Jim Morrison has endured almost unimaginable loss—first his wife and two young children in a plane crash, then his partner and climbing companion Hilaree Nelson in a Himalayan avalanche. But rather than stepping back from danger, he kept pursuing ever more risky objectives, culminating in the first ski descent of Everest’s nearly unclimbable north face via the Super Direct route. This profile explores Morrison’s perseverance and shows how, for some people, a life defined by extreme risk can never be retreated from.

“It was a profound, transformational moment for me to know that when I found Hilaree, she wasn’t in her body,” Morrison told me. “I dug her out of the snow. I held her in my arms. I screamed, and I cried, but it was just her dead body. She was no longer there, and it was as clear as anything has been in my entire lifetime. I had been haunted so much by my wife and my children, and what state they were in when the plane crashed, and how they were recovered. I had been haunted by these visions of their half-burned corpses. Then contrast that with what I went through with Hilaree. There was so much more finality to it.” Morrison had her body cremated in Kathmandu, at a Buddhist temple.

In 1993, an audience member at the Citizen Cup tennis tournament stabbed Monica Seles, then a 19-year-old phenom who was then dethroned from the top of the world tennis rankings. The attack, writes Terrence Doyle, “was a physical manifestation of a logic that has since become our default: the idea that an athlete is not a human to be witnessed, but a data point to be managed, edited, or deleted.” I briefly mentioned Doyle’s disturbing essay a week ago, but it has stayed with me since: a worrying meditation on the ease with which athletes are abstracted into mere data sets. It deserves your deeper consideration.

Perhaps the most profound shift is the collapse of our ability to trust what we see. In 1993, we had the tape. We saw Parche reach over the rail and thrust his blade into Seles’ back. We agreed on the wound. Today, that on-the-ground truth is being eroded. We’re being told by powerful forces to disregard the evidence of our own senses—to see every physical trauma as a narrative threat or a potential deepfake.

Leo Kim’s piece is an ambitious mix of race‑track reportage, personal reflection, and theory‑driven critique. It braids together one night at a small Indiana speedway, the rise and collapse of Anderson’s auto industry and unions, and an abstract meditation on tech, AI, and “speed.” It poses a compelling central question—whether every technology invents its own kind of disaster—but does demand close attention to follow its dense imagery.

The dust doesn’t bother me much. By this point in the night, the round-and-round whirling of cars, combined with the alchemical mixture of exhaust, burnt rubber, and patriotic beer, has lulled me into a Midwestern trance. It must be the flatness that makes this region such a perfect catalyst for this kind of delirium. When Baudrillard drove through the expanse of the US, he wrote about speed as an erasing force whose “only rule is to leave no trace behind.” He was right to sense speed as a primal impulse in this unfurling stretch of country. Movement in the Old World is slowed by its narrow roads, latticed cities, and contested borders; it struggles to overcome the glacial pace of History. Drive a hundred miles and you’re bound to run into something. Not so in the Midwest. Nothing here interrupts the flow. There are no mountains to break the wind, no densities of skyscrapers to bisect the sky, no ravines to stop the sprawl. Everything moves towards terminal velocity. It is a landscape built for vortices and accelerating feedback loops: for flows of capital, weather, ideology, and machinery to intersect and (r)evolve into novel forms.