In a high-end co-working space in Manhattan’s NoMad, where trendy crystals decked out a candlelit bar, a group lounged on pillows scattered on the floor for an open mic to talk about death. 

“I am going to die,” the room of mostly millennials said in unison at the beginning of the event. 

A New York moment:

The midterms were a big loss for New York pro-lifers, with Democrats winning full control of the Legislature by wresting the Senate from Republicans. In local campaigns, Democrats have made legalization of late-term abortion a priority—building off a conjured specter of abortion restrictions from the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Try to think of happy movies about kids in foster care. Without googling, I came up with only one, 1994’s Angels in the Outfield, which is mostly about heavenly hosts playing baseball and only partly about a boy, played by a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt, living in a foster home and dreaming about having a father. And googling films about foster care doesn’t help a whole lot either. (Sorry Google, Annie doesn’t really count as a foster care movie.)

A New York moment:

At the New York Public Library branch on East 63rd Street, a roomful gathered to hear from funeral director Amy Cunningham about how to help those grieving a recent death, and specifically how to write a condolence letter. The event was part of Reimagine End of Life, a citywide festival on death that I’ll be writing about more fully in the future.

A New York moment:

I popped into a Compassion and Choices “community listening session” about the bill in New York to legalize physician-assisted suicide (or as the group terms it, “medical aid in dying”). That bill would allow physicians to prescribe fatal drugs that terminal patients would self-administer. Disability groups chiefly oppose the practice on the grounds that it would put economic and emotional pressure on the vulnerable or “less valuable" to end their lives. 

A campus doctor first introduced Kristen Gunn to the drug Klonopin during her final semester of college at the University of Virginia.

She had a paper to write, about some Reformers’ views of Scripture, which sparked a personal crisis. She wanted to do well in it, but she had questions about her Christian faith. Once an aspiring missionary, now she didn’t know what she would do with her religion major after graduation.

“My views were becoming undone,” she recalled. “Personal, spiritual, emotional, professional, everything you can imagine was on unstable ground.”

A Baltimore moment:

I’ve covered a few stories in Baltimore post-Freddie Gray, and police-community relations have, sadly, continued to suffer big setbacks. The city has seen a recent spike in violence, and the police department is reeling after a major corruption case and the resignation of its police chief over allegations of tax evasion.