at the ballpark by the ninth. RESERVOIR DOTS/GETTY IMAGES (AI) WAKE FOREST MAGAZINE Cover Story rd.com 49
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STREAMING ON THE illustrations by Sean McCabe A closer look at all the ways you can watch TV today BY Caroline Fanning TECH these days, if you don’t stream, it feels an awful lot as if you’re swimming against the stream. When friends buzz about a must-watch show on streaming, you’re left out of the conversation. Or, suddenly, big games are increasingly difficult to locate on familiar channels (or have entirely disappeared). This January, NBCUniversal aired an NFL playoff game exclusively on streaming for the first time in history. In most of the United States (other than rd.com | june 2024 51
reader’s digest 52 june 2024 the two home cities), if you wanted to watch the Kansas City Chiefs duke it out with the Miami Dolphins in the AFC wild-card game, you forked over the $5.99 Peacock monthly subscription fee. (Peacock doesn’t offer a free trial, and neither does Netflix, Max or Disney+, while Hulu, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+ and YouTube TV do.) The gamble paid off: Peacock gained 2.8 million subscribers. These days, streaming is more straightforward than ever. If you have a newer TV, all you have to do is select one of the built-in apps and sign up to start watching. You have more options with devices such as an Apple TV, Chromecast or Roku, and you don’t have to be a tech whiz to operate them. In addition to giving you more to watch, cutting the cable cord could save you money. If you sign up for all the big services listed below (sans YouTube TV) at the basic tiers with ads, you’ll pay $63.92/month. With an average cable bill of $143 per month, you’d save about $230 in the first year alone—even after adding in a stand-alone broadband service for around $60 per month. Here’s the rundown on the major services and the big shows and movies they offer. Netflix The granddaddy of streaming built a dynasty on bingeable shows with established fan bases, like Friends and Grey’s Anatomy. Then Netflix went all in on award-winning and fan-favorite originals such as House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, Stranger Things, Squid Game, Beef and The Queen’s Gambit. Now it’s also the go-to for comedy specials with the likes of Jim Gaffigan, Kevin James, Ali Wong, Gabriel Iglesias, Trevor Noah, Mo’Nique and more, making it indispensable to stand-up junkies. Price: $6.99/month with ads on two devices; $15.49/month ad-free on two devices with one extra member slot; $22.99/month ad-free on four devices with two extra member slots. Devices must connect to one Wi-Fi network, or you can add extra members from outside your household for an additional $7.99/month apiece. Free for some T-Mobile and Verizon wireless and internet customers. Hulu Once little more than Netflix’s understudy, Hulu is coming for top billing. Since Disney purchased the streamer in 2019, it has turned Hulu into a behemoth: A basic subscription includes original Hulu shows Only Murders in the Building, The Bear, Mrs. America, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fargo and Little Fires Everywhere, as well as films such as Nomadland, The Last Duel and Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. You can add Disney+ and ESPN+ for just a few dollars extra. Opt for Hulu’s Live TV tier, and you’ll get 95-plus channels including the big networks, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox (and the familiar news
rd.com 53 Tech broadcasts, awards shows and sporting events that air there). Price: $7.99/month with ads; $17.99/ month ad-free; $14.99/month bundled with Disney+ and ESPN+ (all with ads); $24.99/month bundled with Disney+ (both ad-free) and ESPN+ (which always has ads); $76.99/month for Live TV. Password share as you please, but only two devices can stream at once. Free for some T-Mobile customers. If your household includes students, they can subscribe for just $1.99/month and bundle Hulu with a Spotify subscription for $5.99/month. Max Max’s predecessor, HBO Go, was more a library for HBO to shelve past seasons of its hits such as Game of Thrones and The Sopranos. Since 2022, when parent company WarnerMedia merged with Discovery, it’s no longer HB-Only. Viewers can parse through Discovery titles like House Hunters, Chopped and Say Yes to the Dress alongside HBO triumphs True Detective, The Wire, Succession and The White Lotus, and feature films such as Dune, Barbie, The Revenant and Don’t Worry Darling. Price: $9.99/month for two streams at once with ads; $15.99/month for two streams at once ad-free; $19.99/month for four streams at once ad-free. Free for AT&T and Cricket Wireless customers. Some Verizon customers are eligible for a $10/month Max and Netflix bundle. Apple TV+ Apple’s is the only major service with exclusively original programming and no ads. That means no backlog of old shows to binge, only the new cuttingedge series and films produced by Apple Studios that tend to cap best-of yearend roundups, including Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, Severance, Prehistoric Planet, Masters of the Air and Killers of the Flower Moon. Price: $9.99/month. Any six devices can stream at once. Free for T-Mobile and Verizon customers and Student Apple Music subscribers. When you buy an Apple iPhone, iPad, Apple TV or Mac, you get three months free. Peacock NBCUniversal’s streamer is loaded with bingeworthy favorites including Monk, Saturday Night Live, The Office, 30 Rock and a Peacock original that’s worth a month’s subscription price: Poker Face, from Knives Out director Rian Johnson. You can also watch livestreams of networks including NBC, NBC Sports and Hallmark Channel. And if you’re a fan of the original series and audiencecreated clip shows from our sister brands FailArmy and People Are Awesome, you can catch them here too. Price: $5.99/month with ads; $11.99/ month ad-free. Any three devices can stream at once. Free forInstacart+ customers. Students can subscribe for $1.99/month.
What About Live Sports? There’s no single be-all and end-all streaming service for full access to live sports—yet. Just as some NFL games air on Fox and others on NBC, streaming rights to sports vary across services. We did our best to hash out what’s available where, and how much it’ll cost to stream live sporting events on each service. Hulu + Live TV MLB, NBA, WNBA, NCAA March Madness, 2024 Tour de France, Master’s Tournament, PGA Tour, NCAA football, F1, NFL, NHL, NASCAR, MLS, Wimbledon, U.S. Open, Australian Open, French Open, WWE. Included in $76.99/month Live TV base plan Apple TV+ MLS Season Pass, Friday Night Baseball. Included in $9.99/month base plan Peacock Sunday Night Football, MLB, Premier League, IndyCar, Big Ten Football, Big Ten Men’s Basketball, Big Ten Women’s Basketball, WWE, PGA Tour, MLB Sunday Leadoff, Paris 2024. Included in $5.99/month base plan Max MLB, NHL, NBA, NCAA March Madness, USWNT, USMNT. Base plus $9.99/month ESPN+ Monday Night Football, UFC, NFL, College Football, NHL, MLB, Australian Open, Wimbledon, U.S. Open, PGA Tour, Masters, National Lacrosse League. $10.99/month Amazon Prime Video Thursday Night Football, WNBA, NWSL, NFL, UEFA Champions League, NBA, MLB. Included in $8.99/month base plan Paramount+ with Showtime NFL (when broadcasting in your local CBS market), SEC on CBS, The Masters, PGA Tour, Women’s Soccer, MMA, NCAA March Madness. $11.99/month 54 june 2024
rd.com 55 Amazon Prime Video In addition to a sterling set of originals (Reacher, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Boys, Fleabag, Bosch, Air, The Tender Bar, My Policeman, Being the Ricardos), you can rent or buy almost any title the streamer doesn’t carry. And no, you don’t have to subscribe to Amazon Prime, but yes, you do already have Amazon Prime Video if you do. Price: $8.99/month with ads; $11.98/ month ad-free; Amazon Prime subscribers have to shell out an additional $2.99/month for ad-free Prime Video atop their regular shopping subscription ($17.98/month total). Any three devices can stream at once. Free for Some existing Metro by T-Mobile customers (the offer was discontinued for new customers). Disney+ Disney+ is the exclusive home of Disney titles old and new like The Lion King, 101 Dalmatians, The Princess Bride, Remember the Titans, Hidden Figures, The Mandalorian, WandaVision, Frozen and Moana, as well as megafranchises Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Avengers, Avatar and Spider-Man. So it’s a must for Disnerds and superfans. Price: $7.99/month with ads; $13.99/ month ad-free. Any four devices can stream at once. Free for Spectrum TV customers. Some Verizon plans include the Disney Bundle (Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu) for $10/month. Paramount+ Paramount+ greatly expanded its offerings when CBS merged with Viacom in 2019, acquiring the MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and BET catalogs, and again in 2023 when it began offering a savvy Showtime bundle. Much of the CBS streamer’s programming can lean gritty (The Offer, Yellowjackets, 1883, Tulsa King, Billions, Mayor of Kingstown), but it also features plenty of classics to cleanse your palate before bed (NCIS, Everybody Loves Raymond, Star Trek, I Love Lucy, Freaks and Geeks). Price: $5.99/month with ads; $11.99/ month mostly ad-free with Showtime. Any three devices can stream at once. Free for Walmart+ subscribers. YouTube TV YouTube TV is composed of the 100- plus live channels (or 30-plus Spanish networks under the Spanish Plan) you can find on cable and is scrollable via a familiar TV guide with a DVR function. If a show or movie has aired on one of those networks, full seasons are likely available for free via video on demand or for purchase. Any live sports airing on cable channels like ESPN, FS1 and CBS Sports Network are streaming here too. Of all the services, this one is best for cord-cutters seeking the path of least resistance. You must have a Google account to subscribe. Price: $72.99/month; $34.99/month for the Spanish Plan. Any three devices can stream at once. Tech reader’s digest
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Doing Dad’s Bucket List Laura Carney’s father died suddenly, with unfinished business. So she started checking off the items for him. BY Sydney Page from the washington post INSPIRATION rd.com | june 2024 57 illustrations by Dana Smith
58 june 2024 “She had been wanting to find a way to understand her dad a little better,” says Carney’s husband, Steven Seighman. “As soon as we saw the list, it was immediately like, This is it.” Her brother, David, was the first to spot it. He uncovered the treasure in 2016—13 years after their father, Michael “Mick” Carney, was tragically killed when he was 54 by a distracted driver. The tattered paper was stashed away in a brown suede pouch, along with her father’s driver’s license, a ring and various trinkets. It was her late father’s bucket list, scribbled on three pages torn from a spiral notebook. Laura Carney looked down at it, then she glanced up at her husband. Without a word spoken, they both knew: “I needed to finish it,” says Carney, 46.
ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF LAURA CARNEY VIA THE WASHINGTON POST rd.com 59 The list, Carney says, was written in 1978, the year she was born. It had 60 tasks, five of which had already been checked off, including “do a comedy monologue in a nightclub” and “see a World Series game live.” One was marked “failed”—“pay back my dad $1,000 plus interest.” That left 54 items for Carney to complete. The tasks ranged from relatively simple undertakings, like “swim the width of a river” and “grow a watermelon,” to more complicated endeavors, like “correspond with the pope” and “be invited to a political convention.” Several tasks were seemingly impossible (mainly, “talk with the president”). Still, Carney was undeterred. She was 25, an aspiring writer living in New York City, when her father was hit by a driver who ran a red light while chatting on a cellphone in Limerick, Pennsylvania. In the immediate aftermath of her father’s death, “I didn’t talk about it,” says Carney, who is now based in Montclair, New Jersey. “I really had some shame about it, because it felt like such an undignified way to die.” A few years later, though, she became an activist for safe driving, writing articles about the subject, fundraising and giving talks and interviews. She met a group of people “who were trying to do something to solve what had become a much more common way to die,” Carney says. But the trauma of her father’s death lingered. For Carney, the bucket list was an unexpected opportunity to work through her pain and reconnect with her dad. “I found a way to keep his spirit alive in my life,” she says. “It was a thing I needed to do so I could get back in touch with my real self.” When she first got the list, she crafted a tentative timeline. She put off the pricier items—including going to the Super Bowl and visiting Europe—as well as the item that scared her most: “Drive a Corvette.” “The first couple ones that I did happened organically,” Carney says. She had already signed up for a marathon, which allowed her to check “run 10 miles straight” off the list. Another item she completed early on was “talk with the president.” She learned that former President Jimmy Carter—who would have been president when Carney’s father wrote the list—taught Sunday school in Georgia. She and her husband flew there to meet him. For some items, Carney used poetic license, she says. For instance, one task was “sing at my daughter’s wedding.” “MY DAD WAS SUCH A DREAMER. HE KNEW WHAT IT MEANT TO BE ALIVE.” Inspiration reader’s digest
60 june 2024 “The way we honored him at my wedding was we drank a cabernet that he had purchased in 1978,” says Carney, adding that he had left a note on the bottle, which said “open on Laura’s wedding day.” “It had been sitting there, waiting,” Carney says. “I was thinking, Well, our bellies were singing.” While Carney completed many of the bucket list tasks on her own—including a two-week trip to Europe—“it didn’t really feel like I was doing things alone, because I knew my dad was with me,” she says. “I feel like my relationship with him is very present.” Carney’s brother and mother accompanied her for some activities, and her husband joined her for others. “After about the first year or two of doing this project, he would say to me that the person he had always seen in
rd.com 61 THE WASHINGTON POST ( JAN. 20, 2023), COPYRIGHT © 2023 BY THE WASHINGTON POST. me was coming out,” Carney says. “I had all these layers of grief and trauma and fear that I was leaving behind.” On Dec. 27, 2022, Carney checked off the last task on her dad’s list: “Have five songs recorded.” She picked a few of her father’s favorites, including “The Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie and the Beatles’ “Good Night.” She recorded them in a studio and did the final touches at home. “My fondest memories of him are him singing to us before we went to bed at night,” Carney says. “It felt like I was singing with him again.” Completing the bucket list enabled Carney to get to know her dad in a way she hadn’t had the chance to—and never thought she would. “These were his goals and his dreams,” she says. “It helped me understand him better, to see him as a full human being instead of just my embarrassing dad. And doing that helped me to understand myself.” Like his daughter, Mick Carney was a writer. He spent his days working as a salesman and his spare time singing, writing and performing. “My dad was such a dreamer,” Carney says. “He knew what it meant to be alive; he knew how to have fun.” Finishing her father’s bucket list was the most fulfilling experience of her life, she says. So she decided to write her own bucket list. “I really encourage everybody to write down what they want to do,” she says. “It helps you start living more intentionally. And when you’re living intentionally, you feel more of a sense of purpose in your life.” Carney says she isn’t afraid of leaving some of the items on her own list unchecked. “Even if this doesn’t happen in my lifetime,” she says, “maybe somebody will do it for me. I like that idea.” Inspiration reader’s digest All Over the Map Upon closer inspection, geography is full of counterintuitive facts, such as: Most Canadians live south of Seattle. Reno, Nevada, is farther west than Los Angeles, California. New York City is farther west than Santiago, Chile. The Panama Canal’s Atlantic entrance is farther west than its Pacific entrance. West Virginia is not exactly west of Virginia; the only direction in which it extends beyond Virginia as a whole is north. ATLAS OBSCURA
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CREATIVE CROP/GETTY IMAGES HORROR STORIES illustrations by Jonathan Carlson BY Bill Hangley Jr. J estine Wikenson thought his investment was secure. His house in Palm Beach County, Florida, was almost paid off. His family was happy. He liked his neighbors. His homeowners association (HOA)—a privately managed housing development—worked well. The fees were manageable, and he didn’t mind its voluminous rules. In short, he felt at home. Then one day he looked in the mailbox and found out that his HOA was about to sell his house over a debt of $1,335. “We have a home that’s worth almost a million dollars. We’ve never paid our mortgage one day late,” Wikenson says. “I never imagined that they would do that to someone who was willing to pay.” Wikenson had missed a quarterly dues payment in 2021 and forgotten all about it. Apparently, so had the HOA. Wikenson says he had paid in full for 2022 and 2023, and no one mentioned the unpaid debt. But late in 2023, someone found it, and rather than bring the oversight to his attention, the HOA took legal action. The next thing he knew, he was on the hook for a hefty amount. Between penalties and the HOA’s legal fees, the bill had grown to about $5,000. “The community—we love it. Our kids love it. I would never say anything bad about the community,” he says. But in this instance, it “really did not feel NATIONAL INTEREST The good, the bad and the utterly bizarre! rd.com | june 2024 63
reader’s digest 64 june 2024 like a community. Like you were only as good as your dollar.” Wikenson was finding out what a lot of Americans have learned the hard way: There’s more to those HOA horror stories than nitpicky neighbors (“your grass is too long”; “your paint is the wrong color”). The fines and penalties that are part of HOA life can add up fast into big debts. Minor disputes, financial or medical setbacks that lead to missed payments, or just an honest screw-up, as in Wikenson’s case, can turn quickly into costly court cases. And in the worst scenario, this could cost you your home and all its equity. “Most homeowners would be surprised that the HOA can foreclose, but it’s in the contract,” says Ron Cheung, a professor at Ohio’s Oberlin College who specializes in HOA policies. “They can do it over 50 dollars.” “People say their home is their nest egg,” says Stan Hrincevich, an HOA homeowner whose Colorado HOA Forum advocates for improved governance. “I say, ‘You have no idea how vulnerable you are.’” The good side of the HOA experience is that these communities offer stability, neighborly connections and lasting value. The bad side is that maintaining that value means enforcing all sorts of rules that can drive homeowners nuts. And the really ugly side is that if you’re not careful and you rack up just a few thousand dollars in debt, your HOA just might sell your house to get it. And that’s where Wikenson stood: Out of nowhere, it was pay up or lose the house. Non-negotiable. The clock was ticking. Wikenson paid. He knew he had little choice, and he was glad he had the cash on hand. “I would have lost the home,” Wikenson says. “My wife, my family—we would have had nowhere to go.” America’s Favorite Way to Grow Until the 1960s, HOAs were rare. But today, the Foundation for Community Association Research, an industry group, estimates that America has 365,000 community associations, covering about 35% of all homeowners. “This is how America is growing in the fastest-growing parts of the country,” says Cheung. “In places like Texas, Arizona and Colorado, it’s the predominant form of development.” For builders and buyers alike, a big part of the appeal is the bottom line. “They are a really cost-effective way to build big developments,” Cheung says. “Instead of a swimming pool in every backyard, you have one for the whole community.” The result: HOA homes are seen as reliable investments. Studies show they go for an average of 4% more than nonHOA homes. And surveys show that most HOA homeowners are happy with their situation. Even many HOA critics support the basic model. “I would not live in a community that was not an HOA,” says Hrincevich. “I don’t want to see washing machines in
rd.com 65 National Interest my neighbor’s front yard, or hear dogs barking all night. HOAs put an end to that.” HOAs come in many shapes and sizes; they can be condo towers, small clusters of townhomes or sprawling subdivisions of large houses. But the basic model is always the same: A private company develops a group of homes, and homebuyers sign a contract—or “covenant”—that limits what they can do with those homes. “The idea is maintaining property values,” says Cheung. “You have some insurance against your neighbors.” A board of elected residents, usually supported by professional managers and legal teams, enforces the terms of the contracts. Homeowners fund those services with monthly or quarterly dues that average about $3,500 a year, according to online lender LendingTree. The covenants can be hundreds of pages long and include specific rules for, quite literally, anything under the sun, including lawns, roofs, trash cans, wind chimes, solar panels, flags, shrubs, yard signs and parked cars. And that’s often where the troubles begin. “HOA horror stories almost always start with a board that does more than it should,” says Cheung. “If the fines pile up, it can get really bad, really fast.” Rules, Rules, Rules and Lawsuits It’s not news that a homeowners association can make your life miserable. An episode of The X-Files once featured an HOA that sacrificed hapless rule-breakers to a bloodthirsty Tibetan
reader’s digest 66 june 2024 spirit-beast. And every news cycle brings fresh reports of seemingly absurd HOA battles, such as these: • In Tennessee, a woman got fined $100 for an “offensive image” when, after she moved her parked car, it left a phallic-shaped outline in the snow. • In Missouri, parents faced jail time over a plastic backyard play set that was an unapproved color: purple. • In North Carolina, Sherry Loeffler was fined $12,000 because her windows don’t match her neighbors’ windows (she has four; they have eight). • In Georgia, Roberto Cardenas has paid over $1,700 in parking fines because strangers keep parking in front of his house. “Everybody’s parking a car around my property, that ticket’s on my name,” he told local reporters. “It’s not right!” Making it even more exasperating: Cardenas doesn’t even own a car. Residents subject to unwanted fines and fees often blame overeager HOA board members. And that board is often tipped off by neighbors. Disputes can get bitter, with homeowners convinced that they’re victims of “selective enforcement” for personal, racial, political or religious reasons. In Ohio, neighbors banded together to support Thomas DiSario after he claimed he was unfairly targeted for his “thin blue line” flag. In Florida, Rabbi Naftaly Hertzel has accused his HOA of denying him the right to build a synagogue, while allowing Christian churches. And any issue that can’t be settled
rd.com 67 National Interest between the homeowner and HOA board will eventually end up in court, which can be a lose-lose proposition. In Maryland, a conflict over a fence that crossed 8 inches into a conservation zone ballooned into a five-year battle that left homeowner Betty Hooker saddled with $40,000 in legal costs. For Holly Crystal of Idaho Springs, Colorado, the trouble literally started in what she’d thought was her own backyard. Soon after moving in, she learned that her HOA believes that a clause in her homeowner’s contact gives it control of that yard, allowing it to prevent her from adding shrubs or a hot tub. She argues the clause is invalid. It was added to her contract alone, she says. No other home in the HOA has one, and she says the HOA has never explained why her yard was singled out for special treatment. As the fines piled up, she challenged her HOA in court—and lost. The judge ruled against Crystal, ordering her to pay $93,000 in HOA legal fees or lose the house. This was no idle threat. An investigation by the Colorado Sun found that between 2018 and 2023, state HOAs foreclosed on more than 3,000 homes and sold 250 of them at auction. Crystal says she’s drained her retirement account to fight for her house. If she walks away, she’ll take a big loss. “It’s highly unlikely that I could sell my house,” she says. “Who would want a townhome with a private yard that’s not private?” Most residents of HOAs stay out of trouble. According to LendingTree, only 15% of HOA residents report being fined. But when conflicts arise, those clashes often pit homeowners of limited means against corporate entities with deep pockets. Even a victory can do more harm than good. “In Arizona, the only way to enforce the law is to sue the corporation, which means you’re suing yourself,” says Dennis Legere, the head of the Arizona Homeowners Coalition. “If you win, the costs get passed on to the homeowners, and the homeowners end up paying the legal fees. The only people who win are the lawyers.” A Lost Nest Egg And when homeowners lose, they can lose big. In Texas, Finda Koroma is living with friends after losing the home she raised a family in. Her health isn’t great; work is a struggle; she has no idea what’s next. “I’m panicking,” she says. The home-care nurse’s saga started with some missed HOA payments during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when she lost clients and income. She owed her HOA about $3,500 in unpaid fees. Last year, she says, she thought she was catching up by adding extra to her payments. She was also in the process of renovating the house and preparing to sell it for her retirement. But it turned out that the HOA had foreclosed on her home in 2021 and sold it in January 2023. The HOA says
reader’s digest 68 june 2024 it notified Koroma; she says it didn’t. She was evicted in July 2023. In court, Koroma’s lawyer advised her to drop the case because the law was on the HOA’s side. “She said, ‘The best you can do is just move out,’” Koroma says. Koroma’s home was bought by an investor for just $82,000. The HOA will take some of that to pay Koroma’s debts and return the rest, about $74,000, to Koroma. But that’s just a fraction of the house’s estimated value of $350,000. Losing the equity and her place in a community was bad enough, Koroma says. But losing her dignity was worse. “My grandchildren keep asking, when are you going to get your house back?” Koroma says through tears. “I’m 68 years old. It’s not fair. How can you allow a family to be homeless just for this? I’m so confused.” Sometimes, residents’ financial problems start when their HOA board’s fiscal planning falls short and unexpected costs spring up for, say, insurance or maintenance. In Loveland, Colorado, Virginia Volini-Arzooyan’s HOA got into a tangle over water access for a neighboring development. To cover its legal costs, the HOA added an extra $16,000 to each home’s fee—$1,000 a month for 16 months, which is twice the usual monthly fee of $500, says VoliniArzooyan. At one point, she and her husband held back their monthly payments, demanding to see a detailed accounting to justify the increase. The HOA responded by levying more fines and announcing it would foreclose. “It went on for almost two years. We’d thought we were going to live here forever, but we decided to buy another house,” says Volini-Arzooyan. “Before, people were leaving Christmas cookies on your doorstep. Now nobody does that.” HOA reps defend their powers by noting that without the threat of penalties and foreclosure, they’d have no way to stop homeowners from dodging their fees or the rules, which hurts all the residents. And some homeowners are relentless in that quest. In Florida, for example, a state court recently ended a six-year battle to foreclose on a homeowner who had initially owed about $4,000. According to court records, Lilia Belkova Russo declared bankruptcy three times and also claimed injuries from two car accidents, chronic mercury poisoning, a fall from a horse and “microwave radiation from internet routers and cellphones.” The court decided that Russo was just trying to delay the inevitable, and ruled that she now owes her HOA $87,000, including penalties and court costs. “HOW CAN YOU ALLOW A FAMILY TO BE HOMELESS JUST FOR THIS?”
rd.com 69 National Interest “The HOA board isn’t always the villain,” says Legere. “A lot of homeowners know how to play the game. The threat of taking the home gets payments.” Watching the Watchers As HOAs grow, so too does public demand for consumer protection. Advocates and some lawmakers are pressing for better HOA policies in a number of states. In California, a newly passed law caps annual HOA fee increases. A similar bill is being considered in Florida, where rising insurance is rapidly driving up HOA fees. In Colorado, Stan Hrincevich’s group is working on proposals to mediate disputes and protect homeowners from foreclosure. But even when reforms pass, he says, enforcement remains problematic. “If the HOA violates the agreement, who’s there to enforce it?” Hrincevich says. “You go to court, and you’re up against a company and their lawyers. They’ve been through this before. You don’t have a chance. Unless you have deep pockets.” So for now, advocates say, the best way for HOA homeowners to stay out of the “horror story” files is to stay up to date on payments, stay engaged with the board, and stay out of court if at all possible—even if it means sacrificing your favorite wind chimes. “A guy came to my door and said, ‘You’re a nuisance! Those wind chimes keep me up when I’m sleeping!’ So I took them down,” says Hrincevich. “If I say no, the lawyers get involved, and then it costs thousands of dollars.”
A Match Lit in Heaven Mitch loves cigars, and I love the smell and buying them for him. Every time he smoked one, he’d take the cigar band off and place it on my finger. On our oneyear anniversary, we took a motorcycle ride to a boisterous Irish pub. He lit up a cigar, and as usual, I put out my hand. He placed the band on my ring finger and asked me to marry him. Once I realized he meant it, I quickly said yes. He asked if I wanted a special ring, and I said yes, but something unfussy that I could wear 24/7. The romantic in him surprised me once again: He designed matching rings shaped like cigar bands with our initials entwined. —shannon mesenburg Port Charlotte, FL Head over Heels (and Toes) My husband was so excited to propose that he stopped at my pedicure appointment on his way home from the jewelry store. He walked in, showed me Popping the Question Engagement stories from both sides of the bend BY Reader’s Digest Readers the ring and asked me to marry him in the middle of the nail salon. I said yes and gave him a kiss, and he said he’d see me when I finished. The funniest part is that the nail technician didn’t even look up. —tammy carpenter-fisher Dunnville, ON A Love You Can’t Extinguish My boyfriend called one day with shocking news: His house burned down while he was at work. We’d talked about getting engaged soon, and he told me that he’d bought a ring and stored it in his sock drawer. The site was nothing but ash when we arrived. We ducked under the yellow tape and stood where his bedroom dresser had been, digging through the ash until we came across burned socks. We kept going, soon finding a singed ring box. I opened it and saw the ring. It was tarnished but intact. When I asked what I should do with it, he blurted, illustrations by Olivia Waller YOUR TRUE STORIES reader’s digest rd.com | june 2024 71
“Put it on!” And just like that, we were engaged. —barb weimer Valparaiso, IN A Really Personal Ad I wanted to make my proposal memorable for my sweetheart, so I placed an ad in the Los Angeles Times: “Susan, you are perfect. I love you forever. Will you marry me? Don.” It dawned on me that many others had probably done that already, and I wanted another way to ensure my proposal was one of a kind. The night the ad was published, I directed her to it—while standing on my head and eating a cream puff, a flair that certainly made it a first. She loved it and said yes, placing her own ad in the Times: “Don, you are perfect. I love you forever. Yes, I will marry you. Susan.” Our marriage has been a head-over-heels cream puff since. —don sessions Laguna Beach, CA Take the Plunge, Not a Plunge Christian and I were kayaking in Pottsburg Creek in Jacksonville, Florida, when I noticed something yellow floating in the water. I paddled closer and said, “Oh no, someone lost their boat key!” I pulled the floating keychain in with my paddle ... and realized the tag read, “Will you marry me?” The most gorgeous ring was attached to the chain. Christian paddled back to me, asked me to remove my sunglasses, and said the sweetest things about our love before asking me to marry him. Of course, I accepted—and struggled not to go overboard as I hugged and smooched my new fiance. —chelsea ornelas Baxter, MN Sealing the Dill One Christmas, my daughter Lexi’s boyfriend asked me to help with his proposal. We have an old German tradition of hiding a pickle ornament in the tree, and the finder earns an extra present. On Christmas morning, my other daughter convincingly tussled with Lexi as they searched, but made sure Lexi came up with the pickle. I handed Lexi her bonus present, which she unwrapped with glee, then looked confused when she realized it was a ring. I told her to look to her right, where Justin was kneeling beside her. Lexi was so surprised and happy she burst into tears. They’ll be married this September. —christine snyder Dell Rapids, SD 72 june 2024 reader’s digest
ELECTION CONNECTION Do you remember the first time you voted? Maybe you were a freshly legal adult during an election year, or a new citizen excited to exercise your right to vote in your new country. Even seasoned voters can be surprised at the ballot box, so if you have a funny or otherwise memorable election (for president, governor, mayor, school board or even treehouse club treasurer) story, please see terms and share it at rd.com/electionstory. It might appear in Reader’s Digest. “Will” You Marry Me? My partner and I had been together for more than 20 years when we decided to update our wills. During a Zoom call, our lawyer asked if we were married. When we said no, he said, “Why the heck not?” I stammered about marriage tax penalties, and he countered with a rundown of the benefits. After we hung up, I sheepishly walked into the room where my partner was, got down on one knee and asked if he would marry me. He grinned, also got on one knee and asked me the same. We both said yes— then, with our bad knees, helped each other up. —H.W. Washington D.C. A Quick Title Update My girlfriend and I traveled from California to Oklahoma to visit her family. While we were out shopping, her mother ran into a friend and introduced us. “This is my daughter, Trish,” she said. Then she turned to me and said, “This is David, my daughter’s ...” She paused, unsure how to title me. I looked at Trish and said, “Will you marry me?” Surprised, she said yes. I turned to the other women and proudly proclaimed, “FIANCE!” —david chilton Nashville, TN The Right Kind of Red Flags I’d just moved from Ohio to Texas for my boyfriend when his employer suddenly transferred him to the Netherlands. We continued dating long-distance and eventually had begun talking about marriage when I received a package containing seven flag patches with no note of explanation. My first step was to identify the countries, but some weren’t country flags at all. Do the striped flags go this way or that? And there was a duplicate. It took some doing, but I finally solved his puzzle: Malaysia, Amsterdam, Russia, Russia, Yemen, Morocco and England. Aha—MARRY ME! I sent a photo with three flags: Yap, Estonia and Schleswig-Holstein. (He still insists I said “YESH!”) He proposed traditionally on his next trip home, but for me, the flag proposal couldn’t be topped. We married at the United Nations Chapel in New York City soon after. —Louise Hauser Sarasota, FL rd.com 73 Your True Stories
WHEN A FROM THE SKY WHEN A FFRROMOM THE SKY THE SKY 74 june 2024 reader’s digest
THE WOMAN ON THE LAWN MOWER THOUGHT THAT WAS BAD— ESPECIALLY WHEN IT HIT HER. THEN THE HAWK SWOOPED IN. BY illustrations by Ryan Garcia rd.com 75 DRAMA IN REAL LIFE
EIGHT BILLION PEOPLE INHABIT PLANET EARTH. Thirty million live in Texas. Residents of the town of Silsbee, just west of the Louisiana state line, number roughly 7,000. Let’s estimate, for the sake of argument, that on any given Tuesday evening, 20 of those Silsbee residents are out cutting their grass. Out of all those 20 mowers and 7,000 Silsbee residents and 30 million Texans and 8 billion humans, only one that we know of, 65-year-old Peggy Jones, was unlucky enough to have a living, writhing snake fall out of the sky and onto her. The story only gets weirder. Peggy and her husband, Wendell Jones, were tending a property they own just outside the Silsbee city limits on July 25, 2023. Wendell was out front, weed-eating , while Peggy drove a tractor (Kubota, 26 horsepower) pulling a mowing machine around the big piece of open land out back. They’d waited till evening to do the work, avoiding the nearly 100-degree temperatures of the afternoon. Out of sight and earshot of Wendell, Peggy was lost in thought, hands on the wheel, when suddenly a 3½-to-4-foot snake dropped out of the clear blue sky onto her right forearm. This is not something one expects to happen. “At that particular moment, I don’t know if I realized it was a snake,” reader’s digest Peggy says. “You’re out here, there’s grasshoppers and little flying bugs, so you automatically just kind of sling it off. Just an automatic reaction. And that’s exactly what I did.” But this creature did not sling. It clung, having immediately coiled itself tightly around her arm. A millisecond later, when she realized that the creature on her arm was a snake—and a big one—she shrieked, and flailed more wildly. She had no idea what kind of snake the heavens had favored her with, nor did she much care to know. “To me,” she says, “a snake is a snake.” the story is just getting going, but let’s pause here to settle a couple of questions. First, why would a snake fall out of the sky? Two main reasons, according to Vincent Cobb, a snake expert from Middle Tennessee State University: Sometimes snakes lose their footing (as it were) and tumble from trees onto unfortunate passersby, and sometimes they’re dropped by a hawk that had been meaning to eat them. In this case, there was no tree, which implicates the hawk. But, second question: If a snake falls from the sky onto an outstretched forearm, would it really wrap itself around the arm, just that fast, or wouldn’t it 76 june 2024 | rd.com
Drama in Real Life kind of slide off and slither away through the grass? “The snake could very likely have hit the arm and then fallen to the ground,” Cobb says. “But I’m not surprised it wrapped around her arm, because that’s a safety response. Snakes don’t have legs and arms. It landed on something. The only way it can hang on is to wrap around it.” So we continue with the story, having established that Peggy Jones was doubly unlucky: She’d been directly beneath a clumsy hawk, and the snake that hit her was blessed with superior reflexes, fixing itself instantaneously to her arm—not like a constrictor aiming to crush its prey, but like a beast with no intention to leave, squeezing just hard enough to bruise. No amount of flailing could rid her of the reptile, which now began striking at her face. If that’s not sufficiently appalling, allow Peggy to make it even worse: “Take your hand and hold it at arm’s length and look at it,” she says. “That’s about the size of your hand. But now put your hand up to your face. It looks huge, right? To me, this snake looked like a super huge monster coming at me.” Leaning and straining her head, neck and shoulder as far away from her right arm as possible, Peggy screamed for Wendell. After a few seconds, she realized he wasn’t coming. She was alone in this battle. So she appealed to the only being that could conceivably be of aid: “Help me, Jesus!” she yelled. cobb emphasizes that in striking repeatedly at Peggy, the snake was not just being mean. It was terrified. “It just got
78 june 2024 through being attacked by a hawk,” he says. “It falls on her arm and wraps itself around, just trying to hang on to what it fell onto. And then it sees this woman’s face 2 feet from it. The snake sees this as another predator. That’s why the snake is striking at her face. It wasn’t attacking her; it was defending itself.” With the tractor still rolling, the mower still cutting, Peggy still screaming and flinging, and Wendell still blissfully weed-eating out front, Peggy’s consciousness was abruptly invaded by yet another burst of sensory input too bizarre to register: Now a hawk was there on her arm, clutching at the snake with its razored talons, furiously beating its wings around and above her head in a thunderous flapping thrum. Her heart nearly beat through her sternum. to make sense of this startling development, let’s now learn a little about hawks. Why would one drop a snake from the sky? And would a hawk really brave a noisy tractor and shrieking human to go back for its lost prey? Kevin McGowan, a biologist at the Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University, says it’s not that uncommon for a hawk to drop a snake. “It’s hard to be a hawk,” he explains. “They have to learn how to catch stuff and kill it without getting hurt and letting it get away. And that’s not easy to do.” Rural folklore holds that hawks kill snakes by deliberately dropping them from on high, sometimes aiming specifically for barbed wire fences. Not likely, says McGowan. When snatched up by a hawk, unless they’ve been instantly dispatched, snakes might
rd.com 79 wrap around the bird’s feet, a wing, its body. “If the snake is wriggling and trying to fight back,” he says, “the hawk could lose its grip while it’s flying along.” Cobb concurs: “The hawk has to drop it or maybe go down with the snake.” Indeed, both experts are aware of cases in which hawks have been done in by their serpentine prey. So OK, the hawk drops the snake accidentally, or perhaps out of sheer self-preservation. But would a hawk really plunge down to retrieve its prey from a human astride a chugging tractor with a clattering mower behind? “It strikes me as pretty weird,” McGowan says. “This is an extraordinarily unusual occurrence. Most hawks are scared of people. This one should have been, but apparently wasn’t.” But he has a theory that might explain this unusually bold behavior. “It’s conceivable this is a young bird, hatched this year and still trying to figure out how to do things,” he says. This hawk hadn’t learned the classic life lesson about just letting some things go. “I mean, if it’s a big snake, it’s a big hunk of meat and you hate to lose it,” McGowan says. “So the hawk certainly would have the urge to retrieve it.” quick tally of Peggy Jones’s abysmally bad luck thus far in the story: Hawks don’t usually drop their prey, but this one did, managing to hit her with it. Snakes don’t always catch themselves and wrap around the thing they landed on, but this one did. And to cap it off, not all hawks are feckless juveniles just learning their trade and thus foolish enough to come back for their fumbled prey … but this one seems to have been. We continue. The hawk seized the snake and pulled with such power that Peggy could feel it lift her arm forcefully skyward. “I felt a good tug,” she says. “But that’s when you could feel that that snake was holding on tight.” Before Peggy could react, the hawk flew off empty-handed (as it were). Not surprising, says Cobb. “Snakes are quite muscular, and those coils are hard to break.” For the briefest moment, Peggy was left alone again with an even more beleaguered snake as the tractor zigzagged crazily up toward the mobile homes the couple rent out. But as quickly as the hawk had disappeared, it reappeared, again beating the air about Peggy’s head, again clutching and slashing at her arm with its talons. Again the hawk failed and departed. A moment later, another pass, another vicious grabbing, another failure. Oh, my Lord. Please help me. Something’s got to give here, Peggy thought. And something did give—the snake, weakened from constant attacks by the hawk’s talons. On its fourth sortie, the bird of prey managed to yank the snake off Peggy’s arm and abscond with its meal. Drama in Real Life reader’s digest
Peggy was now snake- and hawkfree, but she was still not mollified. Looking at her bloodied forearm, all she could think was This is not good. Her flesh had been brutally torn, bruised and punctured. She stopped the tractor, reeling with adrenaline. Wendell, who had just finished out front, was there beside her now, having heard her screams, and was begging to know what was wrong. She tried to tell him but was so upset that her words were unintelligible. Wendell loaded his injured wife into their truck and raced toward the hospital. During the drive, he got her calmed enough that he could begin to understand what she was saying. It sounded like she said that “a snake fell out of the air …” “A snake?” he said. “A snake did all that to your arm?” “No,” she answered, frustrated. “The hawk did that to me.” She managed to convey the broadest outlines of what happened. But then a new realization hit her: She was having trouble seeing out of her right eye. “OK,” Wendell said. “We’re almost there. We’re almost there.” At the emergency room entrance, he helped her out of the vehicle. “Oh,” he said. “There’s something on your glasses. That’s why you can’t see.” He removed the glasses and the cloudiness that had blocked her vision vanished. The ER workers cleaned her wounds and carefully inspected her skin for snakebites, miraculously finding none, and wiped from the right lens of her eyeglasses a milky, yellowish fluid. “There was venom on my glasses,” Peggy says. “And there was a little chip in them. They weren’t chipped before this.” With no sign of having been bitten, she was bandaged, put on a course of antibiotics and released. three questions remain: Was that really venom on her glasses? What kind of snake was it? And what kind of hawk? Definitive answers to these three are impossible to come by. The fluid from the lens was never tested. At the hospital, all those assembled assumed it was venom because a snake had been involved. Vincent Cobb acknowledges that venom is yellowy and viscous, as described, but for this to have been venom and for Peggy not to have been bitten would be so freakishly unlikely that his gut tells him it was some other substance, perhaps mouth secretions from the snake. “Then again,” he concedes, “it could have been venom.” After all, what other parts of this story aren’t freakishly unlikely? Regarding the snake’s ID, all Peggy “THERE WAS VENOM ON MY GLASSES. AND THERE WAS A LITTLE CHIP IN THEM.” 80 june 2024 reader’s digest Drama in Real Life
Jones can tell you is that the creature was dark in color and long. (She and Wendell figured out it measured between 3½ feet and 4 feet by wrapping a tape measure twice around her forearm and extending it back to her face.) On that scant information, Cobb says, the specimen of interest could be any of six to eight species, including the pine, speckled king, prairie king, Texas rat, coachwhip and southern black racer. If the snake was indeed venomous, adds Cobb, that probably narrows it to the timber rattlesnake or perhaps the cottonmouth. McGowan is closer to confident about the species of hawk. “Sometimes we say ‘It’s a red-tailed until proven otherwise,’” he says, noting that redtailed hawks are the most often observed species, hunting in the open and perching on poles and fences. But it could also have been a redshouldered hawk. Far less likely, yet possible, McGowan says, would be a Swainson’s hawk. it’s taken longer for Peggy’s psyche to heal than her arm. The encounter still haunts her. For months after the incident, she scarcely slept. Every time she closed her eyes, she would relive the terrifying ordeal—fangs, feathers, talons. But too tough to be defeated by nightmares, she has returned to working outdoors. She’s made but one change in response to the nasty tricks Mother Nature played on her that day. In August, she and Wendell went out and bought her a spanking new zero-turn lawn mower. “It has a canopy that covers the whole entire thing,” Peggy says. “We shopped canopy first and mower second. I got the biggest top that there is.” The canopy is built of aluminum tread plate. Peggy made a sign for it, visible from above: a red circle with a line through it crossing out a wriggling reptile, and featuring two simple words: NO SNAKES. rd.com 81
A painting went missing in 1969, then turned up at a museum’s doorstep. No one knew how or why—until now. BY Dan Barry from the new york times Hey Dad, Can You Help Me Return the illustrations by Marc Aspinall TRUE CRIME 82 june 2024 | rd.com
reader’s digest
In fairness, this forklift operator had no idea that the crate he tossed into his car trunk contained a Picasso until he opened its casing. In fairness, he didn’t care much for it; he preferred realism. But now things had turned all too real. FBI agents were hot on the trail of a hot Picasso unavailable for public viewing, as it was hidden in Rummel’s hallway closet. He and his fiancee, Sam, began to panic. “How do we get rid of it?” she recalls thinking. “We couldn’t just give it back. It was a pain in our butt.” Fortunately, Rummel knew a guy. Someone particularly skilled at making problems melt away. A fixer. He dialed a number he knew by heart. the case of the missing picasso goes back. Back before the far more notorious theft of 13 works of art from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Back, in a sense, to a time before Picasso had even painted the piece. Back to the 1950s of Waterville, Maine, where the Rummel boys—Bill and his younger brother, Whit—were testing their hometown’s Yankee forbearance. If one boy was looting parking meters for his coin collection, the other was pilfering pens from Woolworth’s. If one was stealing radios from junked cars, the other was racing his car so recklessly that it seemed destined for the junkyard. But their father, Whitcomb Rummel Sr., always managed to calm the aggravated constabulary with assurances that he would handle it. And he did: When 12-year-old Whit—known in the family as Half-Whit—was caught stealing from The Picasso fell off the proverbial truck. It vanished from a loading dock at Logan International Airport in Boston and wound up where it didn’t belong, in the modest home of one Merrill Rummel, also known as Bill. reader’s digest 84 june 2024
Woolworth’s, his father forbade him from entering any shop for a year. “Not even into the corner store for a Coke,” the son, now 77, recalls. “This meant my mother had to bring clothes out to the car so I could try on pants because I couldn’t go into the store.” Neither son dared to cross their father. “He was all-knowing, all-seeing, all-hearing,” Whit says. Rummel the elder never spoke of his own childhood—too painful, perhaps. His mother had died of influenza when he was 9, after which his father sent him away to an affection-averse aunt. “It wasn’t until after high school that he reconnected with his father,” Whit says. He attended college, did some acting, married, served with the Navy Seabees in Africa during World War II, and moved to Waterville, where he bought and spiffed up a local ice cream stand. His frozen treats became a favored local delight, available at Gustafson’s market, the Chicken Coop restaurant, Bea’s Candy Kitchen—even Mid State Motors, where a gasoline purchase came with a pint of Rummel’s. The man behind the brand was just as ubiquitous, a chamber of commerce leader, Kiwanis bigwig and Shriners pooh-bah. He donated a scoreboard to the town gymnasium, presented the police with a trained German shepherd, sponsored a semipro baseball team and gave away banana splits to children for their civic spirit or academic success, or just for being kids. Whitcomb Rummel Sr. (far left) was always a man with a plan to his boys, Merrill “Bill” Rummel (above WHITCOMB RUMMEL JR. VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES left) and Whit, seen here in 1958. rd.com 85 True Crime
At home he was a quirky dad, sometimes fun and even zany, but often stern. “He never hugged us,” Whit says. To Waterville’s relief, the Rummel boys moved on. Whit went to Tulane University in New Orleans. Bill served with the Coast Guard in Michigan, where he fell in love with a bowlingalley bartender whose customers called out “Play it again, Sam” so often that her given name, Evelyn, became a gutter ball. When his Coast Guard stint ended in 1968, Bill joined Emery Air Freight, then the country’s largest cargo airline. He worked nights on the company’s loading dock at Logan airport, where, in early 1969, a crate arrived from Paris. Inside, a Picasso: Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer. Pablo Picasso, then in his late 80s, had become intrigued by musketeers as evocative of the old masters, especially Rembrandt, and returned to the theme again and again. “It was the idée fixe of his very late work,” said Pepe Karmel, a professor of art history at New York University. “I think he was asking himself: Where does my art stand in relation to the old masters?” The painting, completed in 1967, was to be forwarded from Boston to a Milwaukee gallery owned by Irving Luntz. His son, Holden Luntz, recalls that his late father bought the piece from Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a prominent dealer in Paris known for championing Picasso. Since negotiations took place on his father’s 40th birthday, he says, Kahnweiler agreed to sell the work for $40,000. “A gesture of generosity,” says Holden Luntz, now 70, who owns a photography gallery in Palm Beach, Florida. But the Picasso never made it to Milwaukee. An anxious Irving Luntz contacted Emery Air Freight to complain, but the cargo company had its own emerging problem, with what came to be known in New England as the 100-hour storm. The protracted late-February snowfall paralyzed Boston, including the airport, where more than 2 feet of snow disrupted passenger flights and cargo deliveries. Large containers littered the tarmac, while boxes and packages clogged the docks. “Our dock was a mess,” Bill Rummel said in a 2007 interview with Ira Glass for an ultimately shelved episode of the This American Life radio program. With outbound crates at the front and inbound crates at the back, Emery executives demanded a decluttering of the dock. Under pressure, his supervisor pointed to a crate whose label had disintegrated from being left out in the storm, and told him to get rid of it. “WORRIED? ARE YOU KIDDING? WE DIDN’T WANT TO GO TO JAIL.” reader’s digest True Crime 86 june 2024 | rd.com
It should be noted that, according to Bill, this supervisor was later fired. For stealing. Bill angled the crate into the trunk of his 1962 Chevy Impala and later lugged it into his half of a two-story home in Medford, Massachusetts. He pried it open with a hammer to discover that he was now in possession of a Picasso. Its artistry underwhelmed him, he told Glass. “Not a Wyeth, put it that way.” Bill called his then-fiancee. “You’ll never guess what I’ve got,” Sam Rummel, now 80, recalls him saying. “A Picasso!” “What are you, drunk?” she asked. She returned to their home to find a big crate leaning against the wall. “You want to see it?” he asked. “Hell, no,” she said. The couple hid the crate in the closet beneath the stairwell. “We shoved that thing so far back there, and then shoved stuff in front of it,” Sam says. “We never talked about it.” But someone was talking about it: Irving Luntz, the Milwaukee gallery owner. After weeks of being Picassoless, he contacted the FBI, which began snooping around Logan. This unnerved a certain affianced couple in Medford. “Worried? Are you kidding?” Sam says. “We were young. We didn’t want to go to jail.” Unsure of what to do, Bill called his brother, Whit, who was more knowledgeable about art. He had once torn a photograph of a Picasso out of a library book to hang in his bedroom. In effect, Whit’s first question was: Have you called the fixer? Of course. Dad. The elder Rummel listened to his older son’s predicament and then offered two options, with all the calm of a soda jerk asking whether you want whipped cream or hot fudge. 1. They could bury the Picasso in the foundation of a Waterville restaurant under renovation that his father co-owned. (The restaurant’s name, The Silent Woman, seemed apropos.) Unearth the painting in 30 years and maybe sell it for a small fortune. Or: 2. Return it. When Bill asked his father what he thought he should do, the elder Rummel said that this was a life choice he had to make for himself. “So I said, ‘I’ll give it back,’” the son told Glass. “And he said, ‘I’ll help you.’” The elder Rummel telephoned Whit in New Orleans and gave him detailed FATHER AND SON SHARING A MOMENT: LOADING A PICASSO INTO A CHEVY. (LEFT) TRAVIS DOVE / THE NEW YORK TIMES 88 june 2024 reader’s digest True Crime
instructions for a handwritten note that could not be traced. Use high-end stationery. Since you’re left-handed, write it out with your right hand. And since you’re studying creative writing, make it sound artsy. Then send it by airmail to your brother in Medford. Meanwhile, the FBI was turning up the heat, issuing a bulletin to lawenforcement agencies throughout the Northeast. Picasso stolen from Logan Airport. Be on the lookout. Days later, the ice cream king of Waterville arrived in Medford with his wife, Ann, a new trenchcoat and a plan. He rubbed the painting’s packaging and crate with Vaseline, for reasons that evaded his son. He attached the handwritten note. He donned the trenchcoat, a brimmed hat and gloves. Go time. Three years after this escapade, Whitcomb Rummel Sr. would die, suddenly, at 63; in his honor, his restaurant would stay closed until the evening ice cream rush. His son Bill would spend the next 18 years with Emery, rising to regional manager before retiring to South Carolina and dying, at 71, in 2015. Whitcomb Rummel Jr. (left) holds a picture of the Picasso that Sam and Bill Rummel (above) shoved to the back of a hallway closet. (RIGHT) WHITCOMB RUMMEL JR. VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES rd.com 89
But on this April Fools’ Day, 1969, in Boston, father and son were sharing an unforgettable moment: loading a purloined Picasso into a Chevy Impala. Bill Rummel, wearing sunglasses and a black watch cap, drove them into Boston and, at his father’s direction, parked on Huntington Avenue. His father got out and carried the crate a few car lengths ahead. The elder Rummel loaded the painting into a taxi, handed the driver a $20 bill and told him to deliver the package to the Museum of Fine Arts, just down the avenue. He returned to his son’s car and, on the drive back to Medford, tossed the coat, hat and gloves in separate garbage cans. Newswire services were soon circulating photographs of Perry T. Rathbone, the museum’s esteemed director, posing with both the recovered Picasso, worth an estimated $75,000, and a mysterious handwritten note, which read: “Please accept this to replace in part some of the paintings removed from museums thruout the country.” It was signed “Robbin’ Hood.” Luntz, the Milwaukee gallery owner, told a TV station that he was “absolutely delirious and delighted to get this painting back.” And yes, he said, prospective buyers were lining up. A few days later, on the Emery loading dock at Logan Airport, Bill Rummel’s reader’s digest 90 june 2024
boss called him over and motioned to a certain crate in the middle of the floor, bound for Milwaukee. “They found it,” his boss said. “Oh,” he answered. Whit Rummel, also known as Robbin’ Hood, is a filmmaker in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He has long thought that his family’s Picasso story had the makings of a movie, and kept all the news clippings as proof of a tale that for decades could not be told. But he sensed a potential plot hole: Where did the Picasso wind up? A couple of years ago he hired Monica Boyer, an editor and financial writer, to track it down. She could not find mention of the work in auction-house records or in various Picasso databases, and, of course, the artist had created many musketeer-themed paintings. Still, by drawing on a few clues— Milwaukee, for example—she found a catalog for a 1971 exhibition called Picasso in Milwaukee. Among the works on display: Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer, courtesy of Sidney and Dorothy Kohl. Sidney Kohl, 93 and living in Palm Beach, Florida, is a member of the family behind the Kohl’s department store chain. He is an extremely wealthy developer, investor and art collector; in 2012, eight pieces from the Kohl couple’s collection sold at auction for $101 million. That sale did not include the Picasso, and the Kohls did not respond to several requests to confirm that the painting—no doubt worth millions of dollars—is still in their private collection. Wherever it is, this work by one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century remains as shielded from public view as if it had stayed hidden in the hallway closet of a forklift operator. But that working stiff had at least tried to return it to the world—with some help, of course, from his dad, the ice cream king of Waterville, Maine. Service with a Scowl In Japan—a country renowned for its etiquette and hospitality—one eatery boasts the nation’s worst customer service. An ordinary cafe by day, it becomes the “rude restaurant” at night. Menus are slammed down and flung like Frisbees. Surly servers petulantly wander off mid-order—or pelt patrons with coasters. And after settling the bill, departing diners are told to get off the property. The place is booked a month in advance. cbs this morning THE NEW YORK TIMES ( JUNE 15, 2023), COPYRIGHT © 2023 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY. rd.com 91 True Crime
92 june 2024 Everything you need to know about the new diabetes drugs shaping the weight-loss revolution BY Karen Robock HEALTH IS EVERYONE ON
CHEE SIONG TEH/GETTY IMAGES ` rd.com 93 Weight is something that I’ve thought about every single day of my adult life,” says Jennifer Blackburn*, a 49-year-old public relations professional in Toronto. Following decades of trying different diets and medications—and finding little success—in fall 2022 she started taking Ozempic, the diabetes drug that has become synonymous with celebrity weight loss. “It has been life-changing,” she says. U.S. health-care providers wrote more than 9 million prescriptions for Ozempic and similar drugs during the last few months of 2022, around the time Blackburn received her script. Some 890 million adults have obesity worldwide, and weight-loss drug sales are forecast to grow to as much as $100 billion by the end of the decade. No wonder obesity medications are a hot topic. But there’s still mass confusion around who should take them, whether the potential side effects are worth it, and whether people who truly need them can access—and afford— the limited supply. How do the new obesity drugs work? Ozempic was approved by the FDA in 2017 for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. Once the manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, tapped into the drug’s added benefit of triggering substantial weight loss, it soon had another drug in the works: Wegovy, with a higher dose of the same active ingredient, semaglutide, was approved in 2021 for the treatment of obesity. The company also makes an oral form of semaglutide called Rybelsus for type 2 diabetes. In addition to semaglutide, there is also tirzepatide, which is prescribed as Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for obesity. (Again, the active ingredient is the same, but the drugs are prescribed under different names with slightly different doses.) Another diabetes drug, liraglutide, is marketed as Saxenda for weight loss. And dulaglutide is sold as Trulicity for diabetes management. Due to staggered release dates of these medications and fluctuations in their availability, some people without type 2 diabetes (such as Blackburn) have been prescribed the diabetes drugs for the treatment of obesity. The practice of prescribing drugs “off-label,” which means for a use other than the one the medication is approved for, is not uncommon. Semaglutide and tirzepatide work for people with type 2 diabetes by helping the pancreas produce more insulin when blood sugar is high and by preventing the liver from releasing too much sugar. And they provide a third action, the one that’s getting all the attention: As GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide 1) receptor agonists, they mimic the gut hormone that communicates fullness to the brain. This false fullness cue helps patients eat less, which leads to weight loss—as much as 15% to 20% of a patient’s body weight. (Tirzepatide has the added benefit of also triggering reader’s digest * Name has been changed.
IAN HOOTON/GETTY IMAGES reader’s digest 94 june 2024 a hormone from the small intestine, which speaks to the fullness center of the brain as well.) Other than Rybelsus, which is a daily oral tablet, they are all given as a self-administered injection just under the skin of the thigh, the abdomen, or the back of the upper arm. Saxenda is a daily jab, while the others are taken weekly. For most people, the doses will need to continue indefinitely. Once someone stops taking the drug, their hunger cues are likely to return to their baseline and the weight comes back. “The first time I see a patient, I tell them this is meant to be a long-term treatment plan,” says Nidhi Kansal, an obesity medicine specialist at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. When can these drugs help? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 4 in 10 Americans have obesity. Defined as a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher, obesity puts a person at increased risk of a range of health problems, from heart disease to sleep apnea. (It should be noted that BMI is a screening tool and does not on its own determine a person’s fitness or health.) In obesity, metabolic hormones can be dysregulated, which means that for some people who are trying to do the right things in terms of diet and exercise, their bodies just won’t respond the same way. “That’s where medication has been a game-changer,” says Dr. Kansal. But since Oprah Winfrey and a slew of other influencers have raved about their slimming successes on these drugs, it seems everybody wants to try them. The overwhelming demand has led to shortages. Throughout 2023, people with type 2 diabetes struggled to access Ozempic. Periodic shortages are expected to continue this year. Novo Nordisk recently announced an earmarked $6.5 billion to boost production facilities to bolster its global supply chain. Those who can access these drugs face a significant financial cost. “These medications are mind-blowingly expensive,” says endocrinologist Amy Warriner, director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham weight-loss clinic. A monthly supply of Wegovy or Zepbound will set you back more than $1,000. Some private insurers won’t cover the cost; some place strict restrictions on who is eligible. Seniors face an added challenge: “Medicare blocks all of these medications,” says Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital. She hopes that the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act, a push to lift Medicare’s ban on weight-loss drugs—a movement that has been underway for over a decade—will finally be passed, expanding and updating coverage. In the meantime, dozens more obesity drugs in development are certain to increase competition and eventually drive down prices.
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reader’s digest 96 june 2024 Still, there is big money to be made. In spring of 2023, WeightWatchers acquired Sequence, an online weightloss coaching company that provides support for diet and lifestyle modifications—as well as for use of prescriptions. Earlier this year, Eli Lilly and Co., makers of Mounjaro and Zepbound, launched a telehealth service called LillyDirect, where patients can, in consultation with an online health-care provider, order the drugs directly to their door. Some practitioners worry that people are basically working around seeing in-person physicians who would be unlikely to prescribe to them, or turning to unregulated private telehealth services and weight-loss clinics to get unapproved generic versions of the drugs without a prescription. “This is very concerning, as we are not sure what patients are actually taking,” says Dr. Warriner. How well do they work? For perspective, it helps to compare these drugs to the alternatives. “Only 5% to 10% of patients seeking treatment for obesity are going to get significant weight loss with diet and lifestyle modifications alone,” says Dr. Stanford. Bariatric surgery (where a large portion of the stomach is removed) has a high success rate (between 50% and 85%, depending on the type), but not everyone is a candidate, and many patients don’t want to go under the knife. The third option is a class of oral weight-loss drugs. The “old generation” of obesity medications, such as phentermine with topiramate (Qsymia) and bupropion plus naltrexone (Contrave), help most patients lose an average of 5% of their body weight. These medications are much more affordable than the newer ones, but the results aren’t nearly as impressive. By comparison, studies show that those taking Wegovy shed an average of 15% of their weight. The results for Zepbound are even better, with patients losing 20% or more of their body weight when the drugs are taken in conjunction with exercise and dietary changes. “These are results we’ve never seen before,” says Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto, who helped identify the hormone that gave rise to these medications. But that’s if, and only if, the medications work for you. “This is not talked about enough, but I do have patients— about a quarter of them—who are minimal to non-responders,” says Dr. Stanford. “That’s why I don’t use phrases like miracle drug, because it’s only a miracle if it works for you.” What else can they do? The benefits extend beyond the number on your scale, says Daniela Hurtado Andrade, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. The largest semaglutide study to date, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that the
PETER DAZELEY/GETTY IMAGES Health rd.com 97 drug reduces the risk of heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular death by 20%. The patients in the study were all 45 years and older, overweight or obese, and had cardiovascular disease. Also, only 3.5% of the patients taking semaglutide progressed to having diabetes, compared to 12% in the placebo group. And a major new study published in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension found that people with obesity taking Zepbound experienced a significant drop in blood pressure. “These medications are life-changing for so many people, allowing significant weight loss, but more importantly, leading to impressive health benefits including medical reversal of diabetes, improved mobility, reduced liver disease due to fatty infiltration and so many more,” says Dr. Warriner. Because we already know that GLP-1 drugs reduce inflammation in the heart,
kidneys and liver, researchers are hopeful that this effect could be applied to treat inflammatory diseases of the brain and eventually Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. Additional research is looking at the potential of these drugs to treat nonmetabolic conditions related to the reward center of the brain, such as drug addiction and alcohol abuse. But are weight-loss drugs really the answer? Despite all the benefits, there are some definite downsides. Mental health issues are not listed among Ozempic’s possible side effects, but in July 2023 the European Medicines Agency (Europe’s equivalent of the FDA) said it was looking into a risk of thoughts of self-harm and suicidal thoughts with the use of Ozempic and similar drugs. Wegovy comes with warnings for depression or thoughts of suicide. More common side effects include a range of gastrointestinal issues, including nausea, constipation and diarrhea. As many as 15% of patients experience side effects, says Dr. Kansal. Ozempic’s list of possible serious side effects includes inflammation of the pancreas, kidney failure, gallbladder problems and thyroid cancer. In August 2023, Eli Lilly and Co. and Novo Nordisk were sued over claims that their drugs caused gastroparesis, a disorder that makes food move too slowly through the stomach on its way to the small intestine, which can cause severe pain, vomiting and dehydration. As of February 2024, over 55 personal injury lawsuits against Ozempic had been combined into a federal litigation that could grow to as many as 10,000 plaintiffs. The companies deny the claims. (At press time, all cases are ongoing.) And a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has established a link between the use of GLP-1 agonists for weight loss and a risk of serious gastrointestinal conditions. Researchers looked at health insurance claims from more than 5,000 patients in the U.S. and compared four gastrointestinal problems, including gastroparesis, in patients prescribed these drugs. Among people taking semaglutide, gastroparesis was seen at a rate of about 10 cases per 1,000. “A rate of 1% initially may seem small, but when you put it into the context of millions of people taking these medications, that could potentially affect tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people,” says the report’s lead author, Mohit Sodhi of the University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine in Vancouver. “IT’S A MYTH THAT OBESITY IS A CHOICE. THE REALITY IS THAT OBESITY IS A DISEASE.” reader’s digest 98 june 2024 | rd.com